by Aaron Schatz

Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings take the long view of things, and so one loss won't sink a team in our ratings. Even two losses won't sink a team if that team was good enough before things went sour. Such is the case right now with the Denver Broncos. The Broncos are still No. 1 in DVOA despite losing two of their last three games. But while the Broncos are still on top, the distance between them and the rest of the league has changed dramatically. Three weeks ago, Denver was at 47.6% DVOA, 21 percentage points ahead of No. 2 Baltimore. Now the Broncos are at 31.5%, less than 8 percentage points ahead of the new team at No. 2, Green Bay. The Packers also pulled ahead of the Broncos this week to lead the league in offensive DVOA, although the Broncos are still pulling off the rare feat of being ranked in the top two in both offense and defense.

With the Broncos now fallen to Earth, we're back to where we were earlier in the season, with 2014 as the year where no single team is standing out in any particular way good or bad. How packed together is the league this year? Well, the Broncos are now the worst No. 1 team ever through 11 weeks of the season, narrowly behind the 1989 Cleveland Browns who led the league at 31.6% DVOA after 11 weeks. And on the other side of the league, Tampa Bay is now very close to being the best last-place team in DVOA history, although they are narrowly inched out by the 2001 Lions and the 1997 Saints.

Lowest-Rated Teams Ranked No. 1 in DVOA

as of Week 11, 1989-2014 x Highest-Rated Teams Ranked Last in DVOA

as of Week 11, 1989-2014 Year Team W-L DVOA x Year Team W-L DVOA 2014 DEN 7-3 31.5% x 2001 DET 0-10 -27.2% 1989 CLE1 7-3-1 31.6% x 1997 NO 3-7 -29.0% 2006 SD 8-2 32.2% x 2014 TB 2-8 -29.1% 2011 HOU 7-3 32.6% x 1995 ARI 3-7 -32.2% 2000 TEN 8-2 32.6% x 1994 TB 2-8 -33.8% 2005 IND 10-0 33.7% x 2006 ARI 2-8 -35.9% 1993 PIT 6-3 34.8% x 1990 TB 4-7 -36.7% 1997 SF 9-1 35.4% x 1989 DAL 1-10 -37.8% 2008 NYG 9-1 35.5% x 1992 NE 1-9 -40.2% 2010 PHI 7-3 35.8% x 2003 ARI 3-7 -40.6%

It's really been a strange year overall. We're seeing more blowouts than usual. (I apologize to Mike Tanier for not remembering which of his articles to link to, but he pointed out a few days ago that there have been about two more blowouts every three weeks of games compared to years past.) It seems like half the league is grouped together at 6-4 or 7-3, which has led to a lot of complicated tiebreaker scenarios that I explained over at ESPN Insider today. Check out the FO playoff odds and you will notice that we actually have Kansas City now with a better chance to make the playoffs than Denver, even though Denver still has better odds to win the AFC West and is still our No. 1 Super Bowl favorite. We also end up with Pittsburgh having slightly higher playoff odds than Baltimore even though the Ravens have a slightly higher average of projected wins.

And, as I keep recounting every week, we're dealing with huge differences between the Football Outsiders DVOA ratings and conventional wisdom about which teams are best this season. Nowhere is that more apparent than with the two teams that currently lead each conference, New England and Arizona.

One element of this, of course, is recency bias. Again, as I keep recounting every week, DVOA ratings tend to take a very long-term view of things with a larger sample of games. Even the weighted DVOA ratings count the last eight weeks of games at full-strength or almost full-strength. New England and Arizona don't just have great records; they've also had their best games in recent weeks. Both teams had their two best single-game DVOA ratings of the year in Week 9 and Week 11.

New England moves from No. 8 to No. 5 this week with its big win over Indianapolis. Obviously, it's still being seriously dragged down by that awful Kansas City game back in Week 4. However, you can't pretend that game didn't happen and not pretend the same for other teams. Let's say that we got rid of the worst game of the year from every team in the league. Would New England now rank No. 1 in DVOA? Nope. The Patriots would move up one space, to No. 4, with Baltimore dropping down to the No. 5 spot. If the Patriots get to forget about their loss to Kansas City, then the Dolphins get to forget about their 29-10 loss to Buffalo back in Week 2. And it's only fair that we also let the Packers write off their 44-23 loss to New Orleans in Week 8 as a fluke, although that was a bit more recent.

As for Arizona, the Cardinals have the lowest DVOA rating of any 9-1 team in DVOA history.

