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A week after the Los Angeles Rams humiliated the defending Super Bowl champions, the Arizona Cardinals walked into SoFi Stadium and humiliated the Rams. Four weeks into the planned NFC West basement season, the Cardinals are undefeated atop the division (and league).
The Cardinals don’t look strong just because they racked up the most points at the end of their games against the Rams, Jacksonville Jaguars, Minnesota Vikings and Tennessee Titans. They are No. 1 in the league in distance and score, and rank third in Football Outsiders’ Adjusted Value to Defense (DVOA) total and fifth in Pro Football’s power rankings. Focus. They are currently fifth in FiveThirtyEight quarterback adjusted Elo odds, with a 52% chance of winning their division.
But the Cardinals’ surprise success doesn’t mean their division rivals are weaker. All four teams are in our top 14 – and the team least likely to make the playoffs still has a 42% chance.
Many advanced measures of team strength tell the same story: The entire division is in the top half of the NFL, if not in the top 14, in most systems. Jeff Sagarin’s USA Today rankings place the 49ers just outside the top half, in 18th place, while Pro-Football-Reference.com’s simple scoring system ranks the Niners in 21st place. But while Football Outsiders’ DAVE metric, which pairs its DVOA with preseason projections, drops the Cardinals to 10th and the Rams to sixth, it propels the other two teams into the top 12. To borrow a phrase from the international football tournaments, the NFC West is the death group of the NFL:
NFC West teams are stellar so far
Ranking team strength metrics for NFC West teams through week 4 of the 2021 NFL season
| Team | 538 link | OF THEM | DAVE | PFF | Sagarine | SRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona Cardinals | 5 | 3 | ten | 5 | 2 | 2 |
| The Los Angeles Rams | 6 | 5 | 6 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| Seattle Seahawks | 11 | 11 | 8 | 11 | 16 | 16 |
| San Francisco 49ers | 13 | 13 | 12 | 11 | 18 | 21 |
And the “top 14” is important because it is the number of teams that participate in the NFL playoffs. In just the second season since the league added a third wild card spot to every conference, NFC West could be the first division in NFL history to have all of its teams qualified for the playoffs.
In fact, this year’s NFC West may be the strongest division since the NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002 and settled into its current roster.
Over four games, according to Football Outsiders’ total DVOA, the average NFC West team was 20.1% more effective than the average NFL team. He is well ahead of second-placed AFC North at 12.6 percent, and far ahead of third-placed AFC West at 5.9 percent. If that holds up over the next 13 games (and 14 weeks) of the NFL regular season, NFC West 2021 would be the strongest DVOA division of the 32-team era.
But not all the numbers agree that NFC West is so far ahead of the rest of the league. SRS and Sagarin’s rankings have a darker take on the Seattle Niners and Seahawks than FiveThirtyEight and PFF. In fact, Sagarin doesn’t even rank NFC West as the best conference this year. His divisional average score is 22.51, behind the best dog in AFC West (23.81).
At this point in the season, any way to rank the strength of the NFL team will rely heavily on preseason expectations or extrapolate based on less than a quarter of a season’s results. No matter what system or rankings you use, however, NFC West has to be a very strong division, and the results so far have confirmed that.
The Cardinals’ surprising 4-0 start propelled their Elo odds to a third-best 1607, and we’re giving them an 87% chance of qualifying for the playoffs. Despite falling to the Cardinals, the Rams still have a 73% chance of making the playoffs, and the Seahawks have a chance to make it too. At 42%, the 49ers are the NFC West team least likely to qualify as of now – but they still have better prospects than 14 other NFL teams.
However, it’s still early in what will be the NFL’s longest season, and nearly every scenario for these four teams is still on the table. In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s model predicts a 5% chance that all four of the NFL’s Group of Death teams will make it to the playoffs alive. And on Thursday night, our predictions will get a very valuable data point when the Rams take on the Seahawks at Emerald City.
Discover our latest NFL Predictions.
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