Ranked on who you beat, and where.
Penta is a resume ranking for the NFL. Every regular-season game is scored on who it was against and where it was played. Beat good teams, especially on the road, and you climb. Lose to bad ones and you fall. The points add up, and the team at the top has the best body of work.
Go to the rankings →Two 7–2 records are not the same
The standings count wins. They don’t say who the wins came against. Halfway through a season one team has played four of the league’s best and another has played none, and their records can match. Penta separates them.
It is a resume ranking, not a power ranking: it adds up what a team has already done rather than estimating how good it is. Penta uses a power rating — Massey’s — but only to measure how hard each opponent was to beat. A team’s own ranking comes entirely from its results against them.
How a game is scored
- Start with the opponent’s rank. Opponent strength is Massey’s NFL rating. One rank per team, 1 to 32.
- Adjust for where the game was played.
A road win is harder, so the opponent counts as better than their rank. A home win counts
as easier.
That adjusted rank places the game in one of five bands.Away rank × 0.7Home rank × 1.3Neutral site rank, unchanged - Score the result. A win is worth 25 points for beating the best possible opponent, down to 1 for the worst. A loss is the mirror image: 1 point for losing to the best, 25 for losing to the worst. A win over any team plus a loss to that same team always adds up to 26. It is the same scale as Penta’s college rankings.
The five bands
| Band | Adjusted rank | A win is worth | A loss costs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1Elite | Elite | 1–6 | 25 → 18 | (1) → (8) |
| P2Strong | Strong | 7–12 | 18 → 13 | (8) → (13) |
| P3Decent | Decent | 13–18 | 13 → 9 | (13) → (17) |
| P4Weak | Weak | 19–24 | 9 → 5 | (17) → (21) |
| P5Cellar | Cellar | 25–32 | 5 → 1 | (21) → (25) |
Within each band, points fall on a straight line. Beating #1 is worth 25, beating #6 is worth 18. Losses work the same way in reverse: losing to a top team costs little, and losing to a bad one costs the most.
Only the regular season counts; the playoffs do not. Negative numbers appear in parentheses, so a loss worth −2.2 shows as (2.2).
What’s on the site
- RankingsAll 32 teams with their record in each band and movement since last week. Pick a conference and a line appears under #7, the size of the playoff field. Click a row for a quick look at any team.
- The RaceThis week’s biggest games by what’s at stake, the top 10 traced week by week, and each team’s ceiling if it wins out.
- Best Wins, Worst LossesEvery result in the league, ranked by what it was worth.
- Team pagesResults and the remaining schedule, with what each upcoming game is worth to win or lose; the team’s rank by week; and every season back to 2024.
- FAQThe full method, including the parts people argue about.
Does it work?
At the end of a season it lands close to the playoff field. In 2024, Penta’s top seven in each conference held 13 of the 14 playoff teams. The miss was Tampa Bay, a 10–7 division winner; Penta had 10–7 Seattle instead, because division titles mean nothing here.
It is not a forecast. What it adds is the middle of the season, when schedules are uneven and matching records hide different accomplishments.
Also: Penta Rankings for college football, college basketball and the NBA.
Game results, schedules and ratings come from Massey Ratings.