Lowest Total DVOA by 9-1 Teams, 1989-2014 Year Team DVOA after

Week 11 Rk Final W-L Final DVOA Playoff Result 2014 ARI 4.4% 15 -- -- -- 2012 ATL 4.8% 12 13-3 9.1% Lost NFC Championship 2013 KC 11.3% 9 11-5 17.5% Lost Wild Card 2006 IND 13.3% 9 12-4 16.3% Won Super Bowl 1998 MIN 17.5% 5 15-1 23.1% Lost NFC Championship 1991 BUF 19.3% 5 13-3 19.1% Lost Super Bowl 2012 HOU 20.1% 7 12-4 6.7% Lost Divisional Round 1990 BUF 22.5% 6 13-3 21.2% Lost Super Bowl 2011 SF 23.0% 3 13-3 18.6% Lost NFC Championship 2007 GB 27.1% 4 13-3 19.8% Lost NFC Championship 2009 MIN 27.6% 5 12-4 18.5% Lost NFC Championship

In fact, the Cardinals aren't just the lowest-rated 9-1 team in DVOA history. They're almost the lowest-rated 9-1 or 8-2 team in DVOA history. Only two 8-2 teams ever had lower DVOA ratings than the Cardinals: the 2000 Minnesota Vikings at -8.1% and the 1997 Minnesota Vikings at 3.5%.

Should we make anything of the fact that the three lowest teams on this list are from the last three seasons? Probably not. The Cardinals' situation doesn't feel much like the Falcons of two years ago. That team picked on an easy schedule (ranked 30th through 11 weeks) and had a lot of close wins. The Cardinals, on the other hand, have played an average schedule. They haven't had any really big, dominant wins except maybe the 31-14 victory over St. Louis, but they also aren't winning by a field goal week after week. (I compared the Cardinals on Twitter this week to the 2003 Carolina Panthers, but that team was winning by much closer scores.) Fumble luck was a bit of an issue, but it is less of a deal now after Detroit fumbled twice this week and recovered both of them.

Over to the right, I've got one of our week-to-week graphs showing the single-game DVOA for the Cardinals this season. I've added the scores of each game, and I've colored their four road games black with the six home games white. What you see with this chart is just how consistently close to 0% the Cardinals were until the last three weeks. Again, that seems kind of weird when they were winning every game. Arizona is actually second in the league in variance. Only Oakland has more consistent this year on a week-to-week basis. (For the Raiders, that means "consistently lousy but not prime-time blowout lousy." So nice that they're about to play in prime time, huh?)

I'm not completely confused by the Cardinals. What baffles me is not that their record is better than their DVOA rating, but just how much better it is. I wouldn't be baffled if the Cardinals ranked around eighth or ninth in DVOA. Subjectively, they certainly don't seem to be playing like the best team in the league. But 15th? After diving through the spreadsheets I can't even really pick out elements where I can explain that it has to do with a certain down or situation.

Actually, that's not quite true. There's one thing that stands out to me about a lot of the teams historically that have outperformed their DVOA ratings: a lot of them seem to be dome teams. The lowest-rated 8-2 and 9-1 teams in DVOA history all seem to be Atlanta or Minnesota, and we've underrated a number of different Indianapolis teams as well. It's definitely possible that something is fishy here with the adjustments for playing indoors that I added to the team DVOA formula a couple of years ago. Those adjustments are different for offense and defense and it is possible that this is unfairly hurting dome teams. Unfortunately, I won't have time to truly check that out and tweak the formula if necessary until the offseason. However, if the dome is the issue, it's not a big issue. I tried coding every Arizona game as "warm" instead of "dome" and their total DVOA still only rose by a couple of percentage points.

Tangentially, this ties into something that was discussed thoroughly in the comment thread from last week's DVOA ratings, and that regards the predictive value of DVOA. It's no secret that our premium picks against the spread have now struggled for two straight years. They finally had a good week this week at 9-5, but that doesn't change the fact that they've been terrible all season. That winning week puts us at 67-88-6, which is gruesome. When you combine that with the fact that this year's DVOA ratings disagree so much with conventional wisdom, there seemed to be some suggestion that DVOA is no longer a valid statistic for judging football teams and how well they might perform for the rest of the season.

