by Aaron Schatz

Once again, it is time for postseason DVOA ratings. As always, the following rules apply:

All 32 teams are ranked, whether they made the playoffs or not.

Teams are ranked in order of weighted DVOA, not total season DVOA. Since weighted DVOA is meant to lower the strength of older games, these ratings do not include Weeks 1-5, and Weeks 6-11 are somewhat discounted. "Last week" here refers to last week's rank in weighted DVOA, not total season DVOA.

Teams are treated as having a bye week in any week where they did not play. Since most teams haven't played in two weeks, that means some of the ratings for non-playoff teams can start getting a little unreliable. Really, this is only to be used for playoff teams, the other teams are just there for ranking comparison purposes.

DVOA, as always takes a long-term view of an NFL team's performance. The games of the last two weeks are just two games among many, so teams may be listed below other teams that they have beaten in the playoffs.

Since we've been writing a lot again these last couple weeks about the question of weighted DVOA vs. total DVOA, and which is more accurate for predicting the postseason, this year I'm including total DVOA in the postseason DVOA ratings table. The total DVOA listed below adds the eight postseason games in with all 256 regular-season games. Obviously, adding eight games into a sample of 264 games doesn't change things much.

Of course, if you scroll down the page to the full ratings, you will notice something really strange: the top three teams are all teams that lost this weekend, not teams that won. There are a handful of reasons why this is the case.

First, remember what I just said about taking a long-term view of an NFL team's performance. Kansas City's loss to New England was just one game; it adds information to what we knew about a Kansas City team that won 11 straight games, but it doesn't mean those games didn't happen. Likewise, New England's strong performance against the excellent Kansas City defense was definitely a positive indicator for the Patriots offense going forward, but it doesn't mean the offense didn't struggle in December. We know the return of Julian Edelman was probably a big part of the improvement, but DVOA only measures the plays on the field. We don't adjust it for every single injury; that's what common sense is for, and why we write commentary rather than having a website that consists of nothing but tables of numbers.

Second, weighted DVOA ratings can sometimes seem a little screwy because of the weights we use and the specific timing of when games drop in importance. (That's something we test every couple years, so there's always a chance we'll change that weight system in the future.) For example, the last game of Kansas City's 1-4 start drops out of weighted DVOA this week. (Yes, it was actually a 1-5 start, but I've written a few times about how the Chiefs actually had a really high DVOA in Week 6 despite losing to Minnesota.) There's also a drop in weight for Week 11, which happened to be the first of Carolina's real blowout wins (44-16 over Washington) and the first week Brock Osweiler started at quarterback for Denver and started to pull the Broncos' offensive DVOA out of last place.

Third, this week's games did not come out with DVOA ratings that necessarily matched the final scores. On the field, all four games were close, six or seven points. However, when we break down the play-by-play, DVOA scores three of the games as so close that the team with the better DVOA (or VOA without opponent adjustments) actually lost, while the Kansas City-New England game "should have" been more of a blowout.

Here are the one-game DVOA ratings for the divisional round:



DVOA (with opponent adjustments) TEAM TOT OFF DEF ST KC -10% 5% 24% 10% NE 74% 60% -10% 3% GB 39% 7% -37% -4% ARI -10% -18% -3% 5% SEA 53% 47% -3% 4% CAR 33% 30% -7% -4% PIT 32% 41% -1% -10% DEN 30% 3% -6% 20% VOA (no opponent adjustments) TEAM TOT OFF DEF ST KC -30% -1% 38% 10% NE 55% 48% -4% 3% GB -2% -14% -17% -4% ARI -12% -23% -6% 5% SEA 15% 18% 7% 4% CAR -4% 14% 15% -4% PIT 13% 14% -10% -10% DEN 8% -5% 7% 20%

I know I'm going to hear it from Carolina fans now. I hope they understand that the purpose of DVOA is not to enable me to say mean things about the Carolina Panthers. I'm sure that's the biggest DVOA shock among the four games, so let's take that one first. The most important thing to understand about this game is that Carolina got a 31-0 lead but did not actually win the game by that score. I know this seems like a simple statement but it's hard to really understand because the narrative in our minds is "Carolina blew Seattle out of the water from the first snap of the game." Which is true, but only for 30 minutes, and you have to play 60. Everything Seattle did in the second half is just as important as what Carolina did in the first half. This is the insane breakdown of DVOA in the first and second halves of that game:

