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 2016.

Most of you are familiar with DVOA, but we probably have some newer readers who 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. The value of the preseason projection changes each week until we are only using current-year data after Week 8.

Of course, though I'm calling our main metric DVOA here, it is actually VOA because there are no opponent adjustments right now. We do not apply opponent adjustments until after Week 4, so in Weeks 1-3 DVOA and VOA are the same thing. Please don't get all nitpicky about it. Most readers know what's up, and if you don't, I just told you!

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 Football Outsiders to call the first few days after Week 1 "National Jump to Conclusions Week." If we only look at Week 1 performance, the best team in football right now is the San Francisco 49ers. It's actually not that strange to say that the San Francisco 49ers are the best team in the NFL according to DVOA. This happens a lot when I go back to break down past seasons to add the 1980s and 1990s to our database. What's strange is saying that "a team quarterbacked by Blaine Gabbert is currently the best team in the NFL according to DVOA." Again, don't jump to conclusions after one week. Just ask last year's No. 1 team after Week 1, the Tennessee Titans.

If you click on that link, you will see that last year after Week 1, we had a perfect symmetry of 1-0 and 0-1 teams, with no team that won its opener ranked lower than a team that lost its opener. That was very unusual, the first time it had ever happened going back to 1989. This year, things went strongly in the other direction. When you have 11 different games decided by one score, you're going to end up with some games where our ratings don't quite sync up with the final result. There were four of those games in Week 1. Which game you feel is most surprising depends on whether you are more surprised by teams ranking higher or teams ranking lower.

At first glance, the most surprising DVOA result from Week 1 is the game we covered in Any Given Sunday, Handsome Jimmy G leading the Patriots to a surprising road win in Arizona. The Patriots are all the way down at 25th in our ratings after Week 1, while Arizona is up at No. 13. I'm surprised how big the gap is, but not that it is there. Remember, DVOA is measuring efficiency, and the Cardinals averaged more yards per play (5.8) than the Patriots (5.5). More importantly, the Cardinals were keeping on schedule down by down, successful on 51 percent of their plays, while the Patriots were successful on just 39 percent of their plays but were saved by a few big third-and-long conversions.

However, the biggest gap in our ratings where the Week 1 loser has a higher rating than the winner is between Dallas (No. 9) and the New York Giants (No. 22). Those two teams have a DVOA gap of 29.5%, compared to 28.8% for the gap between Arizona and New England. And this gap is really strange because the Giants (5.9 yards per play) actually were much more efficient than Dallas (4.4 yards per play). The Giants had some longer gains, but the two teams were similar in success rate, and thus similar in offense and defense. Most of this gap is special teams.

There's a smaller but still significant gap between Carolina (No. 11) and Denver (No. 19).

The smallest "reverse gap" from Week 1 is less than 10 percentage points of DVOA, as both San Diego (No. 10) and Kansas City (No. 15) ended up with positive ratings after their overtime thriller on Sunday.

Win-loss records are scrambled even more in this week's ratings because both Detroit and Indianapolis (barely) had positive DVOA ratings for Week 1, while both Tennessee and Minnesota (barely) had negative DVOA ratings.

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We all should look at these Week 1 ratings with a healthy dose of skepticism. The method we use for normalizing each season's DVOA to 0% can lead to somewhat hinky results with a small sample, and even just two games on Monday night will move those baselines significantly. In addition, special teams ratings are going to be a little awkward for a few weeks until we can figure out just what the new kickoff touchback rule is doing to average kickoff distance and value.

Most importantly, just because we don't do opponent adjustments in Weeks 1-3 doesn't mean you can't add common-sense opponent adjustments in your brain when looking at the tables. San Francisco is No. 1, but we know how badly the Rams played on Monday night. Philadelphia is No. 2, but we had Cleveland projected as one of the two worst teams in the league. By the way, this common-sense adjustment also applies to DVOA's favorite team, the Seattle Seahawks. The Seahawks ended up third for the week even though they barely beat the Miami Dolphins. Yes, DVOA suggests that the Seahawks played better than the final score would indicate... but against the Miami Dolphins, another team we had projected to do poorly in 2016.

(For those who might ask: Yes, we've considered doing adjustments in the early part of the season based on our preseason projections. Trying to build and test that is on our to-do list. As I've mentioned numerous times, it's a really long to-do list. However, we are finally getting to some of the things on it! Exhibit A: The arrival of Football Outsiders Premium Charting Data. For those of you who purchased this subscription, we should have 2015 stats listed on the pages by Wednesday, and 2016 stats will begin to get updated on those pages after Week 2.)

The common-sense opponent adjustment should also apply to how you see Carolina and Denver after their Super Bowl rematch, in particular the rankings for the Carolina and Denver defenses. That being said, each year we point out that there's a difference between using "National Jump to Conclusions Week" to declare that a week ago we were all wrong about how good or bad some team is going to be this year, and jumping to conclusions about what a single win or loss means for that team's playoff chances. As you will see if you click over to our playoff odds report, the Panthers are this year's best example of the importance of a single win when you only get 16 chances. Carolina's DAVE rating is still the highest in the NFC South, but an 0-1 start combined with a road win for Tampa Bay means that the Bucs and Panthers are now effectively tied in mean wins in our simulations, and the Panthers only have a slight advantage over the Bucs when it comes to playoff odds, 45.4 percent to 44.0 percent.

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Once again this season, we have teamed up with EA Sports to bring Football Outsiders-branded player content to Madden 17 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, beginning at 11am Eastern on Friday. We will also tweet out images of these players from the @fboutsiders Twitter account on most Fridays. The best player of each week, the Football Outsiders Hero, will require you to collect a set of the other four Football Outsiders players that week.

The Football Outsiders stars for Week 1 are:

QB Matthew Stafford, DET (FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS HERO) : Led all QB with 197 DYAR in Week 1 (31-for-39, 340 yards, 3 TD, 0 INT).

: Led all QB with 197 DYAR in Week 1 (31-for-39, 340 yards, 3 TD, 0 INT). ROLB Lavonte David, TB : Led NFL with 5 defeats this week: 3 TFL plus 2 tackles that stopped third-down receptions short of conversion.

: Led NFL with 5 defeats this week: 3 TFL plus 2 tackles that stopped third-down receptions short of conversion. RG Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, KC : No sacks allowed; Chiefs RB gained 33 yards on 4 carries to the right and 69 yards on 14 carries overall.

: No sacks allowed; Chiefs RB gained 33 yards on 4 carries to the right and 69 yards on 14 carries overall. SS Tony Jefferson, ARI : Led team with 10 tackles, including 5 run tackles for 2 yards or less.

: Led team with 10 tackles, including 5 run tackles for 2 yards or less. WR Willie Snead, NO: Led all WR with 73 DYAR in Week 1 (9-for-9, 172 yards, TD).

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Most stats pages are now updated with 2016 data. OFFENSIVE LINE and DEFENSIVE LINE will begin updating after Week 2. Snap counts will be updated later this evening, and drive stats and pace stats should be as well. Football Outsiders Premium (both the standard DVOA database and the new game charting data) will also be updated beginning after Week 2.

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TThese are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through one week of 2016, 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 listed as DVOA instead of VOA because I don't feel like going through and changing all the tables manually.) 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>