by Aaron Schatz

The prodigal sons have returned! DVOA's favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles, have finally returned to the top of our ratings this week thanks to a big win over the rival Dallas Cowboys. The Eagles have had the best record in the league for a couple weeks now, and most observers ranked them as the top team in the NFL. DVOA had them just below the top until now. The Eagles were No. 3 last week but slip ahead of New Orleans, which remains at No. 2. Last week's top team, the Los Angeles Rams, drops to fourth after losing to the Minnesota Vikings, who are fifth.

The Eagles are also our new Super Bowl favorites according to the playoff odds report, although their odds of making the playoffs aren't quite at 100 percent yet. The Eagles still miss the playoffs in a grand total of 24 out of 50,000 simulations.

The Eagles are on top of a very packed group of extremely well-balanced teams. Earlier this year, I wrote about a lack of historically great teams, and that 2017 was a particularly condensed year for the ratings. Not anymore. After big wins by the Eagles and Steelers, we now have four teams with total DVOA over 30%. That is very rare. Only twice in the past 25 years have there been at least four teams at 30% or higher as of Week 11. Only five times before this year were there even three teams ranked that high:

1996: Green Bay (8-2, 41.1%) / Dallas (6-4, 31.6%) / Denver (9-1, 30.1%)

Green Bay (8-2, 41.1%) / Dallas (6-4, 31.6%) / Denver (9-1, 30.1%) 2004: Pittsburgh (9-1, 41.2%) / New England (9-1, 38.3%) / Philadelphia (9-1, 32.2%) / Indianapolis (7-3, 31.1%)

Pittsburgh (9-1, 41.2%) / New England (9-1, 38.3%) / Philadelphia (9-1, 32.2%) / Indianapolis (7-3, 31.1%) 2005: Indianapolis (10-0, 33.7%) / San Diego (6-4, 32.7%) / Denver (8-2, 32.4%)

Indianapolis (10-0, 33.7%) / San Diego (6-4, 32.7%) / Denver (8-2, 32.4%) 2009: New England (7-3, 39.4%) / Indianapolis (10-0, 34.7%) / Philadelphia (6-4, 30.7%)

New England (7-3, 39.4%) / Indianapolis (10-0, 34.7%) / Philadelphia (6-4, 30.7%) 2012: San Francisco (7-2-1, 41.7%) / New England (7-3, 39.3%) / Denver (7-3, 38.4%) / Seattle (6-4, 34.4%) / Green Bay (7-3, 31.1%)

San Francisco (7-2-1, 41.7%) / New England (7-3, 39.3%) / Denver (7-3, 38.4%) / Seattle (6-4, 34.4%) / Green Bay (7-3, 31.1%) 2017: Philadelphia (9-1, 34.5%) / New Orleans (8-2, 32.5%) / Pittsburgh (8-2, 31.4%) / Los Angeles Rams (7-3, 31.1%)

Philadelphia (9-1, 34.5%) / New Orleans (8-2, 32.5%) / Pittsburgh (8-2, 31.4%) / Los Angeles Rams (7-3, 31.1%) Honorable mention: In both 1990 and 1993, with only 28 teams in the league, the No. 3 team after Week 11 was at 29.9%.

The other notable fact about the top five teams this year, including those four plus the Minnesota Vikings, is how well-balanced they are between offense and defense. All five teams currently rank in the top eight for both units. There has never been a season that finished with five different teams ranked in the top eight for both offense and defense. Obviously, this season might not end that way either. Four different seasons ended with four teams ranked in the top eight for both units, and the most recent was only two years ago. Arizona, Carolina, Kansas City, and Seattle all ranked in the top eight on both sides of the ball in 2015. However, not a single team was this well-balanced last year.

