Quote:I wanted to be as scientific about this as I could be, and I remembered that Bill James - who is mostly famous for baseball data analysis - has a formula he uses to make NFL power rankings. I won't even bother trying to walk through it because Bill does so quite a bit more effectively than I could anyway. The only significant changes I made were 1) making home field advantage worth 4.5 points (based on some other math I did) and 2) what I describe in the following paragraph. Anyway, here's the link breaking down the methodology: https://www.billjamesonline.com/article808/

I made one small change from the link above. I kept the raw ratings, but I also wanted everything to expressed as a number above or below an average. So I divided all numbers by the league average rating and multiplied by 100 to get a "Rating+".

The two sets of rankings are displayed below. The raw ratings represent a better comparison if you're looking at two teams. As an example, Team A has a rating of 107 and Team B has a rating of 102. So if you wanted to compare those teams you'd basically say Team A is 5 points better than Team B. If you're looking at the scaled ratings, Team A sits at 103 versus Team B's 98. In this case Team A is about 3% better than league average whereas Team B is about 2% worse than league average. The differences between teams are fairly close to the raw system, but the scaled system is much cleaner in my opinion.