by Aaron Schatz
Although they struggled during a few of their later games, the New England Patriots finish 2007 with the best DVOA rating of any team in the 12 years for which we have the play-by-play breakdowns. They also finish with the best offensive rating ever. The Patriots are the first team to ever finish a season with a total DVOA over 50% or an offensive DVOA over 40%, and the first team to finish with more than 14 "estimated wins." They are the fourth team to finish the year number one in both passing and rushing DVOA, along with the 2002 Chiefs, the 2001 Rams, and the wacky mirror-universe 1996 Ravens. (First in offense, 29th in defense. Really.)
| BEST TOTAL DVOA | BEST OFFENSIVE DVOA | |||||
| 2007 | NE | 51.8% | 2007 | NE | 42.8% | |
| 1999 | STL | 45.8% | 2004 | IND | 39.9% | |
| 1996 | GB | 40.6% | 2006 | IND | 33.7% | |
| 2001 | STL | 38.5% | 2002 | KC | 33.3% | |
| 2000 | TEN | 37.4% | 2000 | STL | 31.7% | |
| 2004 | NE | 35.7% | 2000 | IND | 30.1% | |
| 2004 | PIT | 34.8% | 2004 | KC | 28.7% | |
| 1999 | JAC | 34.8% | 2007 | IND | 28.3% | |
| 2002 | TB | 34.0% | 1998 | DEN | 28.0% | |
| 2004 | IND | 33.8% | 2001 | STL | 27.3% | |
| 2005 | IND | 33.5% | 2003 | KC | 27.0% | |
| 2007 | IND | 33.0% | 2005 | IND | 26.9% | |
The Patriots also excelled when it came to individual stats, of course. Tom Brady is the first quarterback to ever earn more than 200 DPAR in a season [1]. Randy Moss is the second wide receiver to earn more than 50 DPAR in a season [2], and his 2007 campaign narrowly edges out Marvin Harrison's 2001 season for the top WR DPAR ever. In addition -- this is discussed further in Quick Reads [3] -- Brady does in fact finish with the greatest quarterback season in modern NFL history according to the formula we used in Pro Football Prospectus 2005. I mistakenly forgot to update opponent adjustments when I wrote last week's Quick Reads, which would have put Brady eighth instead of 11th through last week. Then Brady went and had another great game against the Giants, much more in line with his numbers from the first half of the year, and that was enough to move him past Peyton Manning and Bert Jones.
Speaking of Mr. Jones and Mr. Manning: Clearly, sitting your starters in the final week is a Colts franchise tradition, and once again it affected their DVOA rating this year, dropping the 2007 Colts out of the historical DVOA top 10.
On the other end of the spectrum, the 2007 San Francisco 49ers finish 10th among history's worst total DVOA ratings, and eighth among the worst offensive DVOA ratings. A bad team, but not the historically bad team they looked like a few weeks ago.
Once again this year, teams sitting their starters in Week 17 played havoc with the DVOA ratings. As I've noted in past years, all of the research I've done has shown that removing these "sit starters" games from DVOA doesn't improve the accuracy, and therefore we leave them in. We'll look at this issue again this off-season, but for now, every play of the season is in the ratings. As you can imagine, that means a lot of good teams take a hit. Out of the final top 10 teams, only Green Bay and Tennessee have a higher DVOA after Week 17 than they did after Week 16.
Of course, not every team that had a terrible game in Week 17 was sitting its starters. I'm looking at you, Dallas.
Pittsburgh was one of the teams sitting people, and it cost them the number one spot in defensive DVOA. Instead, Tennessee finishes the year as DVOA's top defense. Last week I wrote about how the Steelers defense is nowhere near as good as the defenses that led the league in DVOA from 1996-2006. After the final game, this year stands out even more as a year when there were a few very good defenses, but no great ones. At -13.5%, the Titans would have finished fourth in 1997 and 2006, and fifth or lower in every other year. This year's best defense ranks 59th among the 375 teams in DVOA history.
