Week 2 Team Defenses

Model run 2026-09-19. 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 0.31 against what actually happened, where the running back rankings reach 0.73. That is roughly three times the published expert consensus at defence (0.10) — the betting line does most of that work — and still a long way from the skill positions. Week to week, a defence is a matchup, 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.