2020 NFL Power Rankings: Cam Newton vaults the Patriots into the Top 5

The domino we were all waiting to fall finally did on Sunday night when news broke that the Patriots had signed Cam Newton to a one-year, incentive-laden deal.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this dramatically changes the landscape of the NFL. Now that the Patriots have a bona fide franchise starting quarterback behind center — provided Newton is healthy — they have to be considered a threat to unseat the Chiefs and Ravens at the top of the AFC.

So with Newton in New England, I decided to go back to the power rankings I put together at the beginning of May and make some updates.

Before we get to the rankings, a little insight into my process: A team’s 2019 performance obviously played a big factor, so I started out by making a list based on how teams finished a year ago. From there, I looked at how teams performed in statistics that are typically beyond a team’s control:

• I used Football Outsiders’ Adjusted Games Lost to gauge how lucky, or unlucky, a team was in the injury department.
• I looked at turnover margin and fumble recovery rates, two metrics that are volatile year-to-year.
• I looked at how teams performed compared to their Pythagorean Win Expectation, which carries more predictive power than your standard win-loss record.
• And I looked at how teams did in “coin-flip games,” a concept developed by FiveThirtyEight’s Ty Schalter that improves on the sometimes misleading “record in one-possession games” stat.

With all that out of the way, let’s get to the rankings. We’ll start at the bottom of the NFL hierarchy.