Is DVOA supposed to be predictive? The answer is "yes, somewhat." DVOA is generally trying to balance two things. First, we want the non-adjusted rating to correlate with wins and losses. Second, we want the adjusted rating to correlate with future performance. Combine these things, and you are trying to measure what I have referred to as "the platonic idea of team quality." I've written about this in the past and I'll write more about it again in the future, I'm sure. But for now, on this specific point, a small mea culpa. The picks we make in the premium section of the site are not based solely on DVOA. They're based on more complicated formulas, and those formulas change a couple times during the season as we get more information on teams. Given the way the the picks have performed the past two years, there's no question that we need to go in and reconfigure those formulas before next season to try to improve things. There are also certainly still elements in the DVOA rating itself that could be changed to improve the accuracy, and we need to spend the time playing with those numbers to try to improve things in the future. If you've followed Football Outsiders for a few years, you know that we do bring out an improved version of our formulas from time to time. The fact is that over the last year or two, I haven't been able to do any work to improve either the main DVOA system or the premium picks formulas because of health problems. I'm hoping to be healthy enough come next spring to really overhaul and improve lots of things around here. I want our readers to feel that they are getting the best I can give them. When readers suggest improvements in the spirit of constructive criticism rather than obnoxious trolling, I truly appreciate it. Unfortunately, I just haven't been able to play with a lot of those ideas. Just be aware that we're not being willfully ignorant of our shortcomings. There are time constraints and personal difficulties that we also must deal with.

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Last week's DVOA discussion threads also had some questions about what we mean when we say that an NFL team is "three parts offense, three parts defense, and one part special teams." Actually, that's now four parts offense. To try to explain, I'll copy here a segment from the Pregame Show article in Football Outsiders Almanac 2014.

There are three units on a football team, but they are not of equal importance. Our DVOA ratings provide good evidence for this. For a long time, the saying from Football Outsiders was that the total quality of an NFL team is three parts offense, three parts defense, and one part special teams. Further recent research suggests that offense is even more important than we originally believed. Recent work by Chase Stuart, Neil Paine, and Brian Burke suggests a split between offense and defense of roughly 58-42, without considering special teams. Our research suggests that special teams contributes about 13 percent to total performance; if you measure the remaining 87 percent with a 58-42 ratio, you get roughly 4:3:1. When we compare the range of offense, defense, and special teams DVOA ratings, we get the same results, with the best and worst offenses roughly 130 percent stronger than the best and worst defenses, and roughly four times stronger than the best and worst special teams.

For those who were confused last week: this is already baked into the DVOA ratings. We don't multiply offense by one variable and defense by another or anything along those lines. Total DVOA is simply (offense - defense + special teams). It's the general ranges of those ratings that give us the "4:3:1" concept.

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Once again in 2014, we have teamed up with EA Sports to bring Football Outsiders-branded player content to Madden 15 Ultimate Team. Each week, we'll be picking out a handful of players who starred in that week's games. Some of them will be well-known players who stood out in DVOA and DYAR. Others will be under-the-radar players who only stood out with advanced stats. We'll announce the players each Tuesday in the DVOA commentary article, and the players will be available in Madden Ultimate Team packs the following weekend. We will also tweet out images of these players from the @fboutsiders Twitter account on most Fridays. One player each week will only be available for 24 hours from the point these players enter packs on Friday.

The Football Outsiders stars for Week 11 are:

RB Jamaal Charles, KC (24-HOUR HERO): Led all Week 11 RB with 83 DYAR (158 rushing yards, 19 receiving yards, 2 TD).

Led all Week 11 RB with 83 DYAR (158 rushing yards, 19 receiving yards, 2 TD). SS Morgan Burnett, GB: Led Packers defenders with 8 combined tackles in 53-20 rout of Philadelphia.

Led Packers defenders with 8 combined tackles in 53-20 rout of Philadelphia. LT Jermon Bushrod, CHI: Allowed no sacks to Vikings, who entered game third in NFL in sacks.

Allowed no sacks to Vikings, who entered game third in NFL in sacks. C Bryan Stork, NE: Helped Patriots running game dominate Indianapolis, including 99 yards on 18 carries up the middle with 83 percent Success Rate.

Helped Patriots running game dominate Indianapolis, including 99 yards on 18 carries up the middle with 83 percent Success Rate. K Greg Zuerlein, STL: 5-for-5 on field goals including two of 50+ yards; seven kickoffs resulted in five touchbacks and two returns that didn't make it past the 15.

Strangely enough, this will be the first time Bryan Stork is available in Madden Ultimate Team. He was mistakenly left out of the original base set of players despite being a fourth-round pick.

