Where do the Patriots rank?

The NFL released the league power rankings. I'm a believer that one has to start where the team finished and then add in additions and departures to determine ranking. I don't factor in the schedule because that's another subject. There have been countless seasons where teams that were good on paper had a bad schedule and fell off for one reason or the other.

Dan Hanzus of NFL.com listed the power rankings. The Buffalo Bills were given the top spot and the defending superbowl champions, the Los Angeles Rans were bumped down to number two. And the defending AFC champions were knocked down to fourth. The Patriots were twelveth in 2021 winning the sixth seed but got blown out to the Buffalo Bills.

Hanzus has the Patriots ranked seventeenth in the league and tenth in the AFC. Before the draft people were talking about expectations for the team and some were saying the Patriots over achieved for a team in a rebuild. Typical if a team is in a rebuild. They get better every advancing year or that's the theory. So early in the offseason, Vicariously Patriots wrote that they expected the Patriots to finish with at least a wildcard birth.

The Patriots lost a good portion of their staff, along with their top cornerback. They also have an uncertainty at linebacker but they did trade for DeVante Parker. And it's too early to tell how they did with their draft. It's one thing to expect them to win the seventh seed in the AFC, which is very well possible. However, expectations and initial power rankings are two different things. 

This writer believes fourteenth to sixteenth was a fair ranking. Seventeenth is only a spot off but still middle of the pack. That's not bad granted they're the tenth AFC team listed. All four AFC West and three of the AFC North teams are ranked above them. So being a middle of the pack team should work in their favor, as the other teams are going to beat up on each other. With that, if the Patriots are ranked correctly, fans should be happy when they look to determine the Patriots record predictions in the coming weeks.