Seattle Seahawks

NFC West not currently an elite division

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

foxsports

The NFC West is off to a slow start overall, and the NFL Power Index suggests that the Seattle Seahawks should have an easier-than-normal path to the playoffs.

After posting the results of of the NFL Power Index for the week, I took a look at the NFC West. The Seahawks represent the division in the top tier of teams, but the rest of the division looks fairly poor according to the mathematical model.

NFL Power index ranks for NFC West:
5) Seattle
13) Arizona
24) LA
30) SFhttps://t.co/yGLKxHGcJW

— Keith Myers (@MyersNFL) October 6, 2016

Clearly, the days of the NFC West being the league’s toughest division are over. They no longer have two teams in the top 5, which has been the case almost every week since the 2nd half of 2012.

Of course, that led to the question: What division is the strongest?

To try and answer that, I used two different methods. The 1st was to add the ranks all the division teams. So the NFC West ranking total would be 5 (Seattle) plus 13 (Arizona), etc. Obviously, the lower total here mean a better division.

Because of the occasional gaps between one rank and the next in terms of overall Power, I also combined the Power metric for all the division teams. In this case, a higher sum indicates a better division.

Both methods produced the same order:

Division	Ranking total	Power Total
AFC West	44	236.49
AFC North	50	224.94
NFC East	63	216.31
NFC North	64	211.16
NFC West	72	199.04
AFC East	73	192.19
NFC South	76	187.51
AFC South	86	165.34

Obviously, the AFC West is the class of the NFL right now, and no other division is particularly close. This makes sense when you consider that Denver and Oakland are both playoff caliber teams. The Chargers have led by 2 scores in the 4th quarter of every game. Even the Chiefs have looked decent except in that one blowout loss in prime time.

Is also shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the AFC South is the league’s worst division. There isn’t a decent team in that division. The Colts, Jaguars, Texans and Titans make a strong case for playoff seeding to not take into account if a team won their division.

As for the NFC West, come in as the 5th-best division overall. There is also a large gap between them and the NFC North in 4th. So while it is a median division, it is also below average overall.

What does this mean for Seattle? Quite simply, it means an easier road to a decent playoff seed. The metrics suggest both a collapse from LA is coming and that Arizona isn’t likely to surge into contention.

We’ll see how this progresses over the next few weeks, but for now the Seahawks will have an easier path to the playoffs than they’ve had at any time during the Russell Wilson era.