Patriots Dominate in Weighted DVOA

NFL Week 13 – The Tampa Bay Buccaneers drop in our overall DVOA ratings this week but they hold on to the top spot over New England and Buffalo. The big story, however, may be in our weighted DVOA ratings that have a slightly higher correlation with future performance.

As you may know, weighted DVOA lowers the weight of early-season games to get a better idea of how well teams are playing now. It doesn’t lower the weight of those games as much as you might expect. A lot of fans have a very short-term view on which teams are good and bad, and only think about the last month or so. Weighted DVOA is still considering every game this season and won’t stop considering Week 1 for another couple of weeks. Right now, Week 1 games still count at 40% strength in weighted DVOA. Every other game counts at least 50% strength or more.

Right now, the New England Patriots are the leaders in weighted DVOA by nearly 10 percentage points over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The gap between the Patriots and the Buccaneers is larger than the gap between the Buccaneers and the No. 8 Los Angeles Rams. This advantage in weighted DVOA is then translated to our playoff odds simulation, which uses weighted DVOA (in conjunction, for one more week, with a tiny bit of the preseason projections). As a result, we have the Patriots right now as a favorite way out of step with the market. Over half our simulations now end up with the Patriots in the Super Bowl, and one-third of our simulations end up with the Patriots winning the whole thing.

It certainly does seem to be too high. Perhaps there needs to be a variable that considers the quarterback’s resume for each team, giving a boost to the teams with the best veteran quarterbacks who have the most consistent records of high performance. Perhaps there needs to be a “rookie quarterback” variable that docks the Patriots for the fact that no rookie quarterback has ever started a Super Bowl. (Kurt Warner wasn’t a rookie in 1999, since he had been bouncing around football for five years beforehand.) However, any metric based on 2021 performance alone is going to have the Patriots very high, and any metric that gives a stronger weight to how the Patriots are playing over the last couple months should have them on top of the league.

It’s hard to overstate how good the Patriots have been over the last two months. (It’s not impossible — Patriots fans are very good at overstating things.) Let’s go all the way back to Week 4, the week of the big reunion game against Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. Opponent adjustments give the Patriots a positive DVOA in that game, even though they lost to the Bucs in the end. Since that game, the Patriots are 8-2. That’s a good-sized sample, 10 games going back to the start of October including two losses. The New England Patriots have put up a positive DVOA in nine of those 10 games; the exception was Week 5’s narrow victory over Houston. They also put up DVOA over 70% in three straight games from Week 10 to Week 12. Only the Bills and Rams have more games over 50% over the course of the entire season than the Patriots have in just the last month.

The Patriots’ recent dominance stands out if we look at DVOA ratings from Week 4 onwards. Packers fans want to pretend Week 1 never happened? Instead, let’s pretend that the entire month of September never happened. Of course, it did happen and it can still teach us something, which is why we still include it in the weighted DVOA formula. But let’s see what the top of the DVOA ratings would look like if we only looked at the last 10 weeks:

Wow. That is a lead. Unfortunately, it’s not easy for me to go back and look at every 10-game stretch dating all the way back to 1983. But I can look at the first 10 games of each season. Since 1983, only 16 teams have put up DVOA over 40% over their first 10 games of the season. That’s what the Patriots have done over their most recent 10 games. You probably already knew how good the Patriots have been on defense and special teams over the past two months. But notice that the Patriots come out third on offense behind the Buccaneers and Chargers. That includes ranking sixth rushing the ball since Week 4 and — I swear I am not making this up out of some sense of homer obligation — first passing the ball since Week 4. With a rookie quarterback! The Patriots have 37.9% passing DVOA since Week 4. Tampa Bay is at 37.6% passing DVOA since Week 4. This will stun you, but the two leaders in net yards per pass since Week 4 are the San Francisco 49ers at 7.7 yards and the Patriots at 7.6 yards. Dallas is third at 7.2 yards.