Chicago finishes the year with the top special teams. In fact, Chicago finishes with the second-highest special teams rating in DVOA history (9.1%), behind only the 2002 New Orleans Saints. However, that rating comes with an asterisk. Regular readers know that I added a new element to our kickoff ratings at midseason to try to account for teams deliberately short-kicking to avoid Devin Hester (and, eventually, numerous other returners). I have not gone back and standardized this change, or added it to previous years. Using the old formula for special teams, Chicago's special teams rating would only be 7.5%. That would still lead the league in 2007, but it would be far behind from the 2002 Saints.
Another note: I have fiddled with the special teams baselines over the last couple weeks to reflect the leaguewide changes in special teams this year. Punt returns were longer than ever, but that was nothing compared to the colossal jump in kick return yardage. On top of this, kickoffs themselves were longer when kickers weren't deliberately trying to avoid the returner, so everything had to be jiggled to keep it from looking like the 32 worst kickoff coverage teams in NFL history all played in 2007. On top of this, field-goal percentage went up around the NFL for like the zillionth year in a row. I will probably need to do a little more adjusting in the off-season, but the changes I've made over the last couple weeks should help even things out for now.
Despite the problem of teams sitting people and not trying in Week 17, this year's DVOA ratings really do a good job of reflecting the best and worst teams. The top 10 teams in DVOA all made the playoffs, as did a team that is effectively tied for 11th (Washington). The Giants are the one straggler, finishing 16th. Even the Bengals' silly-looking DVOA ratings make sense now. Yes, I personally think the Giants are better than the Bengals, but 15th sounds like a reasonable ranking for a 7-9 team in the superior conference.
* * * * *
Here are the final Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings for the 2007 regular season, 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 [4].) OFFENSE and DEFENSE DVOA are adjusted for opponent and consider all fumbles, kept or lost, as equal value. SPECIAL TEAMS DVOA is adjusted for type of stadium (warm, cold, dome, Denver) and week of season.
WEIGHTED DVOA [5] represents an attempt to figure out how a team is playing right now, as opposed to over the season as a whole, by making recent games more important than earlier games. LAST YEAR represents 2006 rank, while LAST WEEK represents rank in Week 16 of 2007.
