by Aaron Schatz

The time has come for our annual preseason DVOA projections, updated from the projections that gave us the season forecasts in Football Outsiders Almanac 2013. Our DVOA projections suggest a Packers-Patriots Super Bowl, the same matchup forecast by last year's DVOA projections. The mean win projections suggest a Seahawks-Broncos Super Bowl, the same matchup forecast by last year's actual in-season DVOA ratings.

We must start with the requisite link to an explanation of DVOA. For anyone new to our site, DVOA stands for Defense-adjusted Value Over Average and measures a team's performance on every play of the season compared to league average in the same situation, adjusted for opponent. I know a lot of people may be coming here from various message boards and this is just going to look like a jumble of pointless numbers. Trust me, there is a method to the madness, and over the past dozen seasons past DVOA ratings -- as well as these multivariable-based DVOA projections -- have been a far more accurate predictor of future performance than wins or points.

Offense, defense, and special teams DVOA are all projected separately using a system based on looking at trends for teams over the past decade. The equations include a number of variables based on performance over the past two seasons in different splits (by down, passing vs. rushing, red zone vs. whole field) plus variables based on recent draft history, injury history, offensive and defensive pace, coaching experience, quarterback experience, and even weather. Strength of schedule was then figured based on the average projected total DVOA of all 16 opponents for 2013, rather than based on last year's performance.

The major difference between this year's preseason forecast and the forecast produced three months ago for Football Outsiders Almanac 2013 is unfortunately caused by an error. As one step towards producing team offensive projections, I create a quarterback projection that does not take into account any team variables. (This allows us to account, to give one example, for the fact that Carson Palmer should be expected to improve the Arizona offense.) The variable I used for Russell Wilson in the Seattle projection was pasted incorrectly, leading to a Seattle projection that was a little bit lower than it should have been. Fixing this moves Seattle a bit higher, making the Seahawks one of the top projected teams in the league. Don't worry San Francisco fans, we're still projecting you into the wild card.

The quarterback variable is also an important one explaining why a couple of teams are lower than previously projected. Despite the recent success of rookie quarterbacks, our "quarterback projection without team variables" numbers projected E.J. Manuel a little bit below Kevin Kolb and Terrelle Pryor significantly below Matt Flynn. Geno Smith and Mark Sanchez are pretty much a wash.

If your response to that paragraph was "the idea that Kevin Kolb might have been better than E.J. Manuel is insane," then please remember the following: The numbers we are presenting here are exactly what the projection system spit out. As we say every year: "A few of them will look strange to you. A few of them look strange to us." As always, the offensive projections come out in a wider range than defensive projections because offense performance tends to be easier to predict (and more consistent from year to year) than defensive performance. If you are looking for subjective projections, tomorrow we will be running our usual staff predictions article where we all talk about where we think the numbers are wrong.

The first postseason odds report of the 2013 season is also online, and I've added the playoff odds and Super Bowl championship odds to the table below. The mean wins forecast produced by our season simulation seems very conservative. In fact, this forecast is even more conservative than the forecast you found in Football Outsiders Almanac 2013 because due to time constraints, I did not have the opportunity to adjust our win projections to better reflect the recent historical distribution of wins in the NFL (fewer teams between 7-9 and 9-7 than you would expect from a normal distribution, and more teams around 12-4 or 4-12). However, this kind of conservative forecast generally leads to smaller errors than a forecast that looks more like a real set of final standings with the best team around 14-2 and the worst team around 2-14. Obviously, the best team in the league will likely have more than 11 wins, and the worst team will have more than 10 losses.

Surprisingly, despite slightly more conservative projections for mean wins, the new forecast raises the playoff odds of the top teams; we now have four teams with over 80 percent chance of making the playoffs instead of just the two we listed in Football Outsiders Almanac 2013.

Projected division champions are colored in light yellow. Projected wild card teams are colored in light blue.