If you ask who was better last season, the Chiefs or the Raiders, you get two honest answers that point opposite ways. One measure says the Chiefs, comfortably. The other says the Raiders won the game that counts. Both are true, and holding both at once is how you actually learn to read a team.
They play again on Sunday, 4 October, in Las Vegas, so this is a good week to lay the two measures side by side.
“Who is better?”- The question that feels like it has one answer
“Who is better?” sounds like it should resolve to a single team. It does not, because there is more than one honest way to measure better, and the two do not have to agree.
The two most common are the win-loss record, which counts how many games you won, and point differential, which counts by how much. Most of the time they roughly agree. When they split, the gap is the lesson.
Who is the better: what the record says
By record last season, this was not close, and it was the wrong way round from what you might expect.
The Chiefs went 6-11 and missed the playoffs for the first time in years. The Raiders finished 3-14. On record alone the Chiefs were poor and the Raiders were dreadful, but neither looked like a good team, and the Chiefs’ collapse from champions to also-rans was the headline.
The trouble with a record is that it treats a one-point loss and a thirty-point loss as the same thing: a loss. It tells you the result of each game and nothing about how close it was.
Decoded takeaway: A record counts your wins. It says nothing about how heavily you won or lost them.
Who is the better: point differential
Point differential is the other lens, and it tells a completely different story about the same two teams.
It is simply points scored minus points allowed across the season. The Chiefs finished at plus 34, meaning they outscored their opponents over the year. The Raiders finished at minus 191, one of the worst marks in the league, meaning they were beaten heavily and often.
By this measure the two were 225 points apart. That is not a close gap, it is a chasm, and it says the Chiefs were a good team having a wretched run of luck while the Raiders were genuinely one of the worst teams in the sport. Point differential is also the measure that travels best into a new season, because a team’s scoring gap predicts next year better than its win-loss record does. I explain why on the NFL Team Stats page.
Here are the two teams side by side, last season, on both measures at once.
Chiefs v Raiders, 2025 regular season
| Measure | Kansas City Chiefs | Las Vegas Raiders |
|---|---|---|
| Record | 6-11 | 3-14 |
| Points scored | 362 | 241 |
| Points allowed | 328 | 432 |
| Point differential | +34 | -191 |
Source: Pro Football Reference, 2025 regular season. Point differential is points scored minus points allowed.
Why the two disagree
So one measure says the teams were roughly matched at the bottom, and the other says a chasm separated them. Both are reading the same season. The gap between them is luck in close games.
The Chiefs lost nine of their ten one-score games. A team that good normally wins about half of those. Lose almost all of them and your record craters while your point differential, which does not care whether a game was close, barely moves. That is the whole disagreement in one line: the record caught every unlucky bounce, and the differential ignored them.
When record and differential split, the reason is almost always the close games.
And yet the Raiders won the one that mattered
Here is the part neither measure captures. In the game between them, the Raiders won, 14-12.
Point differential tells you who is probably better over a full seventeen-game season. It does not tell you who wins one afternoon, and in this rivalry the one afternoon has its own history of ignoring the form book. The full record of the flip, from the Raiders leading by eleven to the Chiefs leading by twenty, is on the Chiefs v Raiders rivalry page.
Which one to use, and when
So which measure is right? Both, for different jobs, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge.
Use the record when you want to know what happened: who made the playoffs, who won the division, who beat whom. Use point differential when you want to know who is likely better going forward, because it sees through a lucky or unlucky run of close games. And use neither to call a single rivalry game, because one afternoon between two teams who have played 134 times is its own thing, decided on the day.
The real skill is not picking the right number. It is knowing that a team can be much better and still lose, and being able to say exactly how both of those things are true at once.
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