by Aaron Schatz

With the best single-game performance by any team so far this year, the San Francisco 49ers this week leap ahead of the rest of the league and into the top spot of the Football Outsiders DVOA ratings. The 49ers' rating for Weeks 1-5 is so strong that it overwhelms their (now clearly erroneous) mediocre preseason forecast so that they are also No. 1 in our DAVE ratings. The DVOA gap between the 49ers and the No. 2 Houston Texans is larger than the gap between the Texans and No. 10 Seattle. Surprisingly, the 49ers are dominating even though our prediction of regression towards the mean does seem to be coming true in one area: San Francisco is currently only 24th on special teams. If that unit comes around, they'll be even better.

The gap between San Francisco and the rest of the league is matched by a large gap that has now opened up between the top dozen teams and the rest of the league. In fact, only those top dozen teams have positive total DVOA ratings; No. 13 St. Louis is at -1.5%. I would love to say that this works out to a clear prediction of "deserving" playoff teams, but it doesn't, since our top dozen consists of seven NFC teams and only five AFC teams. In addition, our top 12 probably won't look much like the top 12 on other websites around the Internets because of the fact that DVOA is looking at individual play-by-play rather than win-loss records. This season has seen an awful lot of close games, and as a result the DVOA ratings don't particularly match the standings. Forty-four of 75 games so far this year have finished with scores within a touchdown (eight points). That's 59 percent; the only other year since 1994 that was over 55 percent was 1999 at 63 percent.

And so, we've got 4-1 Arizona down at No. 14, essentially tied with the 1-3 Detroit Lions. We've got 3-2 Cincinnati way down at No. 25. The last remaining winless team, Cleveland, is nowhere near last place; in 27th, the Browns are almost as close to average as they are to last-place Tennessee. And we've got two different 2-3 teams in the top ten: Green Bay and Denver. I went back and looked, and Green Bay and Denver are two of the best 2-3 teams we've ever encountered. Here's a list of the best 2-3 teams in DVOA history:

Top DVOA with 2-3 Record, 1991-2012 YEAR TEAM DVOA FINAL

W-L FINAL

DVOA 2005 SD 40.1% 9-7 23.3% 2012 GB 26.0% -- -- 1996 DAL 25.8% 10-6 24.0% 2008 PHI 25.7% 9-6-1 31.8% 2012 DEN 22.3% -- -- 1994 GB 20.1% 9-7 21.9% 2010 SD 16.6% 9-7 15.4% 2008 SD 16.5% 8-8 15.3% 2000 DEN 16.3% 11-5 16.0% 1991 SF 13.1% 10-6 26.0%

Boy, the Chargers sure do have a habit of bad starts recently, don't they? Here's the P-F-R page for that 2005 Chargers team, which had two dominant wins and three close losses in their first five games. They ended up winning seven of the next nine, including a win over the previously unbeaten Colts, but lost their last two games and ended up 9-7 and out of the playoffs.

With five weeks gone by, I also wanted to take a look at the best and worst players by DYAR and DVOA. Here's a review, position by position:

QUARTERBACKS: Eli Manning is leading the league in both DYAR and DVOA after five games, and the Manning brothers are actually 1-2 in DYAR, although Matt Schaub and Tom Brady are both ahead of Peyton in DVOA. Unless he had a particularly awesome Week 1 game that I don't remember, I believe this is the first time the younger Manning has been on top of our quarterback table. For all the huffing and puffing about the struggles of last year's big three quarterbacks, DYAR suggests things aren't that bad: Brady is third in DYAR, Drew Brees is seventh, and Aaron Rodgers is ninth. Other advanced metrics, however, disagree with the "Brees and Rodgers are better than you think" idea, starting with ESPN's Total QBR. Now that we're posting Total QBR on FO along with DVOA, the big differences between where the two metrics rank players can be somewhat glaring. That's a subject for another article. I e-mailed Dean Oliver today so we could put a piece together on why DVOA and Total QBR disagree about certain players; look for that in a day or two.

One thing all advanced metrics can agree on: Blaine Gabbert has been awful.

RUNNING BACKS: C.J. Spiller started out the season lapping the field, and he still does according to DVOA, but injuries (and Buffalo losing) have limited him to 19 carries over the past three weeks, so he's no longer on top in DYAR. That spot now belongs to Stevan Ridley. Frank Gore and Ray Rice round out the top four (in both DYAR and DVOA). BenJarvus Green-Ellis used to have Ridley's spot in the New England lineup. Now he's in Cincinnati and he's near the bottom of the DYAR ratings with Shonn Greene, Ryan Williams, and Chris Johnson. There are some fairly notable gaps between DVOA and VOA among running backs, even with opponent adjustments only at 50 percent strength. DeMarco Murray, Darren McFadden, and Steven Jackson have all seen their numbers depressed by tough schedules so far, while Alfred Morris and Willis McGahee have benefitted from easy schedules.

Joique Bell (!?!?!) leads all running backs in receiving DYAR. No, really. Also, the Cleveland running backs are surprisingly strong in receiving DYAR even though they are generally dumpoff options in a bad passing game.

