2026 ELWAY NFL projections: Week 8

Despite football’s reputation for being less analytics-friendly than basketball or baseball, there is a lot of data to work with. The NFL is now in its 107th season. There’s now a quarter-century’s worth of reliable play-by-play data (since 2001) and 20 years (since 2006) of advanced quarterback tracking stats.1

But it can take a bit of creativity to use that data effectively. ELWAY2 is probably Silver Bulletin’s most unique model. You can read more about it on the methodology page, but let’s get to the numbers.

The best (and worst) teams in the NFL

Let’s begin with our topline team ratings. A team’s offensive and defensive ratings represent, respectively, their projected number of points scored and allowed on a neutral site against an average opponent3 and can be combined to form a net rating. The Bills’ net rating of +6.0 means that we’d expect them to outscore an average opponent by 6 points in Week 2, for example.

The comparison between offense and defense is also instructive. The relationship between offense and defense is complicated in the NFL because efficient offenses not only score more but leave their opponents with worse field position and take more time off the clock. Put another way, “the best defense is a good offense.” This means that teams that score more points tend to allow fewer points, and vice versa. However, there are some outliers on either side. The Texans’ strengths are particularly concentrated on defense, whereas the Cowboys have a great offense behind Dak Prescott but really struggle on the other side of the ball, as the Giants exposed last week.

The rest of this page contains:

• Projected W-L records for each team, including a new, detailed chart that shows the probability distribution of each team’s win totals (how likely is it that the Ravens win 11 or more games?) across 20,000 simulations.

• Playoff, division title and Super Bowl odds, including conditional odds showing the effect on a team’s playoff chances from winning or losing its next game.

• Detailed projections for every game of the regular season, with projected point spreads, totals (i.e. over/unders) and win probabilities for each game. There’s also a separate chart showing a distribution of simulated margins: 3-point wins and 7-point wins are particularly common, for instance.

• Finally, we’ll add a series of graphs that track each team’s ELWAY rating from week to week, though we’ve left these off for now since we’re so early in the season.

The remaining features are for paid subscribers. A paid subscription also includes full access to our 2026 midterm election forecast when you sign up for ELWAY.

ELWAY projected records and playoff odds

Here’s what you were probably waiting for: our simulated standings based on playing out the rest of the season 20,000 times, along with each team’s odds of reaching the playoffs, winning its division and winning the Super Bowl. You can also click over to the “playoff seed probabilities” tab to see a team’s likelihood of finishing with the #1 through #7 seed in each conference. The projected standings account for strength of schedule and both current and future injury risk.

Next, here is a probability distribution of each team’s regular season win totals based on our 20K simulations.4 These are typically fairly symmetric, but some teams have discernible left tails. These reflect simulations in which the starting QB is injured or the team goes into a downward spiral after a rough start.

Teams with losing records are more likely to fire their coaches and are slower to bring their players back from injuries. That makes the first few weeks some of the season’s most consequential games outside the playoffs, because NFL outcomes are often path-dependent. You can see this in the next chart, which shows how each team’s chances of reaching the playoffs will change based on its next game. The Broncos’ playoff odds will shoot up to 86 percent if they beat the Chiefs on Monday night, for instance, but plummet to 65 percent with a loss.

Projected game odds, totals, and point spreads

Yes, we’re aware that some of you will use ELWAY for gambling purposes. Be careful, because NFL betting lines have a lot of smart money backing them. Always shop for the best line and consider that ELWAY’s injury information is typically only updated once per week. Still, we’ve put a lot of work into these. Spreads and totals come directly from our simulations and are set at the point that produces the closest possible 50–50 split between outcomes. Thus, both a team that’s favored by 3.6 points in ELWAY’s raw ratings and one that’s favored by 2.6 points will often be rounded to 3, since this is an extremely common final winning margin. Totals are more dispersed than last year because ELWAY now has cleaner ways to separate offense and defense and account for teams like the Cowboys and Texans whose strengths are concentrated on one side of the ball.

This next chart shows ELWAY’s simulation architecture at work. You can scroll through any game for the forthcoming week to find a probability distribution of scoring margins, which tends to spike at numbers like 3, 7 and 10 points.

Tracking ELWAY ratings over time

If you want to see how your team has been performing over each week, use this interactive to compare ratings! And if you want to get extra detailed, click on a team to see the exact change week-over-week.

Bug reports? Feature requests? Thoughts about what you like about ELWAY — or how it could be improved? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line.