NFL Power Rankings - Week 1

Welcome to the 2020 NFL Season! The first game of the season is coming up fast on Thursday, so it is definitely time for some power rankings action.

My methodology here is purely based on my own personal views on each team and where they may be heading going into any given week. No science. No stats. Just pure gut instinct. If you don’t like it, feel free to let me know in the comments section.

We’re going to break things out into two section. The first is using a thing called tiermaker. I found this via a Google search and liked the idea of parsing teams out into groups to give you a better idea of how I would separate teams in the 1-32 list at the end of the post.

I broke them into five tiers: Elite, Contender, Hopeful, Nice Try, and Garbo. These are pretty explanatory. Since its Week 1, we have a lot of hopefuls but I expect tiers to be segmented more clearly between top and bottom tiers by midseason. Here is what I came up with.

My bias is clearly evident here as the Las Vegas Raiders and Los Angeles Chargers can go to hell, while the Denver Broncos with their newborn offense is hope reincarnated. I have the Broncos ranked fairly low to start the season mostly because the team still has to prove my hope is well placed. They start 20th, but that could rise quickly if they get rolling early.

As for other teams, I see the AFC as a two-headed beast this season and the NFC a hodgepodge of talented rosters that will likely beat themselves up all year long. Other biases I have is that I don’t buy into 43-year-old Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and I don’t buy into the genius of Bill Belichick one year removed from a 20 year marriage with Brady.

Teams that I think might be sneaky good this year that I can’t quite put into the contender category would be the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, and Buffalo Bills. We’ll just have to see how they do here in the first month of the season.

Here is your full 32 team NFL Power Ranking to kick off the 2020 season.