To save people some time, we request that you 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>
| TEAM | TOTAL DVOA |
LAST YEAR |
LAST WEEK |
WEI. DVOA |
RANK | W-L |
OFFENSE DVOA |
OFF. RANK |
DEFENSE DVOA |
DEF. RANK |
S.T. DVOA |
S.T. RANK |
|
| 1 | NE | 51.8% | 5 | 1 | 40.6% | 1 | 16-0 | 42.8% | 1 | -6.1% | 8 | 2.9% | 7 |
| 2 | IND | 33.0% | 7 | 2 | 22.2% | 4 | 13-3 | 28.3% | 2 | -10.8% | 3 | -6.1% | 32 |
| 3 | DAL | 23.9% | 10 | 5 | 17.0% | 6 | 13-3 | 19.0% | 4 | -5.8% | 10 | -0.9% | 18 |
| 4 | JAC | 23.7% | 6 | 4 | 31.1% | 2 | 11-5 | 20.8% | 3 | -3.3% | 12 | -0.4% | 15 |
| 5 | GB | 21.0% | 15 | 8 | 19.4% | 5 | 13-3 | 17.3% | 5 | -1.3% | 15 | 2.4% | 8 |
| 6 | SD | 18.9% | 2 | 5 | 27.1% | 3 | 11-5 | 4.8% | 15 | -9.8% | 5 | 4.2% | 4 |
| 7 | TB | 17.8% | 31 | 6 | 13.5% | 9 | 9-7 | 7.7% | 10 | -10.2% | 4 | -0.1% | 12 |
| 8 | PIT | 17.5% | 12 | 7 | 5.6% | 14 | 10-6 | 6.8% | 12 | -12.3% | 2 | -1.7% | 21 |
| 9 | SEA | 11.7% | 25 | 9 | 13.8% | 8 | 10-6 | 5.6% | 14 | -5.4% | 11 | 0.7% | 11 |
| 10 | TEN | 8.8% | 24 | 13 | 2.2% | 16 | 10-6 | -4.0% | 21 | -13.5% | 1 | -0.6% | 17 |
| 11 | PHI | 7.7% | 3 | 10 | 7.6% | 11 | 8-8 | 10.2% | 8 | -3.2% | 13 | -5.7% | 31 |
| 12 | WAS | 7.7% | 23 | 14 | 10.1% | 10 | 9-7 | 1.0% | 17 | -7.2% | 6 | -0.5% | 16 |
| 13 | CLE | 5.8% | 30 | 12 | 14.7% | 7 | 10-6 | 6.9% | 11 | 7.6% | 22 | 6.6% | 2 |
| 14 | MIN | 4.9% | 22 | 11 | 6.2% | 13 | 8-8 | 3.4% | 16 | 0.2% | 18 | 1.7% | 9 |
| 15 | CIN | -0.1% | 11 | 15 | 0.8% | 19 | 7-9 | 11.0% | 6 | 10.1% | 24 | -0.9% | 19 |
| 16 | NYG | -0.6% | 8 | 16 | -1.7% | 21 | 10-6 | -2.5% | 19 | -2.9% | 14 | -1.0% | 20 |
| TEAM | TOTAL DVOA |
LAST YEAR |
LAST WEEK |
WEI. DVOA |
RANK | W-L |
OFFENSE DVOA |
OFF. RANK |
DEFENSE DVOA |
DEF. RANK |
S.T. DVOA |
S.T. RANK |
|
| 17 | HOU | -2.1% | 28 | 21 | 1.0% | 18 | 8-8 | 5.7% | 13 | 13.3% | 30 | 5.5% | 3 |
| 18 | DEN | -3.2% | 18 | 19 | 2.1% | 17 | 7-9 | 7.8% | 9 | 6.3% | 21 | -4.8% | 28 |
| 19 | BUF | -3.8% | 16 | 18 | 0.5% | 20 | 7-9 | -7.6% | 22 | 0.1% | 17 | 3.9% | 6 |
| 20 | CHI | -4.4% | 4 | 20 | 7.3% | 12 | 7-9 | -20.4% | 31 | -6.9% | 7 | 9.1% | 1 |
| 21 | NO | -5.1% | 9 | 17 | 4.0% | 15 | 7-9 | 10.3% | 7 | 11.4% | 27 | -3.9% | 26 |
| 22 | BAL | -7.0% | 1 | 22 | -13.8% | 24 | 5-11 | -12.8% | 26 | -6.1% | 9 | -0.3% | 13 |
| 23 | ARI | -10.1% | 26 | 23 | -12.3% | 22 | 8-8 | -0.8% | 18 | 5.4% | 20 | -3.9% | 25 |
| 24 | DET | -19.9% | 29 | 24 | -25.3% | 28 | 7-9 | -2.7% | 20 | 13.9% | 31 | -3.3% | 23 |
| 25 | NYJ | -20.8% | 19 | 26 | -12.5% | 23 | 4-12 | -10.8% | 25 | 10.9% | 25 | 0.9% | 10 |
| 26 | KC | -21.2% | 13 | 25 | -25.0% | 27 | 4-12 | -18.0% | 29 | -0.5% | 16 | -3.7% | 24 |
| 27 | CAR | -21.3% | 14 | 27 | -19.5% | 25 | 7-9 | -15.2% | 27 | 0.7% | 19 | -5.4% | 30 |
