Team Heat Check: Buffalo Bills Run Hot, Miami Dolphins Run Cold (NFL)

Form is the story the standings tell slowly and the last ten games tell fast. Right now the fast version of NFL is easy to summarize: Buffalo Bills are rolling, Miami Dolphins are reeling, and the gap between those two feelings is enormous.

The warm end of the table

Nobody is playing better than Buffalo Bills right now. The record says 6-0 over their last 6; the points column says even more, a +63 margin that works out to 31.5 scored and 21.0 allowed a night.

Right behind them sit Baltimore Ravens, 5-1 over the same kind of stretch and +79 on points margin, quieter, but pointed the same direction.

San Francisco 49ers (5-1) round out the warm end of the ledger.

The whole league is averaging 20.7 points a game in this stretch, which makes Buffalo Bills outrunning that number by 10.8 per night the loudest stat on the page.

The cold end

Then there is Miami Dolphins. A 0-6 stretch is ugly on its own; pair it with a -91 points margin and it stops looking like bad luck. They are being outscored by about 15.2 points a game, and no scheduling quirk explains that away.

They have company at the cold end: Houston Texans, 0-6 over the same window.

Do not ignore the middle class, either: Atlanta Falcons (3-3) and Pittsburgh Steelers (3-3) sit close enough that a single hot or cold series flips their order.

By the numbers

Here is the warm half of the form table, last ten games for every club:

One more thing

Records fib a little and points margins fib less. When the two columns disagree about a team, trust the margin, it is the slower liar.