Team EPA per play is free on The Margin now. Here's what it says about who wins Super Bowls.

Someone on X went looking for NFL team EPA per play recently, found a site that wanted a subscription to show it, and said so. Fair complaint. It's the most-cited efficiency stat in football, and the play-by-play it comes from is public.

So it's on The Margin now, free. Two places:

• NFL team ratings: offense and defense EPA per play next to our rating for all 32 teams, with league ranks. Click a column to sort by it. Below the table there's a chart of the whole league, offense against defense.
• Every team file: a new EPA panel with the season, the last three games, the last game, passing, rushing and success rate, each with a league rank.

It updates every Tuesday after the week's games are in.

What EPA per play is, in one paragraph

Every snap starts with an expected number of points, based on down, distance, field position and time. A 3rd-and-1 at the opponent's 30 is worth a lot more than a 3rd-and-12 at your own 20. EPA (expected points added) is how much a play moved that number. Last season, a 35-to-45-yard completion on 3rd-and-10 or longer was worth about +4 on average. A sack in the same spot was worth about −1.6. Average every pass and run and you get EPA per play. Zero is about average. On defense it's EPA allowed, so lower is better. The EPA values come from the open nflverse play-by-play, so anyone can check our numbers.

The chart: four kinds of teams

Put offense on one axis and defense on the other, split both at the league average, and every team lands in one of four boxes:

• Juggernauts (top right): better than average on both sides.
• Shootout artists (bottom right): good offense, defense that gives it back.
• Win-ugly crew (top left): the defense carries the offense.
• Bottom feeders (bottom left): below average on both.

Here's 2026 through Week 3:

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A few things jump out.

San Francisco is lapping the field on offense. The 49ers are at +0.33 EPA per play, more than a tenth of a point clear of Buffalo in 2nd (+0.22). Their defense is 16th, right on the line, so they're Juggernauts by a hair on that side. Their net, offense minus defense allowed, is +0.34. Don't book the parade: three-week numbers run hot. The 2019 Patriots were at +0.62 after three weeks, and four teams since 2015 started above +0.43. No team has finished a season above +0.29. San Francisco's number will come down. The question is how far.

Minnesota and Las Vegas are playing the best defense in football. Minnesota allows −0.20 per play (1st), and the Raiders are right behind at −0.20 (2nd). The difference is the offense: Vegas is 16th and lands in the Juggernaut box by a nose, while Minnesota's offense is 25th, which makes the Vikings the captains of the win-ugly crew.

Dallas and Detroit are the purest shootout teams in the league. Dallas is 3rd on offense and 32nd on defense. Detroit is 7th and 31st. Expect points.

Tampa Bay is the strangest team on the board. Worst offense in football, 5th-best defense.

Where Super Bowl winners come from

This is where it gets fun. We ran the same numbers for every season back to 2015 and plotted each champion against its own season's average:

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• 8 of 11 champions were Juggernauts.
• 2 were Shootout artists, and both were Patrick Mahomes teams: the 2019 and 2022 Chiefs, with the 2nd- and 1st-ranked offenses and defenses that were almost exactly average (18th and 15th).
• 1 was Win-ugly crew: the 2015 Broncos, 25th on offense and 1st on defense.
• 0 were Bottom feeders.

Every champion in that stretch ranked in the top 9 in net EPA per play, and 9 of the 11 ranked in the top 6. But being the very best team by this measure hasn't been enough: only the 2016 Patriots ranked 1st and won it all. EPA gets you into the conversation. It doesn't settle it, and a one-game playoff sample is a lot of noise.

Three seasons worth a look

2015, the exception. Denver is the only champion since 2015 with a below-average offense. Their defense allowed 0.13 fewer points per play than the average defense, the biggest gap of any champion in the chart, just ahead of last year's Seahawks.

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2019, the outlier. Lamar Jackson's Ravens put up the best net EPA of any team since 2015, +0.29, more than five hundredths better than anyone else. They lost their first playoff game, 28–12 at home to Tennessee. Kansas City, 5th in net, won the title.

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2025, last season. Seattle won from the top-right box with the league's best defense and the 12th-ranked offense.

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What it can't tell you

EPA per play is a description, not a prediction. Early in the season it moves a lot week to week, and it doesn't adjust for opponents: three games against bad defenses will flatter any offense. It's also not part of our team rating, which is built from results and the starting quarterback. We show it beside the rating, not inside it.

What it does well is answer "how good has this offense and this defense actually been, play by play?" Now the answer is one click away and it doesn't cost anything.

See all 32 teams →