| 28 | ATL | -23.1% | 21 | 28 | -24.2% | 26 | 4-12 | -10.7% | 24 | 12.1% | 29 | -0.4% | 14 |
| 29 | MIA | -28.1% | 17 | 29 | -31.4% | 31 | 1-15 | -8.8% | 23 | 16.7% | 32 | -2.7% | 22 |
| 30 | OAK | -28.7% | 32 | 30 | -27.1% | 29 | 4-12 | -15.4% | 28 | 8.3% | 23 | -5.0% | 29 |
| 31 | STL | -33.9% | 20 | 31 | -30.9% | 30 | 3-13 | -18.7% | 30 | 11.0% | 26 | -4.3% | 27 |
| 32 | SF | -38.0% | 27 | 32 | -32.2% | 32 | 5-11 | -30.5% | 32 | 11.5% | 28 | 4.1% | 5 |
| TEAM |
TOTAL DVOA |
W-L | NON-ADJ TOT VOA |
ESTIM. WINS |
RANK |
2007 SCHED |
RANK |
PYTH WINS |
RANK | VAR. | RANK | |
| 1 | NE | 51.8% | 16-0 | 52.7% | 14.2 | 1 | 0.1% | 19 | 13.8 | 1 | 14.8% | 19 |
| 2 | IND | 33.0% | 13-3 | 31.4% | 12.4 | 2 | 2.5% | 8 | 12.5 | 2 | 16.4% | 14 |
| 3 | DAL | 23.9% | 13-3 | 27.2% | 10.8 | 5 | -1.5% | 21 | 11.0 | 6 | 24.2% | 3 |
| 4 | JAC | 23.7% | 11-5 | 22.0% | 11.3 | 3 | 1.7% | 10 | 10.7 | 7 | 15.6% | 16 |
| 5 | GB | 21.0% | 13-3 | 27.2% | 11.1 | 4 | -5.6% | 29 | 11.5 | 3 | 21.7% | 6 |
| 6 | SD | 18.9% | 11-5 | 16.7% | 9.6 | 7 | 0.2% | 18 | 11.3 | 5 | 25.0% | 2 |
| 7 | TB | 17.8% | 9-7 | 22.3% | 10.1 | 6 | -7.4% | 30 | 10.0 | 9 | 22.1% | 5 |
| 8 | PIT | 17.5% | 10-6 | 19.4% | 9.3 | 9 | -3.3% | 24 | 11.4 | 4 | 22.7% | 4 |
| 9 | SEA | 11.7% | 10-6 | 20.2% | 9.1 | 11 | -11.0% | 32 | 10.7 | 8 | 12.1% | 25 |
| 10 | TEN | 8.8% | 10-6 | 3.2% | 9.2 | 10 | 1.4% | 13 | 8.1 | 15 | 18.3% | 10 |
| 11 | PHI | 7.7% | 8-8 | 0.8% | 9.5 | 8 | 4.3% | 5 | 9.1 | 11 | 14.5% | 20 |
| 12 | WAS | 7.7% | 9-7 | 0.2% | 8.3 | 15 | 4.4% | 4 | 8.7 | 12 | 15.0% | 18 |
| 13 | CLE | 5.8% | 10-6 | 9.1% | 8.9 | 12 | -5.1% | 28 | 8.5 | 14 | 6.2% | 32 |
| 14 | MIN | 4.9% | 8-8 | 7.1% | 8.8 | 13 | -3.9% | 26 | 9.5 | 10 | 19.5% | 9 |
| 15 | CIN | -0.1% | 7-9 | 6.8% | 8.5 | 14 | -3.2% | 23 | 7.9 | 17 | 8.4% | 31 |
| 16 | NYG | -0.6% | 10-6 | -4.4% | 7.9 | 17 | 1.1% | 14 | 8.6 | 13 | 8.4% | 30 |
| TEAM |
TOTAL DVOA |
W-L | NON-ADJ TOT VOA |
ESTIM. WINS |
RANK |
2007 SCHED |
RANK |
PYTH WINS |
RANK | VAR. | RANK | |
| 17 | HOU | -2.1% | 8-8 | -7.7% | 7.7 | 18 | 2.7% | 7 | 7.9 | 18 | 13.8% | 22 |
| 18 | DEN | -3.2% | 7-9 | 0.4% | 7.3 | 21 | 1.1% | 17 | 5.7 | 21 | 34.2% | 1 |
| 19 | BUF | -3.8% | 7-9 | -9.4% | 8.3 | 16 | 5.1% | 2 | 4.9 | 26 | 11.8% | 26 |
| 20 | CHI | -4.4% | 7-9 | -6.5% | 7.4 | 20 | 1.5% | 12 | 7.6 | 20 | 14.4% | 21 |
| 21 | NO | -5.1% | 7-9 | -4.9% | 7.5 | 19 | -3.5% | 25 | 7.8 | 19 | 13.7% | 23 |
| 22 | BAL | -7.0% | 5-11 | -14.4% | 6.9 | 22 | 1.7% | 11 | 5.0 | 25 | 15.4% | 17 |
| 23 | ARI | -10.1% | 8-8 | -0.7% | 6.2 | 24 | -9.3% | 31 | 8.1 | 16 | 20.0% | 8 |
| 24 | DET | -19.9% | 7-9 | -17.4% | 6.3 | 23 | 3.5% | 6 | 5.7 | 22 | 18.1% | 12 |
