NFL Poll of Polls: Week 8

Week 7 broke the season open. Both unbeaten teams lost: San Francisco fell in Atlanta, and Kansas City was beaten 20–3 in Seattle. Minnesota is now the only undefeated team in the league at 6–0.

And the panel has responded in a way worth noting: the lone unbeaten is not No. 1. Buffalo, 5–1 and idle, takes the top spot, with Minnesota second.

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 7.

Buffalo climbs two places to first on six of nine first-place votes without playing, which is what happens when the two teams above you both lose. Minnesota is second on two votes and is the only unbeaten left — but the panel scores the Bills higher on quality, and 5–1 against a tougher slate reads better than 6–0 against a softer one.

The ninth vote is worth naming, because it is the odd one: USA Today puts San Francisco first, the only outlet in the panel to do so. Everyone else has the 49ers third or lower after their first loss.

San Francisco falls to third and Kansas City to fourth, both down two.

Seattle is the week’s statement, up four to fifth after beating the Chiefs 20–3 — the biggest result of their season. Chicago climbs two to sixth.

The bottom of the top ten is where the movement is: Baltimore falls six to 16th after losing 35–13 to Cincinnati, Carolina drops five to 19th after being routed 43–13 by Tampa Bay, and Tampa Bay itself climbs six.

This week’s matchups, priced

Fourteen games in Week 8: Houston, New Orleans, the Giants and San Francisco 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:

Generally strong agreement — mean pairwise Spearman ρ = 0.943 — with one clear exception. Seven of the nine outlets sit within 2.06 positions of the consensus, and Bleacher Report is within 0.69.

USA Today is the outlier at 2.94 positions (ρ = 0.922), and the distance is almost entirely one decision: it is the only ballot that keeps San Francisco at No. 1 after the 49ers’ first loss. That single call reorders everything beneath it, because every other team shifts down a slot in response.

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 hangs on by one door

usatoday.com has returned HTTP 402 Access Restricted to every user agent since Week 6 — Chrome, Googlebot, Bingbot, all of them. What is new this week is that the entire Gannett newspaper network refuses the same way: tennessean.com and detroitnews.com both carried the column in earlier weeks and now return 402 across the whole host, not just the article.

One door is still open. An independent TownNews/BLOX partner reprints the column verbatim under the same headline, with Nate Davis’s byline, and serves it normally. The ballot is read from there.

The caveat is permanent for this source now: reprints 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. If that partner stops reprinting, this ballot leaves the panel.

Three still missing

• Neil Reynolds’ NFL.com UK column is gone rather than late. Both its year-less and year-suffixed slugs return plain 404s, six weeks running, with no stale article to catch and nothing to include.
• Pro Football Talk changed failure mode this week: its old slug now redirects to a 404, so there is no article body to test for completeness at all.
• 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 27 – November 2 window for Week 8; the ninth is dated by cross-check as above.