Behind the five well-balanced teams are the significantly unbalanced teams. The New England Patriots move up to No. 6 this week. The Patriots have the best offense in the league, and are now third on special teams. Yet they are still near the bottom of the league in defensive DVOA, even after giving up just 12.5 points per game for the last six games. New England drops a place back to 31st this week, although there's just a rounding error difference between the Patriots and No. 30 Miami. What's going on here? I've devoted a lot of writing to the Patriots defense this year, but let's do it again, since DVOA's rank for the Patriots is so much different from conventional wisdom.

There's somewhat of a gap between the three worst defenses and the rest of the league, and the Patriots were really, really horrendous over the first four games. So each week, the Patriots' defensive DVOA gets a little bit better, but their rank doesn't improve, so it doesn't look like things are getting better if you only look at DVOA rank. Based on current opponent adjustments, New England had 27.9% defensive DVOA in Weeks 1-4, but that has improved to 11.9% in Weeks 5-11.

A lot of what looks like defense is actually the offense and special teams putting the defense in excellent field position. The Patriots are the worst defense in the league in terms of yards per drive, but they also have the second-best average starting field position on defense.

The Patriots have had some really good luck, especially with opponent field goal kickers missing field goals. That means fewer points scored against them. There have also been some well-timed fumbles, such as the Austin Seferian-Jenkins play.

The Patriots once again have a "bend but don't break" defense. There's almost no year-to-year consistency for defenses that are much better in the red zone compared to overall, but the Patriots seem to be the exception. That's worth its own separate article. The difference isn't as big as you might think this year, though: the Patriots are 17th in DVOA in the red zone.

We're punishing the Patriots for giving up yardage once the game is effectively over. There's something to this argument. The Patriots currently have 10.6% defensive DVOA in quarters 1-3, but 36.6% defensive DVOA in the fourth quarter. Of course, both of those figures rank 30th in the league. As we often point out: DVOA compares teams to a league-average baseline, so the Patriots in a "prevent defense" late-game situation are getting compared to other teams in a "prevent defense" late-game situation. And our past research has showed that removing or lowering the importance of fourth-quarter plays actually makes DVOA less predictive unless the game is significantly out of hand, by over three touchdowns. But we can always take time in the offseason to research this again.

No. 7 is now Jacksonville, with Baltimore at No. 8. In Weighted DVOA, giving less strength to the first couple games of the season, the teams are switched. Baltimore has now passed the Jaguars as the No. 1 team in defensive DVOA, and the Ravens are also No. 1 in special teams. That's how Baltimore is so high in DVOA even though the offense is still horrid. The Ravens have a more balanced defense than the Jaguars, although Jacksonville has significantly improved against the run since picking up Marcel Dareus. They've gone from 32nd to 24th against the run, and are still No. 1 against the pass. As of right now, the Jaguars would rank as the No. 5 best pass defense ever measured by DVOA, trailing the 2002 Bucs, 1991 Eagles, 1986 Bears, and 1988 Vikings.

Baltimore is No. 2 against the pass and No. 10 against the run. However, the Baltimore defense is also No. 1 in variance. Baltimore has three shutouts this year, but were average on defense in a lot of their other games.

This is where we get into one of the other known issues with DVOA, which also plays a role in Philadelphia climbing to the top spot this week. When we compute opponent adjustments, those adjustments are based on performance over the full season. That creates a complication when major injuries significantly change the quality of a unit. There's a big difference between the Green Bay Packers with Aaron Rodgers at quarterback, and the Packers with Brett Hundley. The adjustments for Baltimore in last week's game are based on a combination of the two. There's a big difference between the Dallas offense with Ezekiel Elliott and Tyron Smith, and the offense without Elliott and Smith. The adjustments for the Eagles shutting down the Dallas offense are based on the full season, and most of those games had Elliott and Smith on the field.

Unfortunately, trying to do different opponent adjustments based on injuries like this presents a number of issues. We've written about this in the past, and I will again now. There are reasons why we don't try to adjust for injuries, and instead tell readers that you simply have to use common sense to understand when the ratings might be heavily influenced by a game against backups.