(Aside: obviously, those passing numbers include only three plays from last night’s game. For those who are curious: there are not at this time specific weather adjustments in DVOA for high-wind or high-precipitation games. Offensive and defensive DVOA simply have an indoors/outdoors adjustment. Special teams has general weather adjustments but they’re based on the week of the season and the usual temperatures in that city, not the specifics of each game.)

I hope this table helps explain why the Patriots are so far ahead of everyone else in our Super Bowl simulations. They really have been that good over the last 10 games.

Below the Patriots, the top 10 mostly stays the same as last week. The Dallas Cowboys jump Arizona into the No. 4 slot and the Green Bay Packers jump Minnesota into the No. 10 spot. (I’ll write more on the Vikings before Thursday’s game.) The big mover is the Los Angeles Chargers, who went from 16th to 12th after beating up on the Cincinnati Bengals. The Chargers were also the team with the biggest improvement in playoff odds this week, going from 52.4% to 80.6% odds of making the postseason.

Houston and the History of Grotesque Ground Games

Thank you to reader Todd Singer for pointing this out during yesterday’s Football Outsiders livestream: the Houston Texans have a historically bad running game this year. In fact, the Texans have the worst run offense DVOA we’ve ever measured through Week 13. It’s not like they haven’t done this before. Last year’s Texans had the fifth-lowest run offense DVOA ever tracked through Week 13. And the Texans are not alone. Despite some of Cordarrelle Patterson’s heroics — which have mostly been as a receiver, not as a runner — the Atlanta Falcons also rank among the worst run offenses we’ve ever tracked through Week 13.

The Texans are averaging just 2.95 yards per carry when we remove scrambles and only look at planned runs. The Falcons are in a weirder place. They are partly so low in run DVOA because we now count aborted snaps as running plays and the Falcons have five of those. However, the Falcons are also 27th in the league with 3.82 yards per carry and they are 30th with a 35% success rate on running plays.

(By the way, going back in time, how about those 1986 New England Patriots? The Patriots averaged just 2.9 yards per carry as a playoff team, with all three of their main running backs under 3.0 yards per carry.)

However, as I’ve written about in the past, things are a little more complicated than this. See, the average offensive DVOA is 0.0%. But the average run offense DVOA is not 0.0%. Team DVOA, including run/pass splits, have a baseline of all offensive plays (plus the penalties that are included in DVOA). Since passing is more efficient than rushing, passing will always have a positive average DVOA and rushing will generally have a negative average DVOA. The passing premium has generally increased over time. Here’s a look at the average pass offense DVOA each year as of Week 13; 1987 is missing since that year had only 12 weeks.

Average run offense DVOA bounced around but tended to average about -3.0% or so from 1983 to about 2007, but in the 2000s it fell dramatically before rebounding a little bit over the last five seasons. This year, the average run defense has a DVOA of -8.4%.

You might have figured out where I’m going with this. Our list of terrible running games above compared each team to the league average for all plays, which every year is 0%. But a more proper way to compare running games is to compare rushing DVOA to the average DVOA for run plays only in that season. So I did that. And guess what? The worst running game still belongs to the 2021 Houston Texans! The Atlanta Falcons have fallen from the top of our list, but the Texans still have the worst running game ever tracked through Week 13 since 1983.

Can the Texans break the all-time record for running game futility? Tune in over the next few weeks and find out.

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Football Outsiders playoff odds, snap counts, and the FO+ database are now all updated through Week 13. A reminder that all our free stats pages, including DVOA and player position stats, require registration to view. This is not a paywall! You only need to register (for free) and then log in to the site to view these pages. While you’re at it, you can get a seven-day trial of FO+ and check out the FO+ features like a deeper DVOA database, weekly fantasy projections, fantasy football research tools, and picks against the spread.

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Here is the Football Outsiders Top 16 through 13 weeks of 2021, 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.)

OFFENSE and DEFENSE DVOA are adjusted for opponent and performance indoors 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. As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.

WEIGHTED DVOA gives recent games more strength than older games to get a better idea of how well teams are playing now.

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>

Click here for the full table.