Week 1 DVOA Ratings

by Aaron Schatz

You love them when your team is high! You hate them when your team is low! DVOA ratings are in effect for 2007!

Once again, the first week of DVOA ratings won't tell us much in the long run. Sure, Pittsburgh is in the lead, but they played Cleveland. We don't include opponent adjustments until three games are in the books, and I have a feeling this game won't rank so high once we start considering how bad the Browns are going to be.

This year's DVOA ratings also feature the return of DAVE, our rating that combines the preseason projection with the results of early games to give us a better prediction of how each team will rank at the end of the year. For those who don't know the story, this metric is called DAVE as a reaction to criticism that our stats are too much alphabet soup. I mean, who can argue with a guy named Dave? (Technically, it stands for DVOA Adjusted for Variation Early.)

This year's DAVE is re-figured and ends up a little different from last year's DAVE, primarily because there were a few teams last year that shot out of the gate early and proved their preseason projections to be incorrect. In this week's DAVE ratings, the preseason projection counts for 90 percent, and the current VOA counts for 10 percent. (Last year, DAVE was 96 percent projection after Week 1.)

Congratulations to San Francisco, the only team to win in Week 1 despite a lower VOA than its opponent.

DVOA commentary will not appear on FOXSports.com this year. Normally, I will do a general commentary here, but there's nothing to say after one week. Some form of DVOA ratings may also be appearing on another large sports site, not FOX; that will be announced soon.

Offense [1], defense [2], and special teams [3] pages are now updated with 2007 data. The DVOA Premium Database [4] will be updated with 2007 numbers after Week 2. Individual stats pages and offensive line/defensive front seven pages will be updated with 2007 numbers after Week 2.

Loser League results should be updated by the end of today, and there will be a link on our menu bar to take you to the Loser League page.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through one week of 2007, measured by our proprietary Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) system that breaks down every single play and compares a team's performance to the league average based on situation in order to determine value over average. (Explained further here [5].)

OFFENSE and DEFENSE VOA are adjusted to consider all fumbles, kept or lost, as equal value. SPECIAL TEAMS DVOA is adjusted for type of stadium (warm, cold, dome, Denver/Mexico City) and week of season.

There are no opponent adjustments in VOA until the fourth week of the season, which is why it is VOA right now rather than DVOA.

To save people some time, please use the following format for all complaints:

<team> is clearly ranked <too high/too low> because <reason unrelated to DVOA>. <subjective ranking system> is way better than this. <unrelated team-supporting or -denigrating comment, preferably with poor spelling and/or chat-acceptable spelling>

Seriously, after four years the DVOA ratings and/or preseason projections have been higher than conventional wisdom on every team a few times, and lower than conventional wisdom on every team a few times. We could easily go back into the archives to find reasons why Football Outsiders has a bias in favor of all 32 teams and against all 32 teams. If you make a bias complaint at this point, you just look like an idiot.

	TEAM	TOTAL VOA	DAVE	RANK	NON-ADJ TOT VOA	W-L	OFFENSE VOA	OFF. RANK	DEFENSE VOA	DEF. RANK	S.T. DVOA	S.T. RANK
1	PIT	92.4%	18.4%	4	102.5%	1-0	14.9%	8	-69.6%	1	7.8%	8
2	NE	88.7%	39.0%	1	82.9%	1-0	61.8%	2	-10.1%	14	16.9%	4
3	IND	78.7%	14.2%	5	74.5%	1-0	49.4%	3	-28.6%	8	0.6%	17
4	MIN	59.6%	-2.2%	17	58.8%	1-0	10.9%	9	-41.2%	4	7.5%	9
5	DAL	58.7%	-3.0%	19	60.1%	1-0	83.8%	1	29.5%	29	4.4%	11
6	DET	44.0%	-4.2%	20	27.9%	1-0	24.5%	5	-7.2%	17	12.3%	5
7	SEA	40.6%	4.1%	12	47.0%	1-0	9.3%	10	-25.0%	10	6.4%	10
8	HOU	39.2%	-11.7%	25	37.3%	1-0	3.6%	12	-34.1%	7	1.5%	15
9	SD	32.5%	11.2%	7	29.2%	1-0	-9.5%	17	-48.8%	2	-6.8%	24
10	DEN	19.7%	2.1%	13	21.0%	1-0	16.5%	7	-36.7%	6	-33.5%	31
11	CAR	18.5%	11.2%	6	24.1%	1-0	20.7%	6	-9.7%	15	-11.8%	27
12	TEN	8.9%	-5.1%	21	19.8%	1-0	9.1%	11	-3.5%	19	-3.7%	20
13	WAS	6.4%	10.7%	8	25.3%	1-0	-3.1%	13	-5.9%	18	3.6%	12
14	ARI	4.0%	-16.4%	29	6.6%	0-1	-12.7%	21	-25.3%	9	-8.6%	25
15	CIN	3.0%	-2.9%	18	13.6%	1-0	-11.4%	20	-48.2%	3	-33.7%	32
16	GB	-0.5%	5.0%	11	-4.8%	1-0	-38.3%	28	-19.0%	11	18.7%	3
	TEAM	TOTAL VOA	DAVE	RANK	NON-ADJ TOT VOA	W-L	OFFENSE VOA	OFF. RANK	DEFENSE VOA	DEF. RANK	S.T. DVOA	S.T. RANK
17	PHI	-0.7%	23.3%	2	6.2%	0-1	-19.0%	22	-38.3%	5	-20.0%	30
18	MIA	-0.8%	-13.0%	27	-17.4%	0-1	-5.9%	15	-3.1%	20	2.0%	13
19	SF	-4.1%	-1.9%	15	-7.1%	1-0	-25.3%	24	-12.7%	12	8.5%	7
20	BAL	-6.7%	10.0%	9	-14.9%	0-1	-48.2%	30	-11.4%	13	30.0%	1
21	JAC	-11.6%	21.0%	3	-20.0%	0-1	-3.5%	14	9.1%	22	1.1%	16
22	STL	-19.7%	-23.9%	31	-20.6%	0-1	-9.7%	18	20.7%	27	10.6%	6
23	BUF	-32.3%	-7.5%	23	-31.3%	0-1	-36.7%	27	16.5%	26	20.9%	2
24	TB	-36.3%	5.7%	10	-40.4%	0-1	-25.0%	23	9.3%	23	-2.1%	19
25	CHI	-39.4%	-0.6%	14	-33.3%	0-1	-48.8%	31	-9.5%	16	-0.1%	18
26	KC	-48.4%	-27.9%	32	-42.5%	0-1	-34.1%	26	3.6%	21	-10.7%	26
27	OAK	-48.6%	-15.9%	28	-29.1%	0-1	-7.2%	16	24.5%	28	-16.9%	28
28	NYG	-52.7%	-8.5%	24	-51.1%	0-1	29.5%	4	83.8%	32	1.5%	14
29	ATL	-57.1%	-5.6%	22	-52.6%	0-1	-41.2%	29	10.9%	24	-4.9%	23
30	NO	-82.0%	-12.2%	26	-73.4%	0-1	-28.6%	25	49.4%	30	-4.0%	21
31	CLE	-89.1%	-17.7%	30	-97.2%	0-1	-69.6%	32	14.9%	25	-4.6%	22
32	NYJ	-91.7%	-2.2%	16	-84.4%	0-1	-10.1%	19	61.8%	31	-19.9%	29