The quarter season NFL power rankings

If all 32 NFL teams played a single-elimination tournament right now, who would win? We rank the teams 1 to 32

It feels like the NFL season just started, but we’re already through a quarter of the season. Football teams have already played the equivalent of 21 NBA or NHL games or 17 million hours of baseball. The last few years have taught us it takes about a month of real football for teams to settle in, so this is a great time to check in on the landscape and see how teams rank.

Anyone can do a power rankings, so I decided to do something a little different. I am decidedly not ranking teams by only their records. You can read the NFL standings on your own time. Four weeks of results only tell us so much, and teams have already grown and changed a lot. Instead, I went to an exercise I used to do as an obviously super cool kid.

I randomized all 32 NFL teams into a March Madness bracket and let the teams play simulated neutral-field games in my head. I didn’t agonize over matchups, forcing myself to go with my first instinct winner all the way to the Super Bowl. Then I randomized again and ran nine more tourneys, tallied up the results, and voila, power rankings. It’s a weird but effective way to get a real sense of how you feel about the teams, and it was a helpful reminder of just how much matchups matter in this league.