WIDE RECEIVERS: Wasn't Julio Jones supposed to surpass Roddy White as the main man in Atlanta? It is true they've seen roughly the same number of pass targets, but White leads all wide receivers in DYAR while Jones is 45th. Calvin Johnson is second, Torrey Smith is third. Down at the bottom of the DYAR ratings you'll find a couple of rookies who are being held back by their quarterback situations, Justin Blackmon and Kendall Wright. Wright has -72 DYAR despite a 61 percent catch rate, which is pretty remarkable. Seven of his 27 catches have been "failed completes" by our standards because they've gained so few yards; an eighth catch was also a failure because he fumbled it away.

[ad placeholder 3]

TIGHT ENDS: Tony Gonzalez will never die. He leads the league in DYAR, with a nice big gap between him and No. 2 Vernon Davis. Heath Miller is having a surprisingly good season, and Brandon Myers (surprise!) is first in DVOA among tight ends with at least 10 pass targets. Benjamin Watson is down at the bottom of our list, along with a couple of very surprising names, Jimmy Graham and Peyton Manning favorite Jacob Tamme.

All stats pages should now be updated. FO Premium stats will also be updated later this evening. Our snap counts page now features season snap totals to date, and within the next couple days we will be adding percentage of team snaps for those season totals.

* * * * *

These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through five 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 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.

Because it is early in the season, opponent strength is at only 50 percent; it will increase 10 percent every week through Week 10. 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 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 27 percent of DAVE (40 percent for teams with only four games played).

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 TOTAL

DAVE RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 1 SF 47.0% 2 34.2% 1 4-1 28.8% 3 -21.2% 4 -3.0% 24 2 HOU 33.8% 1 25.7% 5 5-0 19.5% 4 -26.7% 2 -12.3% 30 3 CHI 33.0% 8 27.9% 3 4-1 -5.6% 17 -32.4% 1 6.2% 5 4 ATL 29.1% 4 27.0% 4 5-0 14.9% 7 -9.9% 10 4.4% 8 5 NE 29.0% 3 31.2% 2 3-2 32.4% 1 1.6% 17 -1.9% 22 6 GB 26.0% 7 25.4% 6 2-3 18.0% 5 -5.9% 12 2.0% 11 7 MIN 23.5% 9 12.4% 10 4-1 4.6% 12 -11.2% 9 7.7% 3 8 NYG 23.1% 10 19.5% 7 3-2 29.5% 2 8.2% 21 1.8% 12 9 DEN 22.3% 5 17.6% 8 2-3 14.2% 8 -8.0% 11 0.1% 17 10 SEA 21.7% 11 11.9% 11 3-2 -11.5% 22 -24.9% 3 8.3% 2 11 BAL 16.2% 6 14.4% 9 4-1 11.4% 10 -3.2% 15 1.7% 13 12 MIA 12.5% 12 6.2% 12 2-3 -5.7% 19 -18.3% 5 -0.1% 18 13 STL -1.5% 18 -13.7% 26 3-2 -19.6% 28 -14.4% 8 3.7% 10 14 ARI -2.6% 14 -7.2% 19 4-1 -18.9% 27 -14.7% 7 1.6% 14 15 DET -3.8% 16 -4.3% 14 1-3 16.9% 6 6.6% 20 -14.1% 32 16 SD -5.4% 15 -5.0% 15 3-2 -6.1% 20 -0.1% 16 0.5% 15 TEAM TOTAL

DVOA LAST

WEEK TOTAL

DAVE RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 17 PHI -8.6% 13 -5.1% 16 3-2 -14.7% 24 -15.0% 6 -8.9% 28 18 IND -11.5% 20 -12.1% 23 2-2 3.0% 13 10.6% 25 -3.9% 26 19 DAL -12.0% 25 -6.1% 17 2-2 -12.5% 23 -4.9% 13 -4.4% 27 20 WAS -12.2% 22 -9.0% 21 2-3 11.5% 9 10.4% 24 -13.3% 31 21 PIT -13.8% 28 0.3% 13 2-2 2.3% 14 15.8% 26 -0.3% 19 22 CAR -14.4% 17 -8.2% 20 1-4 -5.6% 18 5.4% 19 -3.4% 25 23 TB -14.7% 26 -11.1% 22 1-3 -17.2% 26 -3.8% 14 -1.2% 21 24 NO -15.0% 21 -6.9% 18 1-4 6.3% 11 21.8% 31 0.5% 16 25 CIN -17.3% 19 -13.0% 25 3-2 -1.3% 16 20.5% 28 4.4% 7 26 NYJ -17.7% 27 -12.4% 24 2-3 -24.9% 31 2.5% 18 9.7% 1 27 CLE -22.4% 24 -22.4% 29 0-5 -16.7% 25 9.8% 22 4.1% 9 28 BUF -28.6% 23 -19.8% 27 2-3 -7.5% 21 26.8% 32 5.7% 6 29 OAK -31.3% 31 -21.6% 28 1-3 -0.1% 15 21.5% 30 -9.7% 29 30 KC -35.6% 32 -24.9% 30 1-4 -23.6% 30 9.8% 23 -2.1% 23 31 JAC -37.3% 29 -30.7% 32 1-4 -20.4% 29 16.4% 27 -0.5% 20 32 TEN -40.7% 30 -30.0% 31 1-4 -27.1% 32 20.7% 29 7.1% 4

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).