| 25 | NYJ | -20.8% | 4-12 | -23.3% | 5.0 | 28 | 5.1% | 1 | 5.4 | 24 | 11.6% | 28 |
| 26 | KC | -21.2% | 4-12 | -23.5% | 5.1 | 27 | 1.1% | 15 | 4.5 | 28 | 21.5% | 7 |
| 27 | CAR | -21.3% | 7-9 | -22.3% | 5.8 | 25 | 1.1% | 16 | 5.6 | 23 | 16.6% | 13 |
| 28 | ATL | -23.1% | 4-12 | -21.5% | 5.5 | 26 | -1.2% | 20 | 4.0 | 29 | 15.9% | 15 |
| 29 | MIA | -28.1% | 1-15 | -35.3% | 4.1 | 29 | 4.9% | 3 | 3.8 | 30 | 12.4% | 24 |
| 30 | OAK | -28.7% | 4-12 | -28.3% | 4.0 | 30 | 2.0% | 9 | 4.9 | 27 | 18.3% | 11 |
| 31 | STL | -33.9% | 3-13 | -31.3% | 3.6 | 32 | -2.7% | 22 | 3.7 | 32 | 9.6% | 29 |
| 32 | SF | -38.0% | 5-11 | -33.2% | 3.9 | 31 | -4.7% | 27 | 3.7 | 31 | 11.7% | 27 |
For those readers who are sticklers for detail, I should mention that the DVOA ratings on the "best DVOA ever" table may differ slightly from ratings on the stats pages, because they may include small play-by-play fixes that aren't reflected on pages last revised a year or two ago. We'll make sure to update everything to the most current numbers over this off-season.
On to the housekeeping... All the team stats pages and individual stats pages are now updated with final 2007 numbers. Because of New Year's, we're not yet sure when we'll have playoff odds [10] and the DVOA Premium database [11] updated.
There will be no new Football Outsiders content on New Year's Day, and no Any Given Sunday this week. We'll be back Wednesday with the Every Play Counts All-Pro Team, the second-half Loser League review, and the usual DVOA on AOL piece with comments on all 32 teams.
For those interested, I'll be chatting about the playoffs over at BaseballProspectus.com [12] this Friday from noon until 1:30pm Eastern. Feel free to also ask questions about what the other 20 teams should be doing over the off-season to improve.
Links:
[1] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/qb.php
[2] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/wr.php
[3] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/2007/12/31/fo-goes-mainstream/5957/
[4] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods#dvoa
[5] http://www.footballoutsiders.com//info/glossary#weighted_voa
[6] http://www.footballoutsiders.com//info/glossary#estimated_wins
[7] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/glossary#pythagorean
[8] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2003/pythagoras-gridiron
[9] http://www.footballoutsiders.com//info/glossary#variance
[10] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/playoffodds.php
[11] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/store/premium
[12] http://www.baseballprospectus.com/chat/chat.php?chatId=401