NFL Performance Rankings for Week 5

It doesn’t matter if you win or lose but how you win or lose that determines your Performance Rankings according to PossessionPoints.com. In Week 4, the Bills held the number one spot in our Performance Rankings, but their poor play caused Buffalo to tumble significantly down to the middle of our chart. The bye week comes just at the right time for the Bills who will have a chance to regroup and prepare for their Week 7 game against the Chargers. If it is any consolation, Bills’ fans, a lot of scoreboard points in the first half against San Diego may position Buffalo for the win as the Chargers do not seem to show signs of life in their games until the second half and sometimes that life comes too late.

The Arizona Cardinals are on the flip side of this situation in that they vaulted up the chart to Number 2 from number 11. These dramatic moves are rather rare in this part of the season. Teams tend not to move 9, 10 or 15 places when the season is already a quarter of the way through. If the Cardinals can avoid making mistakes, their potent offense can carry them not only into a Division championship but deep into the playoffs as well. However as the Houston Texans proved this week, mistakes will kill you.

The Texans are an interesting story in that despite their loss, they moved up the PossessionPoints.com Performance Rankings from 30th to 24th. We are not talking Super Bowl here for the Texans, but their jump does show how PossessionPoints captures performance and to some degree puts aside mistakes figuring that good teams will rise above their errors and eliminate them in the future.

The Top Five teams this week are the Giants, Cardinals, Vikings and the Panthers who are another new addition to the Top Five of our Performance Rankings. The Bottom Five are the Bengals, Colts, Chiefs, Lions and Rams. As you can see by the Colts’ rankings, we do not think much of lucky wins. A team needs to truly perform to move up in our Performance Rankings.