Anleitungen » NFL Power Rankings: Colts generated mixed reactions th

rough week three Through 3 weeks White Denico Autry Jersey , no one knows quite what to make of the Indianapolis Colts. Is their defense any good? Is the offense incredibly innovative or dreadfully boring? Is Andrew Luck back to normal or facing the prospect of being Checkdown Chad Pennington for the rest of his career?All these questions are being bandied about, and the power rankings this week reflect that uncertainty. The Colts have hung in there with 3 very good teams and beaten one of them. They’ve faced two straight road games and gave the defending Super Bowl Champs all they could handle. If the officials had paid more attention, the Colts might have just shocked the league and pulled out a win. Regardless, we shouldn’t expect a lot of movement until the Colts stop “looking promising” and start winning football games. Once that happens, the arrow is likely to point up on this Colts team, and they are entering a pretty favorable stretch of schedule.With that said, let’s take a look at what people are saying about this team around the NFL.NFL.com’s Elliot Harrison has the Colts dropping four spots to 26th.The plucky Colts hung tough in Philly, two weeks after doing the same against the Bengals and a week after delivering an unexpected win in Washington. The movie logline of the 20-16 loss in Philadelphia: A frisky football team enters a hostile stadium with high hopes, only to see its dreams derailed by red-zone futility. Or something like that. Indy kept finding its way inside the Eagles’ 20, yet three times, the Colts came away without a touchdown -- and on another, no points at all. By the way, “finding its way” might not carry the kind of action you would expect in sports writing, especially about offense. Although considering the Colts couldn’t generate any Sunday (209 yards total), how they stumbled that deep into Philadelphia’s side of the field almost defies logic.ESPN has the Colts up one spot to 24th.The Colts still don’t seem to trust Andrew Luck’s ability to throw the deep ball http://www.authenticsindianapoliscolts.com/cheap-al-woods-jersey , as evident in their decision to have Jacoby Brissett attempt the Hail Mary on the final play in Week 3. Luck is averaging just 5.4 air yards per attempt this season, the shortest average pass in the league.Frank Schwab of Yahoo! Sports has the Colts holding at 21st.I’ll give Frank Reich and his staff a lot of credit. The Colts are playing very well, despite their 1-2 record. You get the feeling that staff is getting the most out of the talent on hand. Don’t forget that Reich is a rookie head coach and his offensive, defensive and special teams coordinators were never NFL coordinators before this season.USA Today’s Nate Davis has the Colts ranked 15th. Andrew Luck on pace to become next Chad Pennington given inability to strike deep like he used to. (Hoping this is worst projection of all.)Bleacher Report has the Colts down two spots to 22.The good news for the Indianapolis Colts is the team has had a second-half lead in all three games this season. The bad news is that twice—including Sunday in Philadelphia—the Colts haven’t been able to hold that lead.Frankly, the Colts were fortunate to have ever had the lead against the Eagles. Indy’s offense was downright offensive, gaining a measly 209 total yards. Quarterback Andrew Luck continued to struggle moving the ball downfield, averaging just 4.1 yards an attempt.The most damning indictment of Luck came on the final play of the game, when the Colts brought Jacoby Brissett in off the bench to attempt a Hail Mary. After topping 300 passing yards in Week 1, Luck has just 343 over his last two games combined. Sunday also marked the second straight week the Colts failed to amass 300 yards of total offense.That’s not going to get it done. Bill Parcells famously said, “You are what your record says you are.”After week 7, the Colts 2-5 record should actually be 2-4-1 is tied for 27th place in the league.So, are the Colts really one of the worst teams in the league? Because record isn’t the full story, the media churns out weekly power rankings which supposedly ranks teams by how good they are irrespective of record.Chris Blystone’s recent power rankings article shows that most pundits placed Indy right around 27th.So, either they all agree with Parcells or they are too lazy to actually analyze team play and just basically go by record. I’ll let you guess which is true.Personally, I feel the Colts are playing much better than their record and I have the data to back up that claim.ODDSAs of this writing http://www.authenticsindianapoliscolts.com/cheap-nate-hairston-jersey , Sportsline.com has the Colts odds of winning the Superbowl at 100 to 1 . . . so, you’re saying there’s a chance. While I have no opinion on the predictive capability of Vegas odds, I can say for certain that there are only 19 teams with better odds listed. So, according to the cumulative knowledge of the betting community, the Colts are tied as the 20th best team. Hey, it’s better than 27th.POINT DIFFERENTIALSWins are obviously highly correlated to point differentials. For example, the team currently with the highest season long point differential is the Rams and surprise, they also have the best record. Normally, teams that have less than a 0.500 record, have negative point differentials, but that isn’t true with the Colts. Through 7 weeks, Reich and company have scored 189 points, while giving up 185, which results in a +4 point differential. This suggests that the Colts record is artificially low. How low? Well, rank teams by point differential and the Colts come in at 18th. PYTHAGOREAN WINSFootball Outsiders performs a much math-ier transform of point differentials by calculating a Pythagorean Win Expectation http://www.authenticsindianapoliscolts.com/cheap-rigoberto-sanchez-jersey , which estimates the number of wins a team “should have” given their cumulative points for and against. Statistically, the calculation does a pretty good job of estimating actual wins.According to their formula, the Colts are playing like a team with 3.6 wins and are on pace to garner 8.2 for the season. They also apply an adjustment to account for “garbage time” impacts and after including that, Adjusted Pythagorean Expectation has the Colts ranked 17th in expected wins.That was a lot of math just to improve point differentials by one spot. But I’ll take it.BLOWOUTSWhile I’m on the subject of point differentials, did you hear that the Colts went +32 over the Bills last week? Since the league went to a 16 game season in 1978, there have been 45 games decided by exactly 32 points. The winning teams from those games ended the season with an average of 9.9 wins. Of course, there is variance around that number but only 18% of those teams ended up with less than 8 wins. The point is that if you beat someone by 32, then you probably aren’t one of the worst teams in the league.DRIVE SUCCESS RATEFor the 1 of you who read my articles, you know I am a big fan of Drive Success Rate. The Colts have a season long offensive DSR of 71.1% while the defense has given up a rate of 70.6%. The DSR differential is a relative measure of how well the the team has played overall and the Colts +0.5% ranks 17th in the league. DVOASo far, none of these measures have adjusted for opponent. Football Outsiders is famous for ranking teams by their DVOA metric, which includes an opponent adjustment. After Indy’s week 7 “running of the Bills”, the Colts improved their team DVOA and currently sit as the 14th best team in the league. CONCLUSIONSThere is no such thing as a “true” ranking method but by just about any method you pick, the Colts are much better than bottom dwellers. Add to that, the fact that the team is getting healthier and that there are a lot of winnable games coming up and I believe we will see a huge turn-around in record.Will it be enough to make the playoffs? I think it will be close. Close enough that half a game matters.