Week 8 Team Defenses

A kicker is his own field-goal attempts, scaled by how much offense the sportsbooks expect from his team this week, times his own accuracy nudged toward the league's 84%, plus extra points, adjusted for the roof and the wind. A defense is its own sacks and takeaways plus the opponent's implied team total (from the sportsbooks' lines the morning of this run) 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 defense (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. Nobody adjusts individual players by hand.