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Seattle and Carolina DVOA, 1H vs. 2H TEAM TOT OFF DEF ST SEA 1H -62% -41% 16% -5% CAR 1H 140% 44% -88% 8% SEA 2H 149% 110% -29% 9% CAR 2H -59% 7% 54% -12%

In the end, this game ended up exactly what we would have expected beforehand: two really good teams playing a close game, won by the home team. It looked like a laugher for a while, but if you look at all 60 minutes, it wasn't. And remember, DVOA is primarily a measure of efficiency, and Seattle was actually much more efficient over the entire course of the game. The Seahawks averaged 6.2 yards per play compared to just 4.6 yards per play for the Panthers. That's somewhat balanced out by turnovers, because Russell Wilson threw two interceptions. Carolina didn't have any turnovers, but that's partly because the Panthers fumbled twice and recovered both of them. (One was a muffed punt, which is normally recovered by the return team, so that's not a big penalty in DVOA.)

Similar issues were at play in Pittsburgh's loss to Denver. The Steelers gained 6.7 yards per play compared to just 4.6 yards per play for the Broncos. Even more than in the Carolina-Seattle game, fumble luck ended up the differentiator. There were four fumbles, but three of them were plays normally recovered by the team that fumbles: an aborted snap by Denver and two muffed punts by Pittsburgh. The fourth was the Fitzgerald Toussaint fumble, and that was more of a 50-50 shot. It just happened to go straight into the arms of DeMarcus Ware, and that essentially turned into the difference between two evenly matched performances.

The final game along these lines was Green Bay-Arizona, where both teams averaged the same 5.8 yards per play. Carson Palmer threw two picks, Aaron Rodgers only one. Again, fumble recovery luck played a role, as there was only one fumble in the game, when Nick Perry sacked Carson Palmer, but Palmer recovered it himself. The Green Bay-Arizona game also has a much bigger gap in DVOA than in VOA because Green Bay was clearly the worst of the final eight teams over the course of the entire season.

Back to those Carolina fans who are so angry with Football Outsiders: the irony is that we now have Carolina is a very clear favorite to win Super Bowl 50. What I kept writing during the season was that the Panthers were not the historically dominant team that an almost-undefeated season would suggest, but they were clearly one of the very good teams in a year where there were a number of very good (but not historically great) teams. Well, the Panthers are now the standout team from that group of teams. The teams that dominated the second half of the season alongside the Panthers ended up wild cards and lost on the road this week. The teams that dominated the first half of the season alongside the Panthers generally faded in the second half of the year, which is why Arizona ended the regular season only slightly ahead of the Panthers and New England was behind them. The other team left, Denver, was generally behind Carolina all year because the Broncos were winning entirely with defense.

It doesn't matter anymore if Carolina was the best team over the course of the year, because the Panthers are the best team left and they get home field this week. What we have here is a really good team with a really good head coach, a lot of likeable players, and a fan base whose only professional championship is a Stanley Cup nine years ago won by a team that plays 100 miles from Charlotte. If I end up having to constantly spend the rest of my career having to explain that the 2015 Panthers, despite the 15-1 record, are a "best team of the year" like the 2008 Steelers instead of a "best team of all-time" like the 1985 Bears, it's not the worst thing in the world.

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You will find DVOA matchup pages for the AFC and NFC Championship Games on the FO Premium page.

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The following items will be updated later Monday night: snap counts for the divisional round, and scores in the Football Outsiders 2016 Playoff Fantasy Challenge. When those are updated, you will find the standings and all scores here. Note that there was an error with Alex Smith's score last week -- it was related to the errors that had Kansas City's DVOA against Houston listed too high -- and so that's been fixed in the scores now. If you can't find your team, you might be one of the teams that was entered without a name. In that case we should still have your e-mail to contact you if you end up winning.

We also have not finalized our Madden Ultimate Team content for next weekend, so I can't announce those players now. We'll announce that in a separate post on Tuesday.

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To save people some time, we remind everyone to put their angry troll hatred into the official zlionsfan angry troll hatred Mad Libs form:

<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>

If you are new to our website, you can read the explanation of how DVOA is figured here. As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.

Teams in yellow are still alive in the playoffs. Teams in gray lost this past weekend.