Week 13 DVOA Ratings

by Aaron Schatz

Lots of small movements in this week's Football Outsiders DVOA ratings, but the big winner of the week is Green Bay. The Packers move up to third overall, behind only New Orleans and Philadelphia, and they actually lead the league in weighted DVOA, our formula that gives more weight to recent games.

"Hold on," you may ask, "the Packers? The only team in the league to lose to Tampa Bay, just five weeks ago?" Yes, those Packers. You can't accuse them of consistency, and you can't accuse them of understanding the pass interference rules, but you can accuse them of overall greatness. With the exception of that Bucs game the Packers have been excellent for the past two months. They are one of only two teams to put up a single-game DVOA above 40% in six different games (New Orleans is the other). They rank first in defense and sixth in offense. Only two things are keeping the Packers out of the overall lead position. First, opponent adjustments, as Green Bay has played the easiest schedule in the league by average DVOA of opponent. Second, the Packers can't get their act together on special teams. Green Bay ranks dead last in special teams overall and 22nd or lower in all five aspects of special teams [1] in the FO ratings.

If the Packers moved up to third, and they're behind the Eagles in second, that means that the 12-0 perfect Indianapolis Colts have actually dropped into fourth place, behind two different teams with four losses each. This may have readers wondering what the hell the computer is smoking. The same goes for our playoff odds report [2], which gives just an 17.0 percent chance of the Saints and Colts meeting in the Super Bowl, and just a 0.8 percent chance of what we call the "Mercury Morris is a Royal Douchebag Bowl," in which the Saints and Colts do everyone a favor by going 18-0, guaranteeing that one of them will finish perfect and finally shut up some of those obnoxious 1972 Dolphins for good.

(Calm down, Miami fans. I know most of the 1972 Dolphins are not obnoxious, just a few very loud ones.)

I've written about this before, but I want to go into it a bit further: As impressive as their last-minute wins and 12-0 starts may be, the 2009 Saints and 2009 Colts simply are not dominating the league like undefeated teams of the past. One of the problems with analyzing the Saints and Colts on the run to perfection is that the concept of 16-0 is so completely linked to the controversial 2007 Patriots. It's a lot easier to have a rational discussion if we compare the Saints and Colts to the all the other teams that started 12-0 since the merger. We'll toss in two teams that started 11-0 but lost their 12th game (each by less than a touchdown):

(By the way, while I was putting that table together, Tramon Williams [3] (a.k.a. "Admiral Armbar" was flagged for defensive pass interference nine more times.)

You can see the domination difference when you look at the size of each team's wins. The 2009 Colts have fewer big wins and more close wins than any other team on this list. The 2009 Saints are also near the bottom, roughly equivalent to the 1991 Redskins. (Of course, they would be even more similar to the 1991 Redskins if the 2009 Redskins had done their job.) When you put together the close wins with the lack of dominant blowouts, you get the biggest difference between this year's 12-0 twins and the greatest teams in NFL history: Pythagorean projection.

For our newer readers, Pythagorean projection is a simple estimate of how many wins we would expect from a team if we only considered points scored and allowed. New Orleans and Indianapolis have the best Pythagorean projections in the league this year, but those projections don't come close to the actual 12-0 records these teams have put together. The Saints come out at .791, which works out to 9.5 wins; the Colts come out at .765, which works out to 9.2 wins. Those numbers pale in comparison to the projections of great teams in the past, and it goes far beyond just the six other teams listed above. Thirty-eight different teams since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger have projected Pythagorean win percentages higher than the 2009 Saints. The Colts rank even worse -- 63 different teams (including New Orleans) have Pythagorean win percentages higher than the 2009 Colts.

(By the way, this is not the case at the other end of the league. The Rams' projection of .127 is the 11th worst since the merger, and fourth-worst since 1978. Cleveland's .143 would also end up one of the 20 worst Pythagorean records since the merger.)

Obviously, any team that ends up with a 16-0 record is going to out-perform its projection. You aren't going to go through the entire season without giving up points. However, a 16-0 team with the Colts' Pythagorean win projection of .765 would out-perform its projection by a mind-blowing 3.8 wins. A 16-0 team with the Saints' projection of .791 would out-perform its projection by 3.2 wins. These would be, respectively, the second and fifth most "lucky" seasons since the 1970 merger (not counting the 8-1 Raiders in strike-shortened 1982). And while they may not be competing with the Saints and Colts for historical supremacy, the Jaguars would show up on the list of biggest Pythagorean outperformers as well.

