NFL Week 6: Winners, Losers and Overreactions

Last Updated on October 20, 2026 4:13 pm by Erwin Noguera

The Cleveland Browns are 4-2 and lead the AFC North. They have been outscored by sixteen points.

The Denver Broncos are 4-2. They have been outscored by eleven. ESPN’s own match report on their overtime win described them as “atrocious on offense, depleted on defense, and shaky on special teams.” They won anyway.

Arizona went to Los Angeles as thirteen-and-a-half-point underdogs and won 18-16. Tennessee won a game. The Chargers lost a sixth.

And San Francisco is 6-0 with a +67 point differential, the best record and the best margin in football. Some of this league makes sense.

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Winners

San Francisco 49ers.6-0, +67, and the only unbeaten team left with a game played this week. They beat Washington 23-17 on Monday night with Christian McCaffrey scoring twice. No team is within ten points of that margin.

Kansas City Chiefs. 5-0 with a +57 differential after dismantling the Chargers 22-6. Kenneth Walker III ran 19 times for 128 yards and two touchdowns. The defence that had not recorded a sack since Week 1 held Los Angeles to six points.

Arizona Cardinals.18-16 at the Rams as 13.5-point underdogs, the biggest upset of the season. A 2-4 team with a -52 differential went into SoFi and won without scoring a touchdown.

C.J. Stroud and the Texans. 24 of 34 for 312 yards and three touchdowns in a 34-31 win over Jacksonville at Wembley. Marvin Harrison Jr. made his Houston debut in that game, and Jaylin Noel caught four for 107 and a score. Houston has won two straight.

Caleb Williams. Back from the hamstring injury and immediately 30 of 36 for 305 yards (83% completion) in a 31-23 win at Atlanta. Chicago are 4-2 with a +31 differential.

Tennessee Titans. Their first win, 26-20 at Indianapolis, and they did it by scoring twenty points in the fourth quarter after trailing 13-6.

Aaron Rodgers, at 42.33 of 49 for 253 yards and two touchdowns in a 26-19 overtime win at Tampa Bay, with Pittsburgh scoring sixteen in the fourth quarter to force it.

Carolina Panthers. 25-14 at Philadelphia. Bryce Young threw for 281 and two scores, Chuba Hubbard ran 28 times for 120. Carolina are 3-2 and lead the NFC South.

New England Patriots. 4-2 and winners of three straight after beating the Jets 26-19.

Cleveland Browns. They are 4-2 and top of their division. We will come back to them.

Losers

Los Angeles Chargers. 0-6 with a -61 differential. Six points at Arrowhead. They are the only team in football without a win, and the season has been over for a month.

Philadelphia Eagles. 2-4, four straight defeats, and a -31 differential. They lost at home to Carolina with Jalen Hurts out and Tanner McKee starting. A team that was a Super Bowl pick in August has been outscored by thirty-one points and is last but one in its division.

Baltimore Ravens. 13-10 at Cleveland, and they scored all ten points in the first quarter. Nothing in the final three. Tyler Huntley went 19 of 31 for 165 yards in his third start, and the Ravens are now 4-2, having lost to a team with a negative differential.

Jacksonville Jaguars. 34-31 to Houston in London, their second consecutive week at a London stadium and their first real setback. They remain 4-2 with a +50 differential (still the best in the AFC), but the nine-first-half-points streak is over.

Dallas Cowboys. 23-13 at Lambeau, a second straight defeat, 2-4. Jerry Jones spent four draft picks on this roster, and it has a -8 differential.

Seattle Seahawks. 17-14 in overtime at Denver, a third straight defeat, now 3-3. Sam Darnold went 27 of 51 with two interceptions. Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught twelve for 134 and it did not matter.

New York Giants. 34-27 at home to New Orleans. J.J. McCarthy threw for 243 on eleven completions, and Malik Nabers caught twelve for 165. 3-2-1 with a -4 differential.

Las Vegas Raiders. 33-30 to Buffalo, a third straight loss, 3-3 and a differential of exactly zero. Kirk Cousins threw for 313 and two scores. Tre Tucker caught two touchdowns.

