Monday Night: Atlanta slightly improves again by developing a beatpath over New Orleans.
Big movers:
Up: PIT, CLE, ATL
Down: SD, CAR
Read on for earlier games.
Evening Game: There are a lot of beneficiaries to Green Bay’s upset win over Detroit. Atlanta gets back its beatpath to Detroit. As a result, Seattle and New England look better due to their beatwin over the suddenly stronger Atlanta, and both climb in the rankings. Dallas is actually slightly hurt because Detroit is weakened. Almost every ranking variant I have right now actually ranks Cleveland ahead of Dallas, even though Cleveland is 4-9. More on this when the power rankings come out.
The projections for next week are all starting to look very close. As it stands right now, six of the sixteen games are between teams that are separated in the rankings by two slots or less.
Afternoon Games: How about that Miami team. They’re dangerous. KC had a great opportunity but couldn’t take advantage of it. So the real winner of the week is Pittsburgh, who all of a sudden looks much stronger than both of the two AFC West wildcard hopefuls. Interestingly, Cleveland rises significantly on their loss. Why? Their main beatloss is to Pittsburgh, who rose significantly, and due to the results of other games this week, Cleveland appears stronger than several of the teams it is compared directly against in the tiebreaker. Their beatwin against Miami looks slightly more impressive, while Dallas’ beatwin over PHI looks slightly worse, etc.
Interestingly, all projections for Week 15 are still the same as they were last week, with the exception that PIT is now favored to defeat MIN.
Early Games: Here’s the graph after the early games. Pittsburgh gets a huge win over Chicago, which helps them halt their slide. If they had lost, the system actually would have predicted the Steelers to lose the rest of their games this season. They get a beatpath to Chicago – the graph is turning out to be pretty accurate overall, though – the only other change to the graph so far is Tampa Bay getting back their beatwin over Miami, by beating Carolina. The only change to the rankings so far is that Pittsburgh rises three slots, pushing down SD, CHI, and MIN.
