Our predictions for Sunday were 11-3, our best week, making us 53-31 on the year and 21-7 over the last two weeks.   Whether this means that the NFL is becoming more predictable now that more games have been played or whether it was just a good week, I don’t have any idea.   Our updated rankings:

             Philadelphia now ranks as the #1 team in the NFC, a position which has been occupied this year by everyone except the Giants and Vanderbilt.  Last week it was the Bears, but the Bears struggled to get past the lowly Lions, so they join Tampa Bay, Washington and Dallas, each of which took brief turns at being seen by our system as the best team in that conference.   In the two years that we lived in Boston Boston won more or less everything.  Philly, having just won the World Series, now stands at least a reasonable chance of getting a shot at a Super Bowl title as well.   We see them as the second-best team in football, a half-point behind Tennessee, but a tough schedule and three early losses leave them in some doubt even of making the playoffs.   The experts think that the best team is the Giants, which if they’re not they’re close, but we’ll see. 

            There was more movement at the bottom of the standings than the top, Detroit and KC slipping ahead of St. Louis and Oakland.   The Rams, after rallying behind the new coach for a couple of weeks, have slipped back to the kind of football they were playing earlier in the season, while Detroit is showing signs of being close to their first win.   Kansas City can’t win, but they’re not getting the snot kicked out of them anymore, and congratulations to Cincinnati on their first win of the year.. .one of the three games we were wrong about.  

            The other two being the Jets at Buffalo and Baltimore at Cleveland.   As you know we’ve been badmouthing Buffalo since they started 4-0 and 5-1, but even we didn’t think they were bad enough to lose to the Jets at home.   Baltimore, on the other hand, only plays well against UPS (what can Brown do for you?).  Two of their top three game scores of the year are their Browns’ games, while two of Cleveland’s three worst scores are their games against the Ravens.   

            Detroit’s 23-27 loss to Chicago scored as Detroit’s best game of the season (98.3) and Chicago’s worst by far (99.3, previous worst 103.8).  Other than that game the only team to have their best game of the year on Sunday was Atlanta, with the 24-0 rout in Oakland, and no other team checked in with their weakest outing of the season. 

            Let’s do a little trend-line analysis here.   I compared each team’s average “game output score” for their first four games to their average game output score for their last three, four or five games, whatever they have (Pittsburgh, at the moment, has only seven.)   The two most improved teams are the two teams which made it easiest to show improvement, St. Louis and Detroit.   The good teams that are coming on strong are Arizona, Atlanta, Green Bay and Indianapolis, while Dallas (duh) is just falling apart without Rony Tomo:

            Pittsburgh at Washington should be a good game and could go either way, but we see it Pittsburgh by two:

            Pittsburgh                        &​nbsp;                        &​nbsp;                   108.3

            Washington                                      ​;                            103.2

            Plus Home Field Advantage                            ​;             3.0

            Total                                             ​;                         ​;        106.2

            Advantage                        &nbs​p;                        &nbs​p;                      2.1

            Pittsburgh by two.