A new weekly article I'll have starting this week is the Winning Stats Power Rankings, Strength of Schedule, and Consistency rankings.  I did this last year as well, and this basically remains the same.  It takes into account the 16 stats we look at every week in Inside the Numbers, compares them with all other teams, and sees how they rank against each other.

You'll notice that Wins and Losses don't play into this at all, like most of the subjective rankings.  Remember, it has 9 years of data to bounce off of, so it looks for the same things that have resulted in the most wins over the past 9 years, even if they aren't leading to wins this season.

I'll have some commentary after each set of data, and you can sort on all columns.  We also have a Winning Stats page, where you'll get Colts season stats, as well as these tables, updated on Tuesdays.  It's for those of you that just can't wait for the data.  You can sort any column by just clicking on the header.

Let's get to the rankings:

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It's time once again for our weekly installment of Power Rankings based on the Winning Stats.  There wasn't much movement at the top of the rankings, with the Saints maintaining the top spot, followed by the Patriots, Vikings, and Colts.

Follow me after the jump for the full rankings, Strength of Schedule, and Consistency...

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This week in the Power Rankings, I've added a new way to look at how well teams have played this year:  Consistency.  It gives a pretty good look at how a team have played this year, and what you can expect the last 4 weeks on the year.  I'll talk about what I found above the fold, but the full rankings will be at the bottom of the post:

• The Colts, unsurprisingly, are the most consistent team in the league, followed by the Eagles and Cowboys.  Anyone who is surprised by this clearly hasn't watched the Colts play this year.  Saints?  20th.
  
• This week's opponent, the Broncos, are the least consistent team in the NFL.  In their 8 wins, they've had 7 in the top 101 games of the season, and the 8th was in the top 150.  In their 4 losses?  306, 359, 351, and 353 (out of 384).  Yikes.  When they are on they are pretty good; when they are off, they really are bad.
• If you look at non-defense adjusted numbers, the most consistent team is the Redskins.  I said this measures consistency, not "goodness".

After the jump you'll see the full Power Rankings, Schedule Strength (Past and Future), and the Consistency Rankings...

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The Colts 35-34 victory over the Patriots last week made some movement at the top of our rankings, as both teams moved up a spot in the Adjusted Rankings.  The Colts moved up to #3, and the Patriots now take the top spot, with the 2nd best Offense, and 8th best Defense.

As in previous weeks, I have both the Adjusted and Raw rankings, as well as the Adjusted Strength of Schedule and Future Schedule.  Let's get to the rankings:

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It's time for another weekly installments of the Winning Stats Power Rankings.  There was decent movement at the top of the rankings, with the big jumpers being the Bengals and Steelers, each beating a team in last week's top 5.  The Colts maintained their lofty ranking, moving up one spot in the Adjusted Rankings.

This week I've also included a Future Schedule Ranking, so you have an idea how tough the road ahead will be for teams.  It's figured out the same way as the Past Strength of Schedule.  The rankings have been adjusted as well, so I think it's pretty accurate.

Follow me to see the rankings...

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A new week of Power Rankings brings about a new feature:  Defensive Adjusted Rankings.  I'll still be presenting the Non-Adjusted raw rankings, but I think the Adjusted Rankings are a more accurate picture of what is going on in the league.  Here's how I did it:

• First off, a big thank you to Neil Paine over at Pro-Football-Reference.com, who pointed me to a 5 minute video tutorial on Excel Iterations.  I was struggling mightily with it, and I only got it to work with his help.  Make sure you check out the PFR blog for even more football-related information.
• I took the average of all games for each team, and I subtracted out the historic average for each stat, so I now have either a plus or minus number for each team.  I did this both on offense and defense.
• I then found what the average of each team played against, so I could see the level of teams played against.  For example, with DSR, the Colts are 9.3% above average, but opposing defenses they've faced are 4% below average, so I'd start with an adjusted average  of 5.3% above average.
• Now's the tricky part...since the Colts now have a new figure, it changes each of the defenses they have faced, which would then change the offensive adjustements, etc.  This is where the Excel Iterations come in.  Eventually, the numbers slowly converge until they don't change any more, which are the final adjusted numbers, that are above/below the historic average.  Just add that back in and you're good to go.
  
• I ranked the new adjusted numbers the same way as before, and (I think) you have a more accurate representation of the team's strengths.
• If you want another explanation, here's where I got the idea: PFR.com Simple Ranking System.

Now that you are all thoroughly confused, how about I just show you the results:

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Quite a bit of movement this week in the Power Rankings, as the better teams start to separate themselves from the rest of the league.  The Colts moved up 2 spots this week to #4 after their dismantling of the Rams.  As I mentioned in the Inside the Numbers article, the Colts now have the #1 offense, but a middle of the pack defense, which is keeping them at #4.

The biggest surprise on here has the be the Patriots at #2, but that mainly has to do with the fact they've played the Titans and Buccaneers, who've combined for as many wins as all of us have this year.  Their upcoming schedule of Dolphins, Colts, Jets, Saints (OMG!), and Dolphins again will show if they deserve to stay up there.

More analysis after the jump, along with the rankings:

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Some of you may remember the Predictor I had last year, which looked at all of the counting stats (Pass/Rush Yards, Pass/Rush Attempts, Turnovers, First Downs, etc), and spit out a probability of winning the game.  It worked decently, for looking at data that can be horribly skewed.

This offseason, I set out to find out which stats led to the most wins, and that's where the Winning Stats series came from.  We looked at 16 different stats, and found out how often they lead to wins when a team goes above the league average, both offensively and defensively.  It's only natural now I take the data we learned over the summer, pump in the data through the first 5 weeks of the season, weight them accordingly, and have our own set of Power Rankings, which are not subjective in nature at all.

Here's how it works:

• Like I said, there are 16 stats, going from the most important (Drive Success Rate) to the least important (Net Punting Yards / Game).
• WARNING:  STAT GEEK TALK - In order to get all the stats on the same scale (since it's hard to compare a percentage to, say, Yards / Drive), I found where each stat lied on a Normal Distribution curve, which only goes from 0 to 1.  I used the Mean and Standard Deviation from the past 8 years for this, so we're looking at how good these games fall in relation to over 4200 games, rather than the roughly 150 that have happened so far this year.
• Non Stat Geek Explanation of Previous Bullet - In order to compare each of the stats equally, I made it so each one was in a certain percentile from games over the past 8+ years.  For example, the Colts ANY/A average stat this season is in the 91st percentile over the past 8 years, so the value is 0.91.  I did this for every stat, for every team.
• Once all the stats are on a level playing field, I need to weight them, as we now know that certain stats lead to many more wins than others (like Passing Stats lead to lots more wins than Rushing Stats).  Since I need to keep part of this secret in my computer, all I'll say is that the weighting factors are based off of the Winning Percentages found throughout the summer.  Plus I want to keep refining them, so I don't want to give them out.
• I've calculated both an Offensive and Defensive Power Rankings, as well as the Total Rankings.  As in all other rankings, a lower number is better.
• I also calculated a Strength of Schedule based on these Power Rankings, to show how easy/hard a team's schedule has been so far this year.  I used 2/3 Opponent Rankings, and 1/3 Opponent's Opponent Rankings.  Also, the Offense column is the Strength of Schedule the Offense had to face, not how strong the opposing Offenses were.
  

In the next few weeks, I'll be adding a Future Strength of Schedule, and I'm going to attempt to adjust the stats for opponents, much like Football Outsiders does with their DVOA stats.

Ok, enough explaning.  Let's get to the numbers, after the jump...

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