NFL Poll of Polls: Week 10

Week 9 settled the top of the table. Buffalo went to Minnesota and won 23–6, San Francisco beat Las Vegas 38–21, and both are now 7–1. Jacksonville announced itself with a 33–10 win in Baltimore, and Green Bay hung 45 on New England.

So the panel’s top two are unchanged and the argument has moved down the table, where six teams sit at 6–2.

This is the same poll of polls as previous weeks: the week’s rankings standardised and pooled, every team’s move charted, each team’s record alongside its ranking, and a simulated path to the Super Bowl.

Here is where the panel landed after Week 9.

Buffalo and San Francisco hold first and second on six and two first-place votes respectively, and the gap between them has narrowed to 0.055 rank standard deviations — the closest this pair has been.

Jacksonville is the week’s riser at the top, up one to fourth on the remaining first-place vote, after beating Baltimore by 23. Denver slips one to fifth.

Kansas City climbs two to sixth and Cincinnati two to eighth; Green Bay is up four to ninth after the win over New England.

The week’s biggest fall is Minnesota, down five to eleventh, after being beaten at home by the Bills. Houston is up five.

Only 24 of 32 teams moved, the quietest week since this poll began.

This week’s matchups, priced

Fourteen games in Week 10: Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia and Tampa Bay are on bye. Every game is priced below from the consensus alone, with a sandbox for building any matchup you like.

Path to the Super Bowl

The panel

9 outlets this week. Mean distance from the consensus order, in rank positions:

Mean pairwise Spearman is ρ = 0.946 with split-half 0.991, but the top is less settled than that number suggests. Six of the nine ballots put Buffalo and San Francisco first and second in some order. The other three dissent in three different directions: FOX puts Denver second, Sports Illustrated puts Jacksonville first with Chicago second, and USA Today puts Chicago second behind San Francisco.

USA Today remains the outlier at 2.38 positions (ρ = 0.941); everyone else is inside 1.75.

Sources and method

Every number above comes from one pipeline. Each outlet’s weekly 1–32 ballot is standardised, pooled in a measurement-error model, shrunk toward the panel mean, and published with a range reflecting how much the outlets actually disagree. Records are the standings each team carried into the week, computed from the same results feed. The matchups are priced from the consensus score, and the Super Bowl bracket is seeded and priced on a blend of the rankings and those records. Both derivations are in METHODOLOGY.md.

The method and the week-by-week replication checklist live with the code rather than in every post:

• analysis/nfl-power-rankings/SOURCES.md — one section per outlet: URL pattern, cadence, markup and the specific traps. Follow this file to reproduce a week.
• analysis/nfl-power-rankings/METHODOLOGY.md — the derivations, and what the method does not claim.
• analysis/nfl-power-rankings/README.md — the pipeline and how to run it.

This week’s panel — nine ballots, every one verified complete:

A parser bug, and a truncated reprint

Sports Illustrated looked like it skipped a number, and it was my parser. Conor Orr’s column prints rank 21 as “21 Tampa Bay Buccaneers” with no period after the number, where every other entry reads “22. …”. The extractor required that punctuation, so it found 31 entries and the validation gate refused the ballot — the same symptom that dropped his Week 3 column. On inspection the English page is complete: all 32 clubs are there, in order. The parser now runs a second pass over numbered lines without punctuation, accepting one only for a rank the strict pass left missing, so prose like “4 Buffalo Bills players” cannot invent a rank. This is recorded here rather than quietly fixed because the earlier diagnosis was wrong in a way that blamed the source.

USA Today’s reprint was truncated. The column is only readable through independent reprints, since usatoday.com and every Gannett paper return HTTP 402 to all user agents. The first reprint found this week contained 25 of 32 entries, dropping ranks 2, 3 and 7 through 11. A second reprint of the same article is complete, so the ballot comes from that one.

Still missing

• Neil Reynolds’ NFL.com UK column has not published since Week 2; both slug forms are plain 404s.
• Pro Football Talk redirects to a 404 and has failed the completeness check repeatedly.
• ESPN returns an empty HTTP 202 to any plain request.

Eight ballots passed the freshness gate against their own datePublished inside the November 10–16 window; the ninth is a reprint with no metadata and is labelled unverified in the payload.