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All stats pages are now updated with Week 11 information -- or will be in the next few minutes -- including FO Premium and playoff odds. You can also read the new weekly playoff odds report on ESPN Insider to get more commentary on the current playoff odds. Snap counts are not yet updated because of an NFL error regarding the Indianapolis-New England numbers, but we'll try to get those fixed as soon as the league does.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through 11 weeks of 2014, 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 strength of schedule and 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 represents an attempt to figure out how a team is playing right now, as opposed to over the season as a whole, by making recent games more important than earlier games. 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>

TEAM TOTAL

DVOA LAST

WEEK WEIGHTED

DVOA RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 1 DEN 31.5% 1 30.4% 1 7-3 18.5% 2 -17.2% 2 -4.2% 27 2 GB 23.9% 3 24.9% 2 7-3 22.5% 1 -1.6% 10 -0.2% 16 3 BAL 22.0% 2 23.3% 3 6-4 7.9% 12 -5.7% 7 8.4% 1 4 MIA 20.0% 6 22.1% 4 6-4 8.1% 10 -16.0% 3 -4.1% 26 5 NE 19.6% 8 20.6% 5 8-2 13.8% 4 -0.1% 13 5.8% 4 6 KC 17.1% 10 20.0% 6 7-3 12.7% 7 0.4% 14 4.8% 7 7 SEA 15.1% 4 12.2% 7 6-4 13.1% 6 -5.3% 9 -3.3% 23 8 PHI 9.6% 5 9.8% 8 7-3 -3.4% 18 -5.6% 8 7.4% 2 9 DET 8.9% 9 8.6% 9 7-3 -7.5% 22 -22.3% 1 -5.9% 31 10 PIT 6.9% 11 6.9% 11 7-4 16.9% 3 8.8% 28 -1.2% 20 11 SF 6.8% 16 7.3% 10 6-4 -3.2% 17 -15.5% 4 -5.5% 29 12 BUF 6.8% 13 5.9% 13 5-5 -12.0% 27 -13.2% 5 5.5% 5 13 DAL 5.4% 14 6.0% 12 7-3 11.3% 8 4.4% 21 -1.4% 21 14 IND 5.1% 7 5.3% 14 6-4 6.6% 13 7.3% 26 5.8% 3 15 ARI 4.4% 15 4.6% 15 9-1 -7.8% 23 -12.1% 6 0.1% 15 16 NO 2.6% 12 3.2% 16 4-6 13.6% 5 11.4% 30 0.4% 14 TEAM TOTAL

DVOA LAST

WEEK WEIGHTED

DVOA RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 17 CIN 0.3% 20 -2.9% 17 6-3-1 -1.0% 15 3.7% 20 4.9% 6 18 SD -3.1% 18 -3.8% 18 6-4 8.3% 9 11.8% 31 0.4% 13 19 CLE -3.6% 17 -4.6% 19 6-4 -2.2% 16 1.0% 16 -0.3% 17 20 ATL -4.1% 19 -6.6% 20 4-6 7.9% 11 15.8% 32 3.7% 8 21 HOU -9.1% 23 -7.9% 21 5-5 -3.9% 19 0.6% 15 -4.6% 28 22 NYJ -11.2% 24 -10.7% 23 2-8 -13.5% 28 -0.1% 12 2.3% 9 23 CHI -11.3% 26 -15.2% 26 4-6 3.1% 14 8.2% 27 -6.2% 32 24 STL -11.7% 28 -9.6% 22 4-6 -9.4% 25 2.9% 18 0.6% 12 25 NYG -13.9% 21 -13.9% 25 3-7 -8.8% 24 4.7% 22 -0.4% 18 26 MIN -15.2% 25 -13.7% 24 4-6 -17.1% 29 -0.4% 11 1.5% 11 27 TEN -16.0% 27 -15.7% 27 2-8 -6.0% 20 9.0% 29 -1.0% 19 28 WAS -17.7% 22 -20.5% 28 3-7 -6.7% 21 5.5% 23 -5.5% 30 29 CAR -19.7% 29 -21.8% 29 3-7-1 -10.9% 26 6.7% 25 -2.1% 22 30 OAK -23.5% 30 -23.4% 30 0-10 -22.3% 31 3.0% 19 1.9% 10 31 JAC -27.6% 31 -24.6% 31 1-9 -22.5% 32 1.3% 17 -3.8% 24 32 TB -29.1% 32 -25.2% 32 2-8 -19.4% 30 5.9% 24 -3.9% 25

NON-ADJUSTED TOTAL DVOA does not include the adjustments for opponent strength or the adjustments for weather and altitude in special teams, and only penalizes offenses for lost fumbles rather than all fumbles.

does not include the adjustments for opponent strength or the adjustments for weather and altitude in special teams, and only penalizes offenses for lost fumbles rather than all fumbles. ESTIMATED WINS 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.

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.

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.

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 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).