NFL Power Rankings Week Five: Race to the top

The beauty of the NFL is the brevity of the season, after over half a year of build up, each team will only play 17 regular season games, making each one meaningful.

Slip ups and surprise wins hit that little bit harder when we know just how significant they can be when January football rolls around. Let’s not worry about that for now, though, instead, let’s rank all 32 teams.

There’s nothing to be excited about with this team right now. We really like Drake Maye and think he’ll be a good quarterback but sticking him out there now would be like a lamb to the slaughter.

It’s been a while since the Jags were this bad, but they’ve found themselves back amongst the worst teams in the league after a brief hiatus as a playoff contender. Doug Pederson seems to be angling for an early exit after calling out his players in a press conference, the receivers can’t catch, and Trevor Lawrence is missing throws he should be hitting.

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The Panthers put up some fight against the Bengals, but ultimately losing isn’t a bad thing for Carolina as they may need to find themselves a new quarterback in the offseason.

The Ringer asks, “What exactly would you say Brian Daboll is adding here?” in their recent power rankings, and it’s a great question. Two years removed from his NFL Coach of the Year title, Daboll seems lost. It doesn’t help Daniel Jones is their QB, either.

It’s going to end up being really weird that the Raiders beat the Ravens in week two by the time the season ends. The Raiders look like a bad football team devoid of talent and ideas. They beat the Browns because it’s the Browns, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

The Titans won one of the worst games of football all year, outgaining the Dolphins 244-184 offensively. Will Levis is injured, which may end up being a positive for Tennessee, although Mason Rudolph doesn’t instill much confidence, either.

We were concerned for the Dolphins before the season, given some of the talent they let leave and their softness against the best teams in football. What we didn’t expect was to see them lose 31-12 against the Titans. Admittedly they’re playing their QB4, but it’s not a huge shock to see Tua injured.

Wow, there are a lot of bad teams in the NFL this year, it’s tough to rank them adequately. The Browns’ decision to pay Deshaun Watson all that money looks worse and worse each week. Taylor Wirth wrote, “It’s Week 4 and every week I've mentioned how disgusting this offense is,” for Yahoo Sports, which we thought was both funny and accurate.

To crib from Wirth again, Bo Nix, at one point in the first half on Sunday, “had completed seven passes for negative yards,” which we didn’t even know was possible. We know he’s a rookie, but give him a chance to make some plays at some point.

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Per The Ringer, the Rams have the 31st ranked offense in terms of EPA/Play, which is surprising given Sean McVay’s coaching and Matthew Stafford’s quality. It’s a little less surprising when you consider the injuries they’re suffering from. 

We’re big fans of Anthony Richardson and have written as such many times, maybe it’s just watching a man that size run so fast and throw 70-yard bombs that drew us in, but we may need to reassess if he can’t stop getting himself injured. Still, Joe Flacco coming in and beating the Steelers is good content.

Caleb Williams is starting to look like an NFL player, taking fewer risks and making some accurate throws. His pass to Odunze for the TD was a thing of beauty. D’Andre Swift has silenced his doubters for now.

The Cardinals got blown out by the Commanders to the tune of 14-42 as Washington ran all over Arizona’s defense. Offensively, this is a fun team, but there’s still a lack of talent across the board, and maybe we were a little hasty praising Jonathan Gannon’s coaching so much last season.

Justin Herbert is playing about as well as he can, given his one legit receiver is a second-round rookie. It’s no surprise the Chargers aren’t among the elite teams this season, but the building blocks are there to be a good team pretty soon.

As The Ringer puts it, “same old Derek Carr”. We were ready to reevaluate everything we knew about football through two weeks of the season, with Derek Carr suddenly able to play with defenders in his face. Instead, everything has regressed to the mean and he sort of sucks again.

The Atlanta Falcons battled against the Saints to pick up their second win of the season, but we are a little surprised how mediocre their offense looks. We weren’t expecting the 2007 Patriots, but we were hoping for a little more from Kirk Cousins et al.

We know the Bengals are 1-3 and teams below them have better records, but none of those teams have Joe Burrow, who looked mostly pretty good against the Panthers. If he can find the Joe Burrow of a couple of years ago, even this porous defense won’t stop them winning games.

Could this be the beginning of the end for the Aaron Rodgers-led Jets? Public arguments between head coaches and QBs never end well, and that’s exactly what’s happening between ARod and Robert Saleh. They also lost, at home, to the Broncos.

The football hipster’s preseason favorites are taking some time to find their feet in 2024. Jordan Love probably wishes he had a few of those throws back, as his three picks all came at terrible times for the Packers. We expect them to be better than this moving forward.

We’ve been saying since week one the Steelers would come unstuck at some point as their style of football was simply unsustainable. We aren’t taking a victory lap yet but losing to Joe Flacco and the Colts is probably more predictive than previous games.

The season isn’t over for the Eagles as they hope to get healthy over the bye week, but they need to start racking up wins. Losing in Tampa Bay, in 105-degree weather without three of your best players isn’t season-defining, so let’s reevaluate in a few weeks time.

That was an impressive game from the Bucs and showcased just how important Vita Vea is for their defense. Baker Mayfield loves playing the Eagles.

Is this a little high? Maybe given their insipid performance against the Giants, but a win is a win and if they can find some momentum, there is too much talent for this not to be a playoff team.

For some reason, The Ringer has the Commanders ranked number 21 in their power rankings, which we think is egregious given they currently sit second in FTN Fantasy’s offensive DVOA rankings. We don’t expect they to remain in the top 10 for long, but right now, they deserve it.

Taylor Wirth for Yahoo Sports made the good point that the Seahawks’ three wins came against the Broncos, Patriots, and the Dolphins. However, their loss to the Lions shows they can hang with the best teams in the league, even if they aren’t quite elite themselves.

This is the lowest we’ve had the Niners for a while as they did enough against the lowly Pats to get the win without doing any especially impressive (Fred Warner aside). There is no doubting the talent here, they just need some more wins for us to bump them up our rankings.

The Texans easily could have lost to the Jags at home on Sunday, which is a worry. They did enough to get the win and despite some early-season jitters, C.J. Stroud is back playing at an elite level again.

The top five is difficult to rank, as there are numerous very good teams at the top of the NFL, so maybe we could swap them all around a little bit. Still, the Lions look as good as last year and should be targeting the Super Bowl.

We never doubted you, Baltimore. We kept the Ravens in the top 10 even after losing their opening two games, and the blowout victory over Buffalo vindicates us. Derrick Henry is still a freak, Lamar is elite, and the defense held Josh Allen to 10 points.

Speaking of Josh Allen, we have the Bills just ahead of the Ravens for now, as they’ve looked better in totality than Baltimore. The Bills need to be looking to trade for another wide receiver, as their weapons aren’t good enough right now.

Just as we expected, the Sam Darnold-led Vikings are 4-0 and ranked second in our power rankings. We actually think Darnold won’t be able to keep this level of play up for too much longer so we expect some losses to come, but this is a very good football team regardless.

The Chiefs lost Rashee Rice to an awful looking ACL injury following a dirty-looking hit by *checks notes* Patrick Mahomes? We’ve seen the Chiefs win without good receivers before, so this is just another season. Unless Mahomes gets injured, we probably won’t be moving the Chiefs from the top spot any time soon, as boring as that sounds.

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