by Aaron Schatz

A lot of NFL power ratings around the Internet have the Houston Texans on top after two big wins to start the season. The Football Outsiders DVOA ratings are in agreement there: Houston ranks third in offense and first in defense, although the Texans are just 30th in special teams. Below the Texans, the DVOA ratings probably look a lot different from ratings elsewhere.

One of the big issues early is the issue of opponent adjustments. When you've got subjective ratings, you are always accounting for strength of schedule in the back of your mind, although very few subjective ratings give it the importance it deserves. With objective ratings, we're stuck with the system as we've worked it out for the last few years. After two games is too early to try to get a handle on strength of schedule. We introduce schedule adjustments in Week 4 and then gradually increase the strength until they're finally at full strength after Week 10.

The absence of opponent adjustments does a lot to explain why our ratings currently have New England second and, even stranger, Minnesota fourth. The Patriots blew out a Tennessee team that looks to be pretty poor, and then lost a close game to an Arizona team that has no offense. The Vikings had a close win over a bad Jacksonville team (a game that has a bigger VOA spread than the final score would otherwise indicate), then lost a close game to an Indianapolis team that has a nice quarterback but is otherwise rebuilding. In the middle, San Francisco has two convincing wins over two teams that made the playoffs last year. When the time comes to account for schedule strength, the 49ers will likely see their ratings for Weeks 1-2 move up, and the Patriots and Vikings will see their ratings move down. (No. 1 Houston has benefited from an easy schedule too, of course, whipping Miami and Jacksonville.)

The other reason why the Patriots and Vikings are ranked so high is that their losses are not seen as bad performances by the DVOA system. This week's Any Given Sunday column talks more about the Patriots' weird loss to Arizona, but Minnesota also had a game this week where it lost despite a higher VOA than its opponent, Indianapolis. The Vikings were at 28.9%, and the Colts at -3.7%. The Vikings lost even though they gained 0.6 yards more than the Colts per play. That doesn't include special teams, where the Vikings had 162 yards on returns and the Colts had just 30. The Vikings lost the turnover battle one to zero, but really that's not too bad. Put this game together with the Week 1 win over Jacksonville, and you get the Vikings in fourth place. Given our preseason projections, we see this as a bit of a fluke; the Vikings are still only 20th in DAVE, our rating that combines games so far with the data from the preseason forecast.

Two games in, you're just going to end up with some weird numbers, but this year seems particularly odd. For example: San Francisco being third is not a surprise, but the way they get there is. The 49ers currently rank first in the league in offensive VOA, but are just average on defense and special teams. There's that schedule strength issue again.

The 49ers are still only 13th in the DAVE ratings. Obviously, that seems too low to all of us. As I noted on Twitter earlier this week, "historical trends apply more often than not" still leaves a lot of room for "not." However, we don't know for sure that this is "not." A great example of a similar team would be the 2002 New England Patriots, the team that inspired the creation of Football Outsiders in the first place. This was a team coming off a year where they had gone from 5-11 to 11-5 and won the Super Bowl with a bunch of veteran free-agent defenders and a young quarterback who was not yet Tom Brady. If Football Outsiders existed in 2002, this is the kind of team where we would have been screaming "look out for regression!" before the season. And we would have looked like complete morons after the Patriots started the year by beating Pittsburgh at home 30-14 and then the Jets 44-7 on the road. Like with this year's 49ers, both opponents were coming off playoff appearances. After two weeks, the Patriots were second in the NFL with 65.5% VOA, behind only San Diego. They won their third game, 41-38 over Kansas City in overtime, and then the regression finally showed up. Starting guard Joe Andruzzi tore the meniscus in his knee. Daniel Graham dislocated his shoulder. Troy Brown had knee problems. The Patriots lost a big showdown game against the Chargers to start a four-game losing streak. By the end of the year, they were 9-7 and missed the playoffs on a tiebreaker. Weeks 1 and 2 were their best performances of the year.

As long as we're comparing current teams to teams from the past, how about those Arizona Cardinals? Look at the ratings, and you'll see them way down there at 24th despite being undefeated. The other five 2-0 teams all rank 11th or higher. The Cardinals are only the fifth team in DVOA history to rank 20th or worse after a 2-0 start. Looking back at teams with similar starts, it's surprising to see how many of them continued to win despite unimpressive DVOA ratings. Here is a look at the ten worst 2-0 teams by VOA ratings, and how they ended the season. The worst 2-0 team ever actually put things together, finished the season on a run, and went on to the Super Bowl.

Worst 2-0 Teams since 1991 by VOA after Week 2 After Week 2 Season Final Year Team W-L VOA Rank W-L VOA Rank 2003 CAR 2-0 -36.9% 28 11-5 0.6% 16 2004 JAC 2-0 -23.3% 28 9-7 1.7% 13 2012 ARI 2-0 -16.1% 24 -- -- -- 2007 SF 2-0 -13.8% 22 5-11 -33.4% 31 2000 MIN 2-0 -13.7% 22 11-5 -6.3% 22 2006 MIN 2-0 -7.3% 19 6-10 -12.9% 23 2005 WAS 2-0 -7.0% 17 10-6 21.4% 7 1998 PIT 2-0 -5.8% 19 7-9 -1.2% 16 2001 IND 2-0 -3.5% 17 6-10 -11.3% 23 2009 SF 2-0 -2.9% 19 8-8 -1.2% 20 1996 BUF 2-0 -1.9% 16 10-6 2.4% 15

All stats pages are now updated with 2012 data, including the first tables for offensive line and defensive line. The last table to be added for 2012 will be "defense vs. receivers," which we will add sometime this week. The FO Premium splits database should be updated with 2012 data sometime this evening.

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. The guys from Juice Analytics have been nice enough to design some excellent graphics for us which allow you to dynamically filter and sort through the snap data. Right now there is a table for each week, but we're working on a table that will combine all individual weeks and also show totals.

And now, I'm going to go start answering e-mails and working on a mailbag column. I mean it this time. Really.

* * * * *

[ad placeholder 3]

These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through two weeks 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 75 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>