Week 14 DVOA Ratings

by Aaron Schatz

Can you name the best teams in the NFL this year? It doesn't seem that hard, considering that Indianapolis and New Orleans have each started 13-0. The Football Outsiders DVOA ratings don't disagree here -- after all the advanced play-by-play breakdown, New Orleans ends up currently number one in overall season-long DVOA, while Indianapolis currently holds the top spot in weighted DVOA that discounts the results of early-season games. While DVOA agrees on the identity of the best teams, however, it certainly doesn't agree with the official standings when it comes to the distance between those teams and the rest of the league.

Look at win-loss records, and it is pretty clear that the 2009 season has two dominant teams destined for a historic Super Bowl clash, although two other very strong teams (Minnesota and San Diego) have a chance to upset the apple cart. Most of the other teams are scuffling around, trying to avoid problems like pouty wide receivers, seven turnovers a game, or the little voice inside the head coach's brain that says "You can win with a 100-0 pass-run ratio! Try it!"

Look at DVOA ratings, however, and the Colts and Saints aren't even close to running away with this thing. The 2009 season looks like a mish-mash of very good teams, primarily separated by their consistency (or lack thereof), scrambled up in our ratings and headed for a postseason with no clear favorite.

There's no way around it. The contrast between the standings and the DVOA ratings has gotten really wacko. Last week's DVOA analysis [1] looked at how Indianapolis and New Orleans are not as dominant as past teams that went deep into the season undefeated, but the other side of the story is that we have a lot of other pretty good teams that our ratings say are roughly equivalent even though they're sitting around with records that range from 7-6 to 11-2. (Of course, we were one Steven Hauschka [2] field goal away from those specific teams actually being 8-5 and 10-3.)

• Six teams currently have DVOA over 25%. In 2004, five teams had DVOA over 25% at this point; in no other season were there more than four teams over 25% after Week 14.
• Eight teams currently have Weighted DVOA over 20%. There are only two other seasons where at least six teams had Weighted DVOA over 20% at this point: 2004 (seven) and 2002 (six). Furthermore, if we drew the line at 19% instead of 20%, we would have ten teams instead of eight, and that list of ten teams doesn't even include San Diego (we'll get to them in a bit).
• Despite all those teams over 20%, not a single team has Weighted DVOA over 30%. The only other year where no team had Weighted DVOA over 30% after Week 14 was 2003 (the year Kansas City dominated the first half of the season, then collapsed).

You can see how strange this is compared to the past 15 seasons. When it comes to having lots of strong teams, the most similar season was clearly 2004 [4] -- but in 2004, you didn't have a big close pack of good teams. Pittsburgh and New England finished that season with two of the five highest DVOA totals of all-time, and the Colts were up in the same range until they rested their starters over the final couple weeks.

Just in case things didn't look strange enough, there's a pretty obvious team missing from our pack of good DVOA teams: the 10-3 San Diego Chargers. The Chargers beat Dallas this week for their eighth straight win and actually dropped a spot in the DVOA rankings, down to 14th. Much of the NFL commentariat considers San Diego to be "the team nobody wants to play" -- for starters, we've seen in recent years that they are a terrible matchup for Indianapolis -- so San Diego's low DVOA may be even more surprising than Cincinnati's low DVOA. And, like Cincinnati's low rating, it's hard to find reasons in the usual places. San Diego's fumble recovery rate is 50 percent. The schedule has been easier than average, but not extreme. They get a little value from "hidden special teams," but not that much. It's hard to figure out why so many of their wins have ratings so close to zero. Part of the problem is that the entire team is being dragged along by Philip Rivers [5] and his running buddies, Antonio Gates [6] and Vincent Jackson [7]. We see how great those guys are, and maybe we forget just how ordinary the rest of the team has been this year. The Chargers are below-average on defense and special teams, and their running game is horrid.. LaDainian Tomlinson [8]'s bust in Canton is already sculpted and sitting in a closet waiting for use, but at this point the guy is so toast that actual toast is considering a lawsuit for libel. As Vince Verhei noted in today's Any Given Sunday [9] on ESPN.com, the Chargers are on pace to break the record for biggest difference between pass offense DVOA and run offense DVOA, currently held by the 2003 Tennessee Titans [10].

We also know that San Diego's rating is being dragged down by their 2-3 start. This table shows San Diego's DVOA ratings for the first five games, and then for their eight-game winning streak:

Although Weighted DVOA drops the strength of games more than eight weeks old, most of those games still have some value in the formula, which is why San Diego is still just 11th in Weighted DVOA. Assuming the Chargers continue to play winning football, their Weighted DVOA rating will rise over the next couple weeks until it is a lot closer to 23.1% you see above. Still, even if we only consider the Chargers of the past eight games, we don't get a great team that should scare everyone come playoff time. We get another pretty good team in the year where there are lots of pretty good teams, about as good as Minnesota, Baltimore, or that Dallas team they just beat by a field goal.

Obviously, DVOA is not the end all and be all of how to judge teams. There's something to be said for home-field advantage, as well as the value of consistency. In many cases, the teams that are lower in DVOA than you might expect are also very consistent. San Diego is second in VARIANCE, and Indianapolis is fourth. New England, Philadelphia, and Arizona are all in the bottom ten. On the other hand, Cincinnati -- a team which is much lower in DVOA than its win-loss record would suggest -- is 26th in VARIANCE. New Orleans is actually middle-of-the-pack after a fairly inconsistent November. And get ready for a shock -- the most consistent team in the league this year by game-to-game DVOA is actually Dallas!

Compounding this weirdness is our recent history of playoff upsets, starting with Pittsburgh's wild card run to the title in 2005. Let me show you a table that will be running in an upcoming ESPN.com Insider column. This table shows you how often the team with the better regular-season record wins in the playoffs, splitting things up by four-year increments. (Games where teams had the same record are not listed.) Yes, the sample size is small, and this doesn't account for home-field advantage in the wild card round sometimes going to a team with fewer wins, but it's hard to not be stunned by the contrast between the '90s and the last few years:

Between the recent history of playoff upsets and the closely packed DVOA ratings, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that this year's postseason will be another surprising one. Right now, our playoff odds report [11] still has the odds of an undefeated New Orleans vs. undefeated Indianapolis Super Bowl at less than two percent.

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And now, an important housekeeping note... We're finally set with something we've been planning on since we introduced our new player pages a few months ago: Sponsorships! You can now show your support for both Football Outsiders and your favorite players -- as well as advertise your football-related product -- by purchasing a one-year sponsorship on any FO player page. Most players are five dollars each [12], even many good players [13]. Better-known players [14] cost more [15], with the top players going for $200 per year [16]. If you want a specific player page, just search for the player with our search box on the top right of the site; player pages will always come up first on the list. We're hoping to have a lot of fun little lists and articles to draw attention to the player pages in the offseason, and we'll be adding more material to them as well. 2009 data will go up when the season ends, and we're close to having 1993 data for skill players and 1997 individual defense. We're also exploring the addition of some of Bill Connelly's advanced college player metrics, so you can get Chris Johnson [15]'s POE at East Carolina to go with his DVOA ratings in the NFL.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through 14 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 [17].)

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 [18] 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 [19] 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).