NFL Week 1 Grades

Here are our “grades” for NFL Week 1. We control for game location and opponent quality, and discount garbage time situations. exp score diff is how we’d expect the team to do against an average team on a neutral field based on the way they actually played in the game, but using only predictive metrics. So Pittsburgh was fundamentally 10.7 points better than an average team based on how they played against Washington. pctile rating is a rating of the team’s performance, on a 0-1 scale, relative to all NFL games since 2000. So Pittsburgh’s performance last week was better than 94.7% of team-game performances since 2000. MP can be interpreted as what our MP predictive rating would be for that team if we used only this one game (and no priors or other information). This is broken down into off and def numbers.

Fun fact: LA’s offensive performance was the 13th worst since 2000, and the worst since Indy’s performance against Cincy in Week 7 of 2014.