You’d be close Seattle once again checks in with the top Elo rating this week (see left), but their schedule is difficult enough - eighth-toughest in the league, to be exact - that they don’t have the league’s highest expected win total. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Seattle Seahawks, who won their Super Bowl rematch with the Denver Broncos on Sunday afternoon. OK, so now that the explanation is out of the way, which team has the most predicted wins? That’s how we’re able to simulate the remainder of the NFL schedule thousands of times and track each team’s chances of winning the division or making the playoffs, right down to using the NFL’s actual, highly arcane tiebreaker rules. (For the really gory details of how the ratings work, click here.) To give you a sense of the scale, the average NFL team always has an Elo rating of 1500, and the ratings usually range from 1700 on the high side to 1300 on the low end of the spectrum.Īnyway, once computed, they can be used to derive win probabilities for each game and even point spreads. A team’s Elo rating represents its current strength - or at least an estimate thereof using a simple method that incorporates margin of victory, home-field advantage, strength of schedule and team quality in previous seasons. While you’re thinking, let me briefly explain what these numbers are all about. Before scrolling down and peeking at the table, take a guess: Which team has the highest projected end-of-season win total according to FiveThirtyEight’s latest NFL Elo ratings and playoff odds?

Nfl veeer rating week 4