NFL
2017 NFL Power Rankings: End-of-Season Edition
Sean McVay and Jared Goff engineered a massive one-year turnaround in Los Angeles as the Rams vastly outperformed preseason expectations.

Teams Ranked 32 to 23rd

It was a bad season of football in the Big Apple, but among teams who finished in the bottom 12, the Jets do have the distinction of being the biggest overachiever this season.

RankTeamnERDRec.Super Bowl OddsOff. NEP RankDef. NEP RankChange
32Indianapolis Colts-10.554-120.0%23320
31Miami Dolphins-8.886-100.0%3222-1
30Cleveland Browns-8.510-160.0%2828+1
29Buffalo Bills-5.839-70.30%2917-1
28New York Giants-5.053-130.0%2618-1
27Oakland Raiders-4.956-100.0%1830-3
26San Francisco 49ers-4.896-100.0%1731+3
25Houston Texans-4.674-120.0%1926-3
24New York Jets-4.55-110.0%2520+1
23Cincinnati Bengals-4.27-90.0%2419+3


Granted, Gang Green only moved up five spots from their preseason ranking of 29th, but the squad gave a performance that was a far cry from expectations. Before the season, there was talk of New York going 0-16. But Josh McCown ended up leading a functional passing game, and the Jets turned out not to be terrible on defense.

Things ended up going a lot worse for the Giants. We were not as high on them before the year relative to their 11-5 finish in 2016, which was propped up by an 8-3 record in one-score games. As expected, their record in such games regressed to 1-4 this season, but they also vastly underperformed on defense.

We had them projected to finish third in terms of schedule-adjusted Defensive Net Expected Points, but they instead are 18th. Injuries certainly played a role, as four defensive starters from Week 1 went on injured reserve, as did some bad bounces -- the Giants only recovered a third of their opponents' fumbles, while we would generally expect a team to recover half of them.

Still, luck does not tell the whole story, as the Giants still got 15 games from Landon Collins and 9 from Janoris Jenkins, who both played key roles for the 2016 unit. Starters Jason Pierre-Paul, Darian Thompson and Dalvin Tomlinson all made 16 starts, and linemen Damon Harrison and Olivier Vernon made 15 and 12 starts, respectively. Overall, the defense's opening night starters made a combined 139 appearances out of a possible 176, so poor health isn't the sole reason the unit allowed 5.7 yards per play.

The Giants' offense was hit harder by injuries (122 appearances for the unit's Week 1 starters), but its performance was actually not much worse than what we expected before the season, as we projected it to finish just 24th in NEP.

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