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 2014.

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 DVOA counts for 10 percent.

(Note: I'm calling it DVOA here, but it is actually VOA because there are no opponent adjustments right now. For Weeks 1-3, DVOA and VOA are the same thing. Let's not get all nitpicky, ok?)

The fact that DAVE currently is still counting our preseason projection as 90 percent of its estimate of team quality is another element of the "don't overreact" mentality that leads us to call the first few days after Week 1 "National Jump to Conclusions Week." Last year, the top four teams in Week 1 included Denver and Kansas City... but also Miami and Tennessee. The year before, most of the teams that had strong games in Week 1 were good teams all year long... but the worst team in Week 1 was the eventual AFC North champion Cincinnati Bengals. And in 2011, one of the best teams after Week 1 was Buffalo (finished 6-10) while the worst team was Pittsburgh (finished 12-4).

(Correction: 2012 Bengals lost the AFC North on tiebreaker and were technically second.)

So when we look down at the list of Week 1 DVOA ratings and see New England 20th, New Orleans 23rd, and Green Bay 28th, we really should not overreact and assume these teams will not be among the league's most efficient in 2014. Even a 12-4 team has to lose four games, and those games are not always lost to other top teams. The Saints' and Patriots' losses weren't really particularly bad by DVOA standards, and Green Bay's rating is seriously mitigated by the fact that we are not yet including opponent adjustments. (With a system that is based on a decade of results across the league, no, we can't yet assume that playing Seattle is going to result in a really large opponent adjustment boost, but you know, come on.) San Francisco has moved ahead of these three teams when we compare the DAVE ratings to just the preseason projections, but DAVE still thinks that New England, Green Bay, and New Orleans are three of the top six teams in the NFL.

But there's a big difference between what one game tells us about how inherently strong a team will be over the course of the year, and what one game tells us about how strong a team's chances of making the playoffs will be. With only 16 games in a season, the difference between a single win and a single loss is huge in terms of playoff odds. That's particularly true early in the season because of the way our projections tend to group around 8-8. At this point, the playoff odds simulator doesn't really see any game as a 90 percent chance of a win for anyone, except perhaps Oakland at Seattle (Week 9) and Oakland at Denver (Week 17). Going into the season, a game between a good team and a bad team might be seen as 0.7 possible wins for the good team. If you replace that 0.7 possible wins with a nice big fat zero actual wins, it's a gigantic change. It means even more when you consider that a mediocre division rival might have replaced 0.3 possible wins with 1.0 wins, and that this less-heralded team is going to be winning the rest of its games 40 or 50 percent of the time in each simulation rather than 20 percent of the time (which might be the what the odds look like by November) or the 0 percent used when people do that silly "go through the schedule assigning a W or L to each game" thing.

And so, Green Bay, New Orleans, and New England are all no longer favored to win their divisions according to the current iteration of the Football Outsiders playoff odds report. And while I haven't mentioned them yet, the same goes for the Indianapolis Colts, who now rank third in playoff odds in the AFC South.

There are a few extenuating circumstances here. Football Outsiders projections probably had Buffalo, Minnesota, and Tennessee all rated higher than conventional wisdom. As for the NFC South, while we expected Carolina to decline, we didn't expect the Panthers to completely crater, so one win already moves their DAVE rating up to 11th in the league. Green Bay, Indianapolis, and New Orleans are now each looking up at two teams in the standings, and the Patriots are looking up at all three AFC East rivals. Which leaves us these odds:

In the AFC East, Buffalo is now our division favorite, winning 30.8 percent of the time. All four teams now win the division in at least 20 percent of simulations even though DAVE says the Patriots are still substantially better than the other three teams. The Patriots are still listed as a more likely Super Bowl champion than the Bills.

In the NFC North, Minnesota is now our division favorite, winning 31.8 percent of the time, even though DAVE says the Packers are still a little better than the Vikings (and subjectively, we all expect that the Vikings will eventually see their DVOA for this week drop while the Packers will see theirs move up because of opponent adjustments). The Packers are still listed as a more likely Super Bowl champion than the Vikings.

In the NFC South, Carolina is now our division favorite, winning 38.5 percent of the time, even though DAVE says the Saints are still a little bit better than the Panthers. However, unlike with the previous two divisions, the Panthers also now have better Super Bowl odds than the Saints.

