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 2011.

Now, 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 VOA counts for 10 percent.

There's never much to say after just one week of games and this year is no exception. Buffalo is the big mover this week, going from 18th in our final DVOA projections to 12th in DAVE thanks to their dismantling of the Kansas City Chiefs. The exceptionally high preseason projection for Pittsburgh also looks a little silly now given how badly they played against Baltimore. After one week, Pittsburgh is dead last in DVOA, and has dropped to fifth in DAVE. The playoff odds report no longer favors Pittsburgh to even win its own division, although it is still a likely playoff team.

Each week, one or two teams will have a higher rating than their opponents, and lose anyway. It's more obvious early in the season, when only one or two games are actually going into each team's season rating. This week's "accidental losers" was Tennessee, which had a significantly higher VOA rating than Jacksonville. Way to play well at all the wrong times, guys. It's also interesting to note that Atlanta, even without any opponent adjustments to consider, has a rating above 0% and is only slightly lower than Chicago. The Bears recovered all five of the fumbles in the game, one for a touchdown, but the Falcons actually had more net yardage (386 to 377).

All stats pages are now updated with 2011 data except for OFFENSIVE LINE and DEFENSIVE LINE, which will be updated after Week 2. The FO Premium splits database will also be updated for 2011 after Week 2, next Tuesday. Right now the default stats pages still point to 2010, but we'll be fixing that soon; to get 2011 stat pages, add "2011" to the end of the URL.

Please be aware that the special teams ratings are going to be somewhat sketchy until we can fully get a handle on what the kickoff move to the 35-yard line is really going to mean to average kickoff returns.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through one week of 2011, 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 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>