Washington Commanders. 1-4-1 at -40. Jayden Daniels threw for 300 and two touchdowns on Monday night, and they lost by six.

Overreactions

“Cleveland are a playoff team.”They are 4-2, they lead the AFC North, and they have scored 106 points and conceded 122. That is the joint fourth-lowest scoring offence in football attached to a winning record. It is also now six games of evidence, which is harder to dismiss than two.

“Denver are contenders.” 4-2 with a -11 differential, 114 points scored in six games, and a win delivered by an interception and a 53-yard field goal in overtime. ESPN’s own report called them atrocious on offence. They are also 4-2.

“The Eagles are finished.”Four straight defeats and a -31 differential say it is close. But Hurts has a blood clot with no timeline, and judging a team on the four games it played without its quarterback is the error people made about Atlanta in September. The trade deadline is 10 November, and they have four games to find out.

“Arizona are not that bad.” They won at the Rams, and they have a -52 point differential, second-worst in the league. One result in SoFi does not move that.

“The Titans have turned a corner.” They scored twenty points in a fourth quarter and won their first game in six attempts. 84 points in six games is still the worst offensive output in football.

“Kansas City are the best team in football.” They are 5-0 at +57, and San Francisco are 6-0 at +67. The Chiefs have also played one fewer game. Both are real; only one of them has the better profile.

Where We Were Wrong

We went two from four on the games we previewed, and the miss that matters is the one we talked ourselves into.

We predicted Chiefs 27-20 over the Chargers and wrote explicitly: “the side, not the spread.” Our reasoning was that Kansas City were laying 8.5 while ESPN’s model had them by 6.1, and that “the line is 2.4 points past the model,” the same shape of mispricing that cost us on Buffalo in Week 4.

Kansas City won 22-6. They covered 8.5 by seven and a half points. The line was not inflated. The model was low.

That is worth sitting with, because we introduced that adjustment as a correction to an earlier mistake. The Week 4 lesson was not “fade favourites laying more than the model says.” It was “do not publish a caveat and then bet against it.” We turned a discipline about honesty into a betting rule, and the betting rule has its own error rate.

We also had Ravens 23-17 over Cleveland.The Browns won 13-10, and Baltimore did not score after the first quarter.

And we had Jaguars 23-17 over Houston.Houston won 34-31 behind three C.J. Stroud touchdowns.

What we got right.The 49ers over Washington, correct at 23-17. Carolina at Philadelphia: we flagged that ESPN’s model took the road underdog against a 1.5-point line and said it was “a genuine coin flip on a team that has lost three straight”; Carolina won by eleven. And Buffalo laying 6 with the model at 3.7, we called it “another number past the model” and the Bills won by three.

The other model flag went the wrong way. We noted FPI favoured Dallas by 3.4 at Green Bay against a Packers -1.5 line, a five-point disagreement. Green Bay won 23-13.

And the Cleveland thread needs an honest accounting. We have called the Browns the most overrated team in the league in each of the last three articles, on the strength of a negative point differential. They have gone 4-2 and lead their division. The differential argument has been correct about the quality and useless about the outcomes, which is precisely the mistake we made three times on the Cleveland Guardians this month. At some point, a team that keeps winning close games is a team that wins close games.

The One Number That Actually Matters

Minus sixteen.

That is Cleveland’s point differential, and they are top of the AFC North at 4-2.

They are not alone.Denver are 4-2 at minus eleven.Eight teams are sitting at 4-2, and two of them have been outscored across the season.

Here is why it matters beyond Cleveland. Through six weeks, eight teams have a differential better than +23 and five are at -40 or worse. Between them sit nineteen clubs, and the records inside that band are being decided almost entirely by margin of victory rather than quality.

San Francisco at +67 lead Kansas City at +57 by ten, and Kansas City lead Jacksonville at +50 by seven.Jacksonville are third and lost this week. After that, it is Minnesota at +45, Chicago at +31, Buffalo and Seattle at +26, and Seattle are 3-3.

The honest conclusion after six weeks is that two teams are clearly very good, five are finished, and the other twenty-five are being sorted by three-point games.We have spent a month treating point differential as the tool that cuts through that. It identifies the top and the bottom accurately and it has told us nothing useful about the middle.