ELWAY NFL team projections: Week 11
Team ratings, playoff and Super Bowl probabilities, and forecasts of every upcoming game from Silver Bulletin's exclusive NFL model.
🕒 Our latest NFL team ratings
Updated Tuesday, November 11
After a weird Week 9 when a lot of ELWAY’s favorite teams hit a stumbling block, this week provided considerably more clarity, especially about the division races. But let’s take a quick look at the overall leaderboard first:
The Lions, fresh off a 44-22 win over the Commanders — oddly, one of two 44-22 games this weekend — are back in the top slot after a hiatus of a couple of weeks. They were, if anything, more dominant than the final score suggests — jumping out to a 22-3 lead by early in the second quarter (ELWAY considers the game script in its analysis of team performance) and their injury list is slightly clearing up. The challenge is that the NFC is almost certainly the tougher conference. After the Lions, the Seahawks and Rams, who play one another this week, are second and third in Super Bowl odds.
Since we’re now past the midpoint of the season, let’s take a look at how the division races are shaping up. Much of this detail is usually reserved for paid subscribers, but I’m going to open up the divisional odds this week. It’s very much not in my style to do “hard sells”. We think ELWAY is a really cool product and has generally proven insightful this season … so I hope a few of you will consider upgrading to the paid version if you haven’t yet.
NFC East: ELWAY has been a little bearish relative to the consensus on the Eagles, but winning in Green Bay against the Packers — even by an ugly 10-7 scoreline — will always get you some credit in the system. They have the easiest path of any division winner (a 95 percent chance of the division crown) with the Commanders falling into a tailspin and the Cowboys too far behind at 3-5-1.
NFC North: The Bears and Lions are tied atop the division at 6-3, but ELWAY thinks the Lions are the much better team; the Bears continue to survive by the skin of their teeth against a very weak schedule and with a negative point differential. The Lions also already beat the Bears earlier this season and so have an edge in the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Packers are by no means out of the running, but neither the eye test nor the advanced stats that ELWAY tracks suggest that they’re an elite team.
NFC South: The Buccaneers are the only quality team in this division; ELWAY thought the Panthers were pretenders despite a 5-4 record, and they just took an awful loss to the Saints. It’s not quite a cinch, but the Bucs are at 89 percent to win the division and are probably mostly fading injury risk to Baker Mayfield or other key personnel.
NFC West: The best division in football, and it goes without saying that the Seahawks-Rams game is huge — particularly for Seattle, which has a larger home-field advantage and would benefit from a higher seed in the playoffs. The 49ers may finally get Brock Purdy back this week and are favorites to make it to the playoffs as a wild card, but division contention is tough as they’re two games back in the loss column.
AFC East: I’m very pleased with the bet I put in on the Patriots at +185 odds for the division title a few weeks ago. They’re two games ahead in the win column, already won in Buffalo, and QBERT loves young QBs like Drake Maye when they get on a roll. ELWAY thought the Dolphins were slightly better than their 2-7 record heading into last week might have implied, but that’s still an unforgivable loss for the Bills and the game wasn’t even close.
AFC North: The Ravens are now roughly 2:1 favorites to pull off the comeback and win the division after a 1-5 start. Lamar Jackson, QBERT’s highest-rated quarterback, has been more or less himself again. Meanwhile, ELWAY thinks the underlying metrics on the Steelers reveal a (slightly) below-average team.
AFC South: Daniel Jones has reverted to the mean, and the Colts’ rating has declined in consecutive weeks after a loss to Pittsburgh and an overtime win against the Falcons in Berlin in which they were saved by Jonathan Taylor (244 yards, 3 TDs); rushing performances like those usually aren’t sustainable. Still, they’re 84 percent to win the division. ELWAY is not a big believer in Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars, while the Texans have one of the league’s best defenses but are 3½ games behind.
AFC West: Here’s a case where there’s a split between who ELWAY thinks is the best team, the Chiefs, and the divisional favorite, the Broncos. Bo Nix has been inconsistent, especially in a narrow Thursday night win against the Raiders, but they’re 2½ games ahead of the Chiefs in the standings, and that provides some cushion. The teams play this week in Denver: win that game, and the Chiefs have a highly viable path to the division title. But if they lose, they’ll be 5-5 and only slight favorites to make the playoffs at all. I’ve neglected the Chargers, whom ELWAY regards as only barely better than league average given all their injuries — but they have head-to-head wins against both Denver and KC should the division come down to a war of attrition.
The rest of this page contains:
Different versions of our ELWAY ratings;
Playoff odds, Super Bowl odds and projected regular-season finishes, along with conditional odds indicating the impact of a W or L this week;
Detailed projections for every forthcoming regular season game, including point spreads and totals (yes, there is gambling in this casino);
And a series of 32 mini-graphs that track each team’s ELWAY rating from week to week.
The ratings themselves are free for everyone, and I’ve opened up the divisional odds just for this week since we’ve already talked about them so extensively. The other features are exclusive to paying subscribers. -NS, 11/11/25
See also: QBERT NFL quarterback ratings.
The best (and worst) teams in the NFL
The default version of ELWAY ratings includes adjustments based on a team’s projected starting QB for the upcoming game and current injuries. You can click the tabs in the table to view the other versions. “Healthy QB1s” backs out injuries completely for both QBs and non-QBs; the Bengals magically get Joe Burrow back. This might be a good indication of a team’s intrinsic strength later in the season. Meanwhile, the “team performance” version is most comparable to traditional NFL power ratings. It accounts for offseason roster movement and carries over a portion of the ratings from one season to the next, but otherwise takes a more “set it and forget it” approach.
ELWAY’s offensive and defensive ratings are essentially projections of how many points a team is expected to score and allow in forthcoming games. (Lower defensive ratings are better since it means a team is projected to allow fewer points.) By design, these ratings tend to be correlated, as you can see from this scatterplot:
Why such a strong relationship? Well, it’s because in a very literal sense, “a good offense is the best defense” in the NFL. Holding onto possession of the ball prevents the other team from scoring — defensive TDs are rare — eats up the clock, and leaves them with worse field position.
ELWAY projected records and playoff odds
We simulate the remainder of the season 5,000 times based on these ratings, projected injury timelines, and a whole series of other adjustments. A team like the Packers will tend to have a bigger home-field advantage later in the season, for instance, because winter weather tends to help home teams that are accustomed to it. (There’s a reason that luxury housing is relatively affordable in Green Bay.)
Here are our projected regular-season and playoff odds, starting with the AFC.
This next chart shows conditional probabilities: how a team’s playoff odds will change after a win or loss this week.