Bill Parcells famously said Darius Leonard Jersey , “You are what your record says you are.”After week 7, the Colts 2-5 record should actually be 2-4-1 is tied for 27th place in the league.? Because record isn’t the full story, the media churns out weekly power rankings which supposedly ranks teams by how good they are irrespective of record.Chris Blystone’s recent power rankings article shows that most pundits placed Indy right around 27th.So, either they all agree with Parcells or they are too lazy to actually analyze team play and just basically go by record. I’ll let you guess which is true.Personally, I feel the Colts are playing much better than their record and I have the data to back up that claim.ODDSAs of this writing, Sportsline.com has the Colts odds of winning the Superbowl at 100 to 1 . . . so, you’re saying there’s a chance. While I have no opinion on the predictive capability of Vegas odds, I can say for certain that there are only 19 teams with better odds listed. So, according to the cumulative knowledge of the betting community, the Colts are tied as the 20th best team. Hey, it’s better than 27th.POINT DIFFERENTIALSWins are obviously highly correlated to point differentials. For example Authentic Braden Smith Jersey , the team currently with the highest season long point differential is the Rams and surprise, they also have the best record. Normally, teams that have less than a 0.500 record, have negative point differentials, but that isn’t true with the Colts. Through 7 weeks, Reich and company have scored 189 points, while giving up 185, which results in a +4 point differential. This suggests that the Colts record is artificially low. How low? Well, rank teams by point differential and the Colts come in at 18th. PYTHAGOREAN WINSFootball Outsiders performs a much math-ier transform of point differentials by calculating a Pythagorean Win Expectation, which estimates the number of wins a team “should have” given their cumulative points for and against. Statistically, the calculation does a pretty good job of estimating actual wins.According to their formula, the Colts are playing like a team with 3.6 wins and are on pace to garner 8.2 for the season. They also apply an adjustment to account for “garbage time” impacts and after including that Youth Malik Hooker Jersey , Adjusted Pythagorean Expectation has the Colts ranked 17th in expected wins.That was a lot of math just to improve point differentials by one spot. But I’ll take it.BLOWOUTSWhile I’m on the subject of point differentials, did you hear that the Colts went +32 over the Bills last week? Since the league went to a 16 game season in 1978, there have been 45 games decided by exactly 32 points. The winning teams from those games ended the season with an average of 9.9 wins. Of course, there is variance around that number but only 18% of those teams ended up with less than 8 wins. The point is that if you beat someone by 32, then you probably aren’t one of the worst teams in the league.DRIVE SUCCESS RATEFor the 1 of you who read my articles, you know I am a big fan of Drive Success Rate. The Colts have a season long offensive DSR of 71.1% while the defense has given up a rate of 70.6%. The DSR differential is a relative measure of how well the the team has played overall and the Colts +0.5% ranks 17th in the league. DVOASo far, none of these measures have adjusted for opponent. Football Outsiders is famous for ranking teams by their DVOA metric, which includes an opponent adjustment. After Indy’s week 7 “running of the Bills”, the Colts improved their team DVOA and currently sit as the 14th best team in the league. CONCLUSIONSThere is no such thing as a “true” ranking method but by just about any method you pick, the Colts are much better than bottom dwellers. Add to that, the fact that the team is getting healthier and that there are a lot of winnable games coming up and I believe we will see a huge turn-around in record.Will it be enough to make the playoffs? I think it will be close. Close enough that half a game matters.Roster Moves: Colts place WR Deon Cain on IR; sign WR Matt Hazel and RB Branden Oliver Chris Ballard and the Indianapolis Colts are busy making roster moves on Sunday afternoon.The Colts have agreed to deals with wide receiver Matt Hazel and running back Branden Oliver. With the signings, Indy also waived wide receiver Dres Anderson and placed highly-touted wide receiver Deon Cain on Injured Reserve. The addition of another wide receiver was expected after the team announced Cain tore his Anterior Collateral Ligament in the Colts’ preseason opener against the Seattle Seahawks. Hazel http://www.coltsauthorizedshops.com/authentic-rigoberto-sanchez-jersey , 26, saw time on Indy’s active roster and practice squad last season. Before that, he spent time on the Cleveland Browns’ practice squad in 2017. Hazel has one career reception for one yard. Hazel has appeared in nine games, starting one for the Browns in 2017. In his previous stint with the Colts, he played in four games. Hazel has also seen time with the Washington Redskins and Miami Dolphins. With Marlon Mack dealing with a hamstring injury, and Robert Turbin dealing with an ankle issue and a suspension, Indy adds running back depth with Oliver in the backfield. Oliver, 27, saw playing time in 30 career games over the last four seasons (2014-17) with the Los Angeles Chargers, starting eight games and amassing 773 yards on 226 carries (3.4 yards an attempt). The Colts adding Oliver makes sense in a lot of ways. For one, Oliver played for Colts head coach Frank Reich when he was a part of the Chargers coaching staff from 2014-2016. Oliver was mentioned as a possibility to join the Colts in our free agent prospects piece yesterday.