Dave Tuley, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

Vegas Rankings for NFL playoffs

NFL

LAS VEGAS -- The Seattle Seahawks will start the playoffs after the New Year the same way they ended last season: atop the NFL Vegas Rankings.

The combined power ratings of our panel of ESPN Insider pro football handicappers -- Erin Rynning of sportsmemo.com, Sal Selvaggio of madduxsports.com and yours truly, Dave Tuley -- have Seattle as a point better than the Green Bay Packers and the Denver Broncos on a neutral field, with the New England Patriots another half-point behind.

The updated Super Bowl futures from the Westgate Las Vegas Hotel-Casino are pretty much in agreement with Seattle as the 9-4 favorite (plus-225 if expressed as a money line), though the SuperBook has New England as the 5-2 second choice thanks to it having home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs and then Green Bay at 5-1 and Denver at 6-1.

The NFL Vegas Rankings can be used to create your own ratings or to compare two teams to the current point spread, as if they were meeting on a neutral field before factoring in home-field advantage. The industry standard is 2.5 points for home field, but teams such as Green Bay, New England and San Francisco are typically given a full field goal, while Denver and New Orleans are closer to 3.5. Seattle is given the biggest home-field advantage in the league (about 4 points).

Below is a look at the power ratings for the 12 remaining playoff teams. It's interesting to note that the first 11 were in the top 12 of last week's ratings, while Carolina was actually tied for 21st and would still be rated behind four non-playoff teams (Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo and Houston) if we listed all 32 NFL teams.

We'll then look at the four wild-card matchups for this weekend. During the course of the year, the NFL Vegas Rankings "value plays" were 21-17-1 ATS (55.3 percent) and 21-14 ATS (60 percent) after the 0-3-1 ATS start in the preseason betting guide. Also, the value plays were 11-4-1 ATS when picking a favorite, though three of those were cases where we recommend a play on Arizona as a favorite earlier in the week and it ended up going off as the underdog (winning all three games outright).

As always, these are not my personal plays or those of any of the other handicappers, but rather the group as a whole. I'll post my thoughts in the Tuley's Take column, which will appear this week on Wednesday afternoon.


NFL Vegas Rankings

1. Seattle Seahawks (Power rating: 28)

^ Back to Top ^