One week of football does a lot to Natural Power Rankings.  For those of you who missed it last week, or were confused by it, Natural Power Rankings are an invention of mine to determine the order of NFL superiority based on pure logical reasoning regarding wins, losses, and margin of victory.  In other words, I go down the following process to determine if team A should be ranked higher than team B:

1. If A beat B, A is higher than B.

2. If A beat C by more points than B beat C, A is higher than B.

3. If A beat C by the same margin as B beat D, and C is ranked higher than D, A is ranked higher than B.

4. If rank still cannot be determined, margin of victory is weighed against quality of opponent (by Natural Power Ranking), and whichever is more significant determines the higher ranked team.  Make sense?  That was rhetorical, of course it makes sense, that's the whole point.

So, here are the rankings.  In parentheses are last week's rankings.  Having another week's worth of evidence helped generate rankings that make more sense.  The five 3-0 teams are, in fact, at the top, and all of the 0-3 teams except Buffalo are at the bottom. 

1. NEW ENGLAND (1)
2. GREEN BAY (4)
3. PITTSBURGH (2)
4. DALLAS (5)
5. INDIANAPOLIS (18)
6. HOUSTON (3)
7. TENNESSEE (19)
8. NY GIANTS (13)
9. WASHINGTON (8*)
10. PHILADELPHIA (14*)
11. SAN DIEGO (21)
12. JACKSONVILLE (20)
13. CAROLINA (23)
14. CHICAGO (24)
15. KANSAS CITY (29)
16. DETROIT (6)
17. DENVER (9)
18. MINNESOTA (7)
19. OAKLAND (10)
20. CLEVELAND (12)
21. BUFFALO (11)
22. SAN FRANCISCO (25)
23. CINCINNATI (16)
24. ARIZONA (27)
25. SEATTLE (28)
26. BALTIMORE (17)
27. NY JETS (21)
28. MIAMI (15)
29. TAMPA BAY (30)
30. ATLANTA (31)
31. NEW ORLEANS (32)
32. ST LOUIS (26)

* Washington and Philadelphia were posted as #14 and #8, respectively, since it was before Monday night's game.  Since their placing was somewhat arbitrary, I simply switched the two given Washington's win.

Interesting things worth pointing out here:

I had my first circular conundrum.  Cincinnati beat Baltimore.  Baltimore beat Arizona.  Arizona beat Seattle.  Seattle beat Cincinnati.  So who to rank first?  Margin of victory breaks the tie-in these games, the Bengals won by 7 and only lost by 3, putting them at the top.  The reverse happened to the Ravens, putting them at the bottom.  Arizona and Seattle both won by 3 and lost by 3, so I put Arizona ahead since they won the head-to-head matchup. 

You may wonder how I can have three 1-2 teams in the top 11.  Easy.  They lost to better opponents, and the teams they beat are ranked pretty high.

Why does Buffalo get to be so high and Tampa Bay so low?  That's how the chain of wins fell.  The Bills came almost as close to beating Denver as Oakland did, so they must be ranked closely (by the way, an overtime 6- or 3-point win is counted as a smaller margin of victory than a 1-point regulation win).  Oakland beat Cleveland, who beat Cincinnati, who for the above reasons is ranked higher than Seattle, Arizona, and Baltimore.  Baltimore beat the Jets by 7, who beat Miami by 3.  Tampa Bay, however, got beat by Seattle, who is only better than Baltimore by the slightest of margins.  We're talking .001 here.  So if we assume Baltimore would beat Miami by 10 (7+3), that is lower than Tampa Bay's 14-point loss to Seattle. 

Why is Indianapolis at the bottom of the 3-0 teams?  They had two close games; none of the top 4 did.

Check it out - 1 &2 and 3 & 4 are both mid-1990s Super Bowl rematches.  Of course, only one of them has any key players still on the roster...I'm looking at you, Old Man Favre.

All right, so the question arises - why do this?  It was fun as an experiment last week, but am I going to keep it up all season?  Meh, we'll see.  If it becomes impossible; if at some point the entire league is like the SEA-CIN-ARI-BAL situation (Seacinaribal - sounds like a medieval warlord), then I'll call it quits.  But in the off chance that this ends up being a reasonable predictor of how good teams are, better than personal power rankings based on hunches and preconceptions, then maybe I've stumbled on something awesome.  Somehow, I doubt it.  The real reason I'm doing this is to debunk the twisted logic pervading so many throwdowns-if you think that the Giants' 10-point loss to Dallas makes them better than the Bears, who lost by 24, then by the same logic Baltimore and Cincinnati are worse than Detroit, Minnesota, Oakland, Cleveland, and Kansas City.