NFL Poll of Polls: Week 6

Week 5 finally produced a clean answer at the top. San Francisco went to Seattle and won 32–29, and the panel rewarded it: the 49ers are 5–0 and take the No. 1 spot with seven of nine first-place votes.

Two other results mattered. Green Bay beat Chicago 31–7, moving the Packers up eight places and dropping the Bears five. Dallas lost to Buffalo in overtime and fell seven, the week’s biggest slide. And the Giants and Commanders tied 27–27, the season’s first.

Every one of the 32 teams changed position this week. That has not happened before in this poll.

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

Here is where the panel landed after Week 5.

This week’s matchups, priced

Fourteen games in Week 6: Cincinnati, Detroit, Miami and Minnesota 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

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

Nine ballots is the fullest panel since this poll began, but agreement loosened slightly (mean pairwise Spearman ρ = 0.932, split-half 0.991) — adding a ninth voice that sits furthest from the consensus will do that. USA Today is the outlier at 2.69 positions; every other outlet is inside 1.88.

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 — which is why the Giants and Commanders show 3-1-1 and 1-3-1 after their tie. The matchups are priced from the consensus score alone, using constants fitted on 6,719 completed regular-season games.

The method, the calibration 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 — both 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:

NFL.com came back

Nick Shook’s column returns after two weeks of 404s and is a complete ballot, which puts the panel back at full strength. Its own ranking was the second furthest from the consensus but only slightly, so the absence looks like a scheduling gap rather than a change in the series.

How USA Today is read now

usatoday.com returns HTTP 402 Access Restricted to ordinary browser agents and serves only a Googlebot user agent. Last week the pipeline took that route and I said so. I am not going to keep doing it — presenting a non-Google crawler as Googlebot to get past a block is not something I want this pipeline doing quietly every Tuesday.

The column is nationally syndicated, and a partner site carries it verbatim under the same headline. That copy returns HTTP 200 to an ordinary request, so Nate Davis’s ballot is back in the panel, fetched the way any reader could fetch it. The tradeoff is real and worth stating: syndicated copies carry no datePublished metadata, so the freshness gate cannot date this one. It is included on the strength of an independent cross-check of the original — same headline, same No. 1 (49ers) and No. 32 (Titans) — not on a verified timestamp. The pipeline logs it as freshness unverified on every run, which is the honest label.

One trap this week, avoided

The Reynolds columns are still the cautionary tale. NFL.com’s year-less slug …neil-reynolds-week-6-power-rankings returns HTTP 200 with a 2020 article — it was updated to 2020-10-11 — while the correct 2026 slug 404s. That is now four consecutive weeks without the column (weeks 3–6), so the fair description is that it has stopped rather than that it is running late.

Every other ballot passed the freshness gate against its own datePublished / dateModified inside the October 13–19 window for Week 6.

ESPN remains absent permanently: every URL returns an empty HTTP 202 to a plain request.

One candidate found and rejected: Pro Football Talk (NBC) publishes a weekly 1–32, but its rendered page omits entries 12 through 14 entirely, so it fails the completeness check. Worth re-testing next week.