Week 1 Team Defenses

Model run 2026-09-16. A kicker is his own field-goal attempts scaled by how much offence Vegas expects from his team this week, times his own accuracy regressed toward the league's 84%, plus extra points, adjusted for the roof and the wind. A defence is its own sacks and takeaways plus the opponent's implied team total scored on the same points-allowed ladder the real result uses. Measured over 2024 and 2025 this ordering reaches a rank correlation of about 0.21 against what actually happened, where the running back rankings reach 0.73. That is more than twice the published expert consensus at defence (0.09) and still weak in absolute terms. Most of what it knows is who the defence is playing, not how good the defence is. Published as the model produced it — Reynold has not gone through it line by line and has not overridden anything.