NFL Poll of Polls: Week 9

The last unbeaten team is gone. Minnesota lost 19–15 in Detroit, and with San Francisco idle and Kansas City beaten again — 28–24 in Denver — three teams now sit at 6–1: Buffalo, San Francisco and Minnesota, with Chicago and Denver a game back at 6–2.

The panel’s answer is emphatic: Buffalo is a near-unanimous No. 1 on eight of nine first-place votes, and the teams that lost paid for it.

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 8.

Buffalo holds first and gains a vote, now eight of nine, after beating Baltimore 36–20. San Francisco climbs to second without playing, which is the arithmetic of everyone else losing.

Chicago is the week’s big riser, up two to third after their Monday night win in Seattle — the panel has moved them from fifth to third in a fortnight. Denver climbs three to fourth after beating the Chiefs.

And the two losers fall hard: Minnesota drops four to sixth after its first defeat, and Kansas City drops four to eighth after a second straight loss. Seattle falls three to ninth.

Tampa Bay is up six again, the second straight week the Bucs have made the biggest move in the table.

This week’s matchups, priced

Fifteen games in Week 9: Pittsburgh and Tennessee are the only teams 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:

Agreement is strong — mean pairwise Spearman ρ = 0.949, split-half 0.993 — and unanimous at the very top: every outlet has Buffalo first except USA Today, which alone keeps San Francisco there.

That ballot is the outlier on both measures — the largest mean gap at 2.06 positions and the lowest agreement at ρ = 0.954, where every other outlet sits inside 1.81. The reason is blunt: USA Today ranks Buffalo sixth, and all eight other ballots rank it first.

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:

How USA Today is read, and why it stays

usatoday.com and the entire Gannett newspaper network return HTTP 402 Access Restricted to every user agent, so the column is read from an independent TownNews partner that reprints it verbatim under the same headline. That route has now held for three straight weeks.

The caveat is permanent for this source: 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, same No. 32 — not on a verified timestamp. If the reprints stop, this ballot leaves the panel.

Three still missing

• Neil Reynolds’ NFL.com UK column has not published since Week 2. Both of its slug forms return plain 404s, so there is no stale article to catch.
• Pro Football Talk publishes a weekly 1–32 but has failed the completeness check repeatedly, and its article URL currently redirects to a 404.
• 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 November 3–9 window for Week 9; the ninth is dated by cross-check as above.