NFL Power Rankings: How high do NY Giants rise after Week 6?

I suppose you could say 3-3 feels about right. They don’t have any bad losses, but they don’t have any particularly impressive wins either.

Cam Newton struggled mightily in his return from COVID-19, will the effects linger? The Patriots can’t afford many performances like his 17 of 25 for 157 yards and two interceptions effort this week.

They’ve had a relatively tough schedule so far, and they’ve been hanging tough. I like their chances to finish above .500 if they stay healthy.

They haven’t impressed me much, and they’ve got trips to New Orleans and Kansas City in the next three weeks, a home bout with Tampa Bay. They should beat Atlanta in between, but I expect them to lose three of four.

Three teams in the AFC have five wins so far, and the Broncos have already played two of them and face the other next week. They’ve also had to face Tom Brady’s Buccaneers. That’s the good news. For the bad news, look at their depth chart at quarterback.

They got routed in their first game without Dak Prescott, but the bottom third of the league this year feels worse than usual. As a result, it’s hard to put a two-win team behind any of the teams with worse records.

The fact that the Eagles are ranked this highly says more about how bad the bottom-10 are than anything else. They did give the Steelers and Ravens a run in back-to-back weeks, missing a field goal for the lead with a little over three minutes left in Pittsburgh and failing to convert a 2-point conversion attempt to tie the game late against Baltimore.

When I can’t figure out how to rank a team, I ask myself who I’d be more worried about playing. Deshaun Watson scares me more than anyone any of the remaining teams can throw at me.

It’s not the type of thing you want to be saying at this point in the season, but all four of their losses were by one score or less and to respectable opponents.

While Daniel Jones hasn’t turned the corner and really elevated his game yet, he generally does enough to make me think he could be close. If he does, the Giants should at least be competitive most weeks. Thursday Night’s game against the Eagles should be an inflection point in their season. Will they contend in a weak division, or will Giants fans soon be talking about next offseason and the draft?

Joe Burrow had about as lackluster of a 300-yard passing performance as you can put together this week: 25 of 39 for 313 yards, no touchdowns and an interception. He’ll need to do more to move the Bengals up the rankings.

They picked up a win this week, and Matt Ryan is still good enough to do plenty of damage. If I told you that through six weeks he’d have completed 65 percent of his passes for 1,843 yards, 11 touchdowns and three interceptions, surely you’d expect the Falcons to be way better than 1-5.

The one thing you could say about them through five weeks was that perhaps they hadn’t lost to any terrible teams. But then we realized the Texans weren’t just off to a shaky start. Then the Vikings lost to the Falcons.

Let the record show that I never thought Gardner Minshew was better than Nick Foles. Never.

I mean, there are widespread trade rumors about the quarterback they drafted in the top half of the first round 18 months ago. That’s crazy.

As a former Jets head coach famously said, “You play… to win… the game.” Until they win one, they’ll hold down the bottom spot.