It is hard to gauge what this means for the Saints and Colts. Most of the teams with Pythagorean "luck" over .150 and 10 or 11 wins got killed in the playoffs, but the best teams with "luck" over .150 did a lot better than that:

• 2004 Steelers (15-1, luck: .220) lost in the AFC Championship to the defending champion Patriots
• 1976 Raiders (13-1, luck: .213) won the Super Bowl
• 1999 Titans (13-3, luck: .201) lost in the Super Bowl to the dominating 1999 Rams
• 1999 Colts (13-3, luck: .174) lost to that same Titans team in the divisional round
• 1991 Lions (12-4, luck: .168) lost in the NFC Championship to the 1991 Redskins, one of the best teams of all-time
• 1985 Raiders (12-4, luck: .168) lost to New England in the divisional round
• 2003 Patriots (14-2, luck: .164) won the Super Bowl
• 1990 49ers (14-2, luck: .159) won the Super Bowl
• 2006 Colts (12-4, luck: .150) won the Super Bowl

I guess the moral of the story is that right now, New Orleans and Indianapolis are run-of-the-mill "best NFL teams that season," rather than all-time great teams. Yes, if one of these teams manages to finish 19-0, I think we have to celebrate it as one of the greatest teams in history, no matter what DVOA says. But DVOA is warning us that this is a lot less likely to happen than people seem to think. Especially considering the topsy-turvy nature of the last few postseasons, be prepared for one or both of these teams to finish 16-0 and lose in the playoffs. Although I don't think anyone is going to market New Orleans "18-1" t-shirts.

A few more notes about teams that are not undefeated:

• I'm guessing a lot of people will be shocked that the Patriots are still ranked number five, and third in weighted DVOA. Yes, they are 7-5, but three of those losses came by a field goal or less, including two losses by just one point. The Patriots are fourth in Pythagorean projection at .712, behind the Saints, Colts, and Vikings. If the Patriots manage to lose one of their final four games (or any playoff games) by just one point, they will become just the third team since 1990 to lose three games by exactly one point. (The others were the 1997 Raiders and the 1990 Chiefs.) Look, the recent "media panic" over the Patriots departure from the "NFL elite" is a bit ridiculous. Has this team played well the last two weeks? No, and the pass defense is struggling badly. But still, this is one of the top teams in the league. One reason why the Patriots look worse than they actually are -- especially Tom Brady -- is the schedule. If you look at the FO schedule ratings, you'll notice only two teams in the DVOA top 15 have faced schedules ranked in the top ten: New England and Baltimore. Last night, ESPN showed a poll where they asked people online which team's playoff chances were in bigger trouble after this week, Dallas or New England. Readers in 48 states picked Dallas; only readers in Massachusetts and (for some reason) Hawaii took the Patriots. This is a good example of how self-flagellating Boston fans can be. The "Patriots are doomed" stuff is just as annoying as the "Patriots can do no wrong" nonsense from five years ago, and my fellow Patriots fans need to get over themselves.
• Although, to be honest, the Dallas loss is a bit overrated as well. I think that game said more good things about the Giants than it did bad things about the Cowboys.
• Arizona moves up to seventh in overall DVOA and fifth in weighted DVOA after whipping the Vikings. It's safe to say now that the preseason projection system was wrong, wrong, wrong about the Cardinals. The question is why. Is this a sign that they really did give up in December 2008, and those games should be thrown out of consideration? Is it a sign that playoff improvement is a much stronger indicator for the following season than it used to be? (See also: 2007-2008 Giants, 2006-2007 Colts run defense.) Some combination of both? Something else entirely? We'll definitely be looking into this while we prepare Football Outsiders Almanac 2010, because I don't want to be making similar mistakes in future preseason projections. This is a darn good team, and a serious contender to get back to the Super Bowl.
• San Diego, allegedly the "hot team nobody wants to play in the postseason," is just 13th despite a 9-3 record. This warrants more analysis, but I've sort of run out of time and space for this week, so we'll analyze it next week, either in Any Given Sunday (if they lose to the Cowboys) or the DVOA Analysis (if they beat the Cowboys).

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through 13 weeks of 2009, 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 DVOA 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) and week of season. WEIGHTED DVOA is adjusted so that earlier games in the season become gradually less important. It better reflects how well the team is playing right now. 

As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.

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>

• ESTIMATED WINS [6] uses a statistic known as "Forest Index" that emphasizes consistency as well as DVOA in the most important specific situations: red zone defense, first quarter offense, and performance in the second half when the score is close. It then projects a number of wins adjusted to a league-average schedule and a league-average rate of recovering fumbles. Teams that have had their bye week are projected as if they had played one game per week.
• PAST SCHEDULE lists average DVOA of opponents played this season, ranked from hardest schedule (#1, most positive) to easiest schedule (#32, most negative). It is not adjusted for which games are home or road.
• FUTURE SCHEDULE lists average DVOA of opponents still left to play this season, ranked from hardest schedule (#1, most positive) to easiest schedule (#32, most negative). It is not adjusted for which games are home or road.
• VARIANCE [7] measures the statistical variance of the team's weekly DVOA performance. Teams are ranked from most consistent (#1, lowest variance) to least consistent (#32, highest variance).