AFC Dominates in Rankings by Comparing Performance Against Common Opponents

Several years ago, I ranked teams by their relative performance against the same opponents, and thought I would dust it off at the mid-point of this year to see if it showed anything interesting.

Now, this is the concept behind many rankings, so let me explain how this is a little different. Rather than just, say, taking the point differentials and adjusting by overall strength of schedule, I’m actually putting teams head to head and assigning wins based on how they did against the same teams.

For example, the Broncos have only lost twice in seven games. New England, with the biggest victory on Sunday, would be credited with a 7-0 record against other Denver opponents, and Seattle, as the only other team to win, would be credited with a win against six teams, and a loss to New England. Kansas City and Indianapolis, even with losses, performed very well, and thus would garner 4 wins, a draw, and 2 losses. San Francisco, meanwhile, went 0 for 7 against Denver’s other opponents based on the 25 point loss.

I treated all games where the point difference was with 3 points as a draw, and calculated that for the opponents for all 32 teams. The rankings are below, and are an indicator of whether the team has played better, average, or worse compared to other team’s with the same schedule.

The AFC comes out significantly on top here, with 10 of the top 12 teams in the American Football Conference. The NFC has been largely the better conference in the last few years, particularly by depth, but that may be changing. The AFC is 19-18-1 against the NFC this year, but a closer look shows that the AFC teams have been dominating more games. The AFC is only 5-11-1 in close games decided by 7 or less, but there have been 8 games where an AFC team has won by 20+, compared to only one such NFC victory.

The AFC has four teams that are clearly at the bottom of the league, and then a large gap, with 12 teams still in contention. In the NFC, Seattle probably will play better than they have, but the 5-3 mark is not the result of some flukes. They have not played well relative to the competition, and other than the Green Bay and Denver wins at home, have played down (or worse) to the level of the competition.