I'm so happy - this is the easiest to compute the NAPOs have ever been!  No knots, and the longest chain of wins I've seen yet.  Check this out - each team beat the team immediately after them:

Indianapolis-Jacksonville-Carolina-Seattle-Arizona-Cleveland-Buffalo-Washington-Giants-Philadelphia-Dallas-Green Bay-Oakland-Denver-Kansas City

After that, it was just a matter of fitting the others into the order based on success against common opponents.  And where necessary, progressing through degrees of separation like I normally do.

No idea what I'm talking about?  You must be new here.  These are my Natural Power Rankings, a weekly feature where I rank the teams based on their performance only over the past three weeks, using final scores from the games played and nothing else.  This gives me an objective, unbiased, mathematical gauge of where the teams are, and while it seems like BS at first glance, it's done a remarkably good job of predicting game results this season.

The fun thing this week is that the AFC West, by beating up on each other, has doomed all but San Diego to the bottom four teams in the league.

Here are this week's Natural Power Rankings, with the team's record over the past three weeks in parentheses:

• 1) Indianapolis (3-0)
• 2) New England (3-0)
• 3) Jacksonville (2-1)
• 4) San Diego (3-0)
• 5) Tennessee (2-1)
• 6) Houston (2-1)
• 7) Pittsburgh (1-2)
• 8) Carolina (2-1)
• 9) Seattle (2-1)
• 10) Tampa Bay (2-1)
• 11) New Orleans (2-1)
• 12) Arizona (1-2)
• 13) Cleveland (2-1)
• 14) NY Jets (1-2)
• 15) Buffalo (2-1)
• 16) Washington (2-1)
• 17) Minnesota (3-0)
• 18) NY Giants (2-1)
• 19) Philadelphia (1-2)
• 20) Chicago (0-3)
• 21) Dallas (2-1)
• 22) San Francisco (1-2)
• 23) Detroit (0-3)
• 24) Green Bay (2-1)
• 25) Cincinnati (1-2)
• 26) Miami (1-2)
• 27) St. Louis (1-2)
• 28) Atlanta (0-3)
• 29) Oakland (1-2)
• 30) Denver (1-2)
• 31) Baltimore (0-3)
• 32) Kansas City (0-3)

And thus, the NAPOs make the following predictions for this week's games:

Pittsburgh beats St. Louis

Carolina beats Dallas

New Orleans beats Philadelphia

Buffalo beats NY Giants

Chicago beats Green Bay

Cleveland beats Cincinnati

Detroit beats Kansas City

Indianapolis beats Houston

Jacksonville beats Oakland

Arizona beats Atlanta

Tampa Bay beats San Francisco

Seattle beats Baltimore

Tennessee beats NY Jets

New England beats Miami

Washington beats Minnesota

San Diego beats Denver

Interestingly, all but four of these are home teams.  So that helps the odds of the upsets happening.  I think I'm going straight NAPO picks in my office pool this week - we'll see how it goes.