NFL Poll of Polls: Week 7

Week 6 was the season’s least predictable slate yet. Arizona won in Los Angeles, Carolina beat Philadelphia, Tennessee beat Indianapolis, Cleveland beat Baltimore, and Houston outscored Jacksonville 34–31. San Francisco and Kansas City were the only contenders who simply took care of business.

The 49ers stay first at 6–0, but the order behind them shifted: Buffalo climbs to third, Minnesota to fourth, and Denver and New England both jump three.

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 6.

San Francisco holds the top spot with seven of nine first-place votes, and Kansas City holds second with the other two — the two have now been 1-2 for two weeks running, and the gap between them is 0.064 rank standard deviations, effectively nothing.

Buffalo climbs a place to third and Minnesota rises two to fourth — 5–0 and finally inside the top four, after weeks of the panel rating it below teams with losses.

The week’s real movement is downward in the NFC West: the Rams fall eight places to 17th, the biggest drop of the season, after losing at home to Arizona. Seattle falls four to ninth.

Cleveland is the week’s biggest climber at six places; Houston is up five.

This week’s matchups, priced

Fourteen games in Week 7: Buffalo, Jacksonville, the Chargers and Washington 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

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

This is the most agreed panel of the season: mean pairwise Spearman ρ = 0.946, split-half reliability 0.992. Every outlet sits within 1.88 positions except one, and that one is marginal.

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:

USA Today closed every door but one

Nate Davis stays in the panel, but how his column is read has changed twice in three weeks and the reason is worth recording.

usatoday.com has refused ordinary browser requests since Week 5, when the workaround was to present as a crawler. That no longer works either. This week the canonical URL returns HTTP 402 Access Restricted to every user agent tried — Chrome, Googlebot, Bingbot, curl — all identical 254-byte refusals. The Gannett syndication network, which carried the column for the last two weeks, blocks the same way.

An independent syndication partner still carries it verbatim under the same headline and serves it normally, so the ballot is read from there. The honest caveat is unchanged and now permanent for this source: syndicated copies carry no datePublished, so the freshness gate logs USA Today as freshness unverified on every run. It is included on the strength of an independent cross-check — same headline, same No. 1 (49ers), same No. 32 (Chargers) — not on a verified timestamp.

Two still missing, and one that has now stopped

• Neil Reynolds’ NFL.com UK column is absent for a fifth straight week (weeks 3–7). Its behaviour also changed: the year-less slug used to serve a live 2020 article — the trap the freshness gate exists for — and now returns a plain 404. There is no version of this column published since Week 2.
• Pro Football Talk publishes a weekly 1–32, but its rendered page is again missing entries (1, 11, 13 and 14 this week), so it cannot pass the completeness check. Two weeks of trying, the same failure.
• ESPN remains absent permanently: every URL returns an empty HTTP 202 to a plain request.

Eight ballots passed the freshness gate against their own datePublished inside the October 20–26 window for Week 7; the ninth is dated by cross-check as above.