Do we only adjust for backup quarterbacks, or for all positions? If we adjust for all positions, what do we do about positions where it is extremely difficult to determine the value of a specific player? We do occasionally make adjustments in the ratings we use for the playoff odds, but this is mostly guesswork except for the quarterbacks.

If we adjust for more than one player, what do we do about the crossover of multiple players being injured? How do we adjust defenses facing the Dallas Cowboys offense when Tyron Smith comes back but Ezekiel Elliott is still suspended?

How do we adjust if we only have one or two games of sample size to see how well a team plays without a certain player? What if the backup has a surprisingly good game, like in Week 3 of 2015 when Luke McCown started in place of Drew Brees and completed 31 of 38 passes for 310 yards?

Even if we could figure out how to answer these questions, we run into the problem of programming the whole thing. We're not really computer programmers around here and we still do a lot of our numbers in very old-school Excel.

So, with that in mind, there's no question that the Ravens are ranked a little higher because they got to shut out two backup quarterbacks. On the other hand, the effect of a single game with the Packers is smaller than you might think, and we probably could have a good debate about whether we should even consider Miami with Matt Moore at quarterback to be an easier offense to play than Miami with Jay Cutler at quarterback. This is going to continue to be a problem because the Ravens will get the Houston Texans with Tom Savage this week, and the Texans opponent adjustments are based in part on games with Deshaun Watson at quarterback. We just need to keep this in the back of our minds rather than taking the numbers as gospel.

No matter whether DVOA is overrating their defense or not, the Ravens are in the driver's seat for an AFC playoff spot. Their remaining schedule ranks 24th in average DVOA of opponent, and four of those six games are at home. The Ravens are very likely to finish with a winning record. Only five AFC teams have winning records right now. The only second-place team with a winning record is Tennessee, and the Titans have a head-to-head win over Baltimore, but the Ravens have a big advantage over anyone else in the wild-card race. The other 5-5 team is Buffalo, which has completely imploded in the past three weeks. After that, we're talking about 4-6 teams, and the Ravens have head-to-head wins over Cincinnati, Oakland, and Miami. So the FO playoff odds simulation gives Baltimore a 74.8 percent chance of making the playoffs, even though there's only a 3.0 percent chance of the Ravens winning the AFC North. If we were to compute Baltimore's defensive DVOA using only Green Bay games with Brett Hundley at quarterback, it wouldn't even drop their playoff odds below 70 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 18. This year, our content for Madden Ultimate Team on consoles comes monthly, while our content for Madden Mobile comes weekly. Come back to each Tuesday's DVOA commentary article for a list of players who stood out during the previous weekend's games. Those players will get special Madden Mobile items branded as "Powerline, powered by Football Outsiders," beginning at 11am Eastern on Friday. Our stars for Week 11 are:

G Joe Berger, MIN (HERO): Berger anchors a line that had its 6th game without giving up a sack in Week 11 against the Rams.

Berger anchors a line that had its 6th game without giving up a sack in Week 11 against the Rams. P Chris Jones, DAL: No punts returned, three punts downed inside the 15.

No punts returned, three punts downed inside the 15. OLB Matt Judon, BAL: 2 sacks, TFL with forced fumble, tackle to prevent conversion after third-and-4 reception.

2 sacks, TFL with forced fumble, tackle to prevent conversion after third-and-4 reception. WR Kenny Stills, MIA: No. 2 among WR in DYAR for Week 11 (7-of-8, 180 yards, TD).

No. 2 among WR in DYAR for Week 11 (7-of-8, 180 yards, TD). G Xavier Su'a-Filo, HOU: Texans RB had 22 carries, 84 yards and a 68 percent success rate on runs up the middle.

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All stats pages should now be updated through Week 11, including snap counts, playoff odds, and the FO Premium DVOA database.

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These are the Football Outsiders team efficiency ratings through 11 weeks of 2017, 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.

WEIGHTED DVOA represents an attempt to figure out how a team is playing right now, as opposed to over the season as a whole, by making recent games more important than earlier games.

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 WEI.

