by Aaron Schatz

You love them when your team is high! You hate them when your team is low! Once again, the famous Football Outsiders DVOA and DAVE ratings return for 2012. Denver starts the year on top after a big win over Pittsburgh. So does that mean Pittsburgh is stuck as the worst team in the league all season? Not according to DAVE.

Some of you may be familiar with DVOA, but you have never met our good friend DAVE. Well, DAVE is our rating that combines the preseason projection with the results of early games to give us a better prediction of how each team will rank at the end of the year. For those who don't know the story, this metric is called DAVE as a reaction to criticism that our stats are too much alphabet soup. I mean, who can argue with a guy named Dave? (Technically, it stands for DVOA Adjusted for Variation Early.) In this week's DAVE ratings, the preseason projection counts for 90 percent, and the current VOA counts for 10 percent.

Football Outsiders always preaches caution after Week 1, and this year is no exception. There's a reason that we call this National Jump to Conclusions Week. I know there's some research that Chase Stuart did this week showing that Week 1 does have some importance for forecasting the rest of the season. And our own Vince Verhei writes today over on ESPN Insider about the very strong effect that a Week 1 loss had on the New York Giants' playoff chances. Nonetheless, the main reason why a team's playoff odds will change between Week 1 and Week 2 isn't that we know more about that team's true quality; it's that the team now has an actual win or loss instead of a projected partial win or loss.

In fact, it's not just a good idea to preach caution after Week 1. It's also a good idea to preach caution after Week 2. Once upon a time, the NFL had six preseason games and only 14 regular-season games, and in some ways the first two weeks of the year still show a bit of that "preseason" feel, with teams figuring out what works and doesn't work with their current personnel. I did some research last year which grouped every two-week period during the season, and figured out the correlation of DVOA in those two weeks to the team's total win-loss record for the entire season. The lowest correlation, as you might expect, was Weeks 16-17, when some teams are sitting starters. The second-lowest correlation was Weeks 1-2. (Of course, this research would be more valuable if I could find the damn thing on my computer, but I don't remember what I named the stupid file.)

The first week of 2012 actually featured a game where both teams came out below 0% and we were very close to a game where both teams came out above 0%. You often see games like this once the opponent adjustments have kicked in; when two good teams play a close game, they're both going to come out as above average. But you don't often see it with non-adjusted VOA. Any Given Sunday discusses the game where both teams were below average, Washington's win over New Orleans. The other game was San Francisco's win over Green Bay. The Packers end up with -0.3% VOA. It was a very close game, and you can't go blaming the Packers when David Akers boinks a 63-yarder off the uprights.

(Late note: Actually, there were two other games with both teams below 0%: ARI-SEA and SD-OAK. I was so busy thinking about the two games noted above that I didn't even notice the other ones until readers pointed it out. Whoops. -- Aaron)

These two games lead to a couple of DAVE ratings that might be controversial. Washington's DAVE rating is actually lower than its preseason projection, and San Francisco's DAVE rating is still just 18th in the league. Part of the issue here is that we're not including opponent adjustments yet. We think Green Bay and New Orleans are still two of the strongest teams in the league, which makes beating them look pretty impressive. If a couple more games show that we were right about the Packers and Saints despite their first-week stumbles, then the ratings that San Francisco and Washington get for beating them will increase. For now, however, the DVOA system sees San Francisco with a good-but-not-great win, and Washington with a game that they might have lost if they had recovered two of the game's fumbles instead of all four of them. You are allowed to look at those numbers and think "subjectively, San Francisco and Washington are probably a little better than this."

As long as we're talking DAVE asterisks, the Oakland Raiders will not be using a backup long snapper all season, so their rating is a little artificially low. Some readers were asking me on Twitter if this was the worst special teams game we've ever measured. No, it was not. It was not even close. Our metrics estimate special teams costing the Raiders -12.2 points in this game. This is nothing compared to the ridiculous game that Cincinnati had against Carolina in Week 14 of 2002, which was worth -18.6 points. Steve Smith returned two punts for touchdowns, and on another punt Travis Dorsch shanked it for just 10 yards. He also had an absurdly short 40-yard free kick after a safety.

All stats pages are now updated with 2012 data except for OFFENSIVE LINE and DEFENSIVE LINE, which will be updated after Week 2. The FO Premium splits database will also be updated for 2012 after Week 2, next Tuesday. Football Outsiders QB stats pages now also feature ESPN's Total QBR rating, so that you can compare that to DVOA and DYAR and enjoy even more arguments than before about who really is playing better than whom.

Make sure to also check out our brand new SNAP COUNTS page! The NFL is finally making snap counts publicly available, and we're counting them up for you and posting them free. Right now it's just one big table but we're looking at ways to produce fun tables that filter and sort and do all kinds of interesting things to make that data easier to read. Note that the positions listed on that page are the positions as listed by the NFL in the official gamebooks.

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Wait, did I forget something? I said something about doing a mailbag in the first week's DVOA article, didn't I? Um... I ran out of time. Again. It takes a lot of time to set everything up for the first week of the year, and it was either put up the DVOA ratings in the afternoon or do a mailbag and not get them up until late night. I really will still try to do a mailbag soon rounding up some answers to questions posed in our e-mail and in the discussion threads of things like the introduction of the new normalized DVOA and the 1991 commentary.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through one week of 2012, 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 VOA are adjusted to consider all fumbles, kept or lost, as equal value. SPECIAL TEAMS VOA is adjusted for type of stadium (warm, cold, dome, Denver) and week of season.

There are no opponent adjustments in VOA until the fourth week of the season, which is why it is listed as VOA right now rather than DVOA. As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.

DAVE is a formula which combines our preseason projection with current VOA to get a more accurate forecast of how a team will play the rest of the season. Right now, the preseason projection makes up 90 percent of DAVE.

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>