SITE NEWS: 2021 Stats Housekeeping

NFL Offseason – We’ve updated all 2021 DVOA and DYAR numbers on the site with any postseason stat changes made by the league in the official play-by-play, such as a handful of plays going from scrambles to regular runs or vice versa. We’ve also fixed an error that existed in the 2021 special teams numbers during the season; the fix moves all the 2021 special teams ratings a little closer to zero. “DVOA as of Week X” numbers are retroactively updated with this fix for all of 2021.

The changes to DVOA here are pretty small but a couple of teams did change in the overall DVOA rankings. Green Bay moved ahead of Seattle as No. 8, while Pittsburgh moved ahead of Chicago as No. 23.

One change we did not make relates to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. DVOA has adjustments for playing indoors in all three phases of the game. Right now, we have SoFi Stadium coded as a “warm weather” stadium rather than a dome. It’s a weird hybrid: SoFi has a roof but is open on the sides so it does get some weather effects. I did analysis of the last two years of stats (you can read about that here), polled readers, and even spoke to people in the Rams front office and there wasn’t enough evidence to push things either way. So we’ll leave SoFi as an outdoor stadium in DVOA, for now, and gather another year of data (two seasons, since there are two teams) before making a final decision. Switching SoFi to a dome would require retroactively updating 2020-2021 numbers as well as 2022 numbers. The change would make the Rams and Chargers look better on defense but worse on offense and special teams.