In the AFC South, Tennessee is now our division favorite, winning 48.3 percent of the time. Let's be honest, this sounds completely insane. But unlike in those other divisions, the Colts aren't even the top team in their division by DAVE anymore; Tennessee's convincing win makes them 16th in DAVE while the Colts are 21st. (Again, we all think opponent adjustments will eventually change the ratings for these teams in Week 1, but we can't be sure.) The Titans win the Super Bowl right now in three times as many simulations as the Colts do.

The winner of all this? It might be Cincinnati. Click on the playoff odds report and you will see that the Bengals are now listed No. 4 on the list of teams likely to win the Super Bowl. New England, San Diego, and Indianapolis are all now 0-1, and that gives Cincinnati a better chance at home-field advantage, and thus a better shot at the Super Bowl. It also helps that these teams are less likely to make the playoffs in the first place; right now our ratings think the Bengals would have better odds of beating AFC East champion Buffalo than of beating AFC East champion New England. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have also moved up our odds for similar reasons.

The other thing that happened when these strong teams (as well as San Diego and Chicago) all slipped up in Week 1? Our odds of a Super Bowl rematch went up to 7.4 percent, and Super Bowl XLIX now pits Denver against one of the two NFC West powerhouses in more than one out of every eight simulations.

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As usual, I have adjusted the projection part of the DAVE ratings for major injuries that took place in Week 1. Kansas City and Indianapolis saw their defensive projections decline because of the injuries to Derrick Johnson and Robert Mathis. Houston's defensive projection declined half as much because Jadeveon Clowney will miss half the season, and Philadelphia's offensive projection declined slightly for Evan Mathis missing half the season. The ratings for the other 28 teams all went up slightly in order to keep the league average at 0%. Given how bad Ray Rice was last year, his suspension and release doesn't affect the Baltimore projection at all.

(By the way, some folks asked why Oakland was missing from the Super Bowl odds table in the initial playoff odds; when a team falls below 0.05 percent, the process that creates the HTML tables drops that team off the Super Bowl odds list. The same thing happens with the "On the Clock" table when a team no longer has at least a 0.05 percent chance of getting the No. 1 overall pick.)

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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 1 are:

WR Antonio Brown, Pittsburgh (24 HOURS ONLY) : Second among all wide receivers with 57 receiving DYAR (5-of-6, 116 yards, TD)

: Second among all wide receivers with 57 receiving DYAR (5-of-6, 116 yards, TD) RB Knowshon Moreno, Miami : 48 rushing DYAR (134 yards, TD, and seven broken tackles)

: 48 rushing DYAR (134 yards, TD, and seven broken tackles) RG J.R. Sweezy, Seattle : Seahawks averaged 6.5 yards per carry on runs between the middle and the right tackle.

: Seahawks averaged 6.5 yards per carry on runs between the middle and the right tackle. CB Jason Verrett, San Diego : We haven't done the charting stats on him yet either, but he was phenomenal and a big reason why John Brown had only two catches for 29 yards and Larry Fitzgerald had only one for 22.

: We haven't done the charting stats on him yet either, but he was phenomenal and a big reason why John Brown had only two catches for 29 yards and Larry Fitzgerald had only one for 22. SS D.J. Swearinger, Houston: Led NFL with five Defeats in Week 1. Sack, FF, and tackled DeSean Jackson for no gain twice.

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All stats pages are now updated with 2014 data except for SNAP COUNTS, which should be updated by late tonight, and OFFENSIVE LINE and DEFENSIVE LINE, which will be updated after Week 2. The FO Premium splits database will also be updated for the first time after Week 2, next Tuesday. We apologize for the fact that the Matchup View for FO Premium is not yet updated with the 2014 schedule; that's a bug we're working on fixing right now.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through one week 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 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. As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.

Please note that there are no opponent adjustments in DVOA until after Week 4. (It's still called DVOA below because I honestly didn't feel like going through and changing all the tables manually this year. You folks know what's up, anyway.) In addition, our second weekly table which includes schedule strength, variation, and Estimated Wins will appear beginning after Week 4.

DAVE is a formula which combines our preseason projection with current DVOA 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>