DVOA RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 1 PHI 34.5% 3 37.6% 1 9-1 16.0% 3 -15.1% 4 3.3% 11 2 NO 32.5% 2 33.9% 2 8-2 25.7% 2 -9.0% 8 -2.1% 22 3 PIT 31.4% 4 30.4% 4 8-2 14.8% 6 -16.8% 3 -0.2% 18 4 LARM 31.1% 1 32.6% 3 7-3 9.6% 8 -14.2% 5 7.3% 2 5 MIN 26.0% 5 25.9% 5 8-2 16.0% 4 -9.5% 7 0.5% 15 6 NE 17.5% 7 19.4% 6 8-2 28.9% 1 18.2% 31 6.9% 3 7 JAC 16.3% 6 15.7% 8 7-3 0.1% 16 -21.9% 2 -5.7% 27 8 BAL 15.1% 14 16.2% 7 5-5 -16.6% 29 -23.7% 1 8.0% 1 9 CAR 13.8% 9 14.9% 9 7-3 -1.5% 18 -11.9% 6 3.4% 10 10 KC 11.7% 8 6.2% 12 6-4 15.0% 5 10.0% 25 6.6% 5 11 DET 10.8% 10 9.1% 11 6-4 2.9% 14 -1.1% 17 6.8% 4 12 SEA 8.9% 11 11.2% 10 6-4 0.3% 15 -7.5% 9 1.1% 14 13 WAS 5.6% 15 2.8% 16 4-6 8.6% 10 0.0% 19 -3.0% 24 14 GB 4.0% 12 4.1% 15 5-5 3.6% 13 -0.6% 18 -0.2% 19 15 DAL 3.7% 13 4.7% 14 5-5 7.7% 11 9.8% 24 5.8% 6 16 LACH 2.4% 18 5.2% 13 4-6 5.7% 12 -5.7% 11 -9.0% 32 TEAM TOTAL

DVOA LAST

WEEK WEI.

DVOA RANK W-L OFFENSE

DVOA OFF.

RANK DEFENSE

DVOA DEF.

RANK S.T.

DVOA S.T.

RANK 17 ATL 2.3% 16 1.3% 17 6-4 10.3% 7 6.8% 22 -1.1% 20 18 HOU -2.2% 17 -3.1% 18 4-6 -2.2% 20 -2.6% 16 -2.6% 23 19 TEN -9.7% 19 -13.4% 22 6-4 -1.4% 17 9.7% 23 1.4% 13 20 CIN -10.0% 22 -9.2% 19 4-6 -11.3% 23 -3.1% 12 -1.8% 21 21 OAK -11.3% 20 -12.0% 21 4-6 9.4% 9 22.5% 32 1.8% 12 22 CHI -13.4% 25 -11.5% 20 3-7 -10.0% 22 -2.9% 14 -6.2% 28 23 BUF -13.7% 21 -17.1% 25 5-5 -11.5% 24 6.2% 21 4.0% 7 24 DEN -14.9% 24 -17.3% 26 3-7 -13.0% 25 -6.8% 10 -8.7% 31 25 TB -15.5% 23 -16.8% 24 4-6 -1.8% 19 10.6% 27 -3.1% 25 26 ARI -18.0% 26 -16.5% 23 4-6 -13.8% 26 -2.8% 15 -7.0% 29 27 NYJ -20.4% 27 -18.1% 27 4-6 -16.3% 27 4.4% 20 0.3% 16 28 NYG -22.5% 29 -22.5% 28 2-8 -2.8% 21 11.4% 28 -8.3% 30 29 SF -25.6% 28 -25.3% 29 1-9 -16.4% 28 13.0% 29 3.8% 8 30 CLE -27.4% 31 -26.1% 30 0-10 -25.1% 32 -2.9% 13 -5.2% 26 31 IND -29.1% 30 -26.7% 31 3-7 -22.3% 31 10.5% 26 3.8% 9 32 MIA -36.6% 32 -37.1% 32 4-6 -18.5% 30 18.2% 30 0.2% 17

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).