ELWAY NFL team projections: Week 14
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, December 2
Let’s see if you can detect a theme here in the leaderboard:
The theme is NFC West. The division has three of ELWAY’s top five teams in football on a QB- and injury-adjusted basis. The Rams still lead the pack despite a loss to the Panthers that ELWAY was pretty forgiving toward1, followed by the Seahawks, who pitched a 26-0 shutout of the Vikings. The 49ers also project to a 12-5 record. Turf toe can be an annoying injury, but Brock Purdy has been pretty good since he’s been back.
Conversely, the NFC North has little representation on the leaderboard. ELWAY has been very stubborn about giving credit to the 9-3 Bears, who had what was easily their best win of the season on Friday against Philly. Chicago only barely has a positive point differential against one of the league’s easiest schedules, and QBERT is only lukewarm on Caleb Williams — but every year, there’s a team that keeps making analytics nerds look stupid, and that’s been the Bears this year.
Meanwhile, the Lions are down to just a 48 percent of making the playoffs. The problem isn’t just that they lost to the Packers last week; it’s the constant stream of injuries, now including to Amon-Ra St. Brown (who is questionable for the Thursday night game against the Cowboys). Non-QB injuries don’t get much attention from casual fans, but ELWAY estimates that they are subtracting 3-4 points per game from the Lions’ performance. So ELWAY is now mostly resting its hopes on Green Bay to win the North and prove its Bears bearishness correct. Oddly enough, the Pack and Bears still have both legs of their two-game series left to play, including in Green Bay on Sunday.
The situation isn’t quite as bad for the Chiefs, despite a 6-6 record. By the underlying metrics, they’re probably just as good as the team that went 15-2 last year. And ELWAY has sort of been warming up on the Cowboys so it doesn’t consider a Thanksgiving Day road loss in Dallas to be so bad. Importantly, the Chiefs still have games left with the Texans and Chargers, two teams that they are battling with for wild card slots. The Chiefs’ playoff chances will rise to 71 percent if they beat Houston on Sunday night, but crash to 21 percent if they don’t.
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, while the other features are exclusive to paying subscribers. -NS, 12/2/25
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.