{"id":143871,"date":"2022-11-30T11:21:08","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T11:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/bengals-climb-past-dolphins-with-titans-win\/"},"modified":"2022-11-30T11:21:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T11:21:08","slug":"bengals-climb-past-dolphins-with-titans-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/bengals-climb-past-dolphins-with-titans-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Bengals Climb Past Dolphins with Titans Win"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NFL Week 12 – <\/b>Which teams moved up and down on the top of the DVOA table this week? The answer depends if you’re looking at DVOA rating or DVOA ranking.<\/p>\n

As Mike Tanier explained in his DVOA preview article yesterday, available to FO+ subscribers, this is how we ended up with the paradox where the Miami Dolphins easily beat the Houston Texans but actually dropped one spot from seventh to eighth in DVOA. Their rating went up from 12.6% to 14.8%, but their ranking dropped because another team happened to go up more: the Cincinnati Bengals, who moved from 10th to sixth after beating a better opponent (Tennessee) than the Dolphins.<\/p>\n

(Houston Texans aside: Houston had -86.3% offensive DVOA in this game, the second-lowest individual offensive game this season behind only Indianapolis getting destroyed by Jacksonville back in Week 2. It would have been worse if Miami didn’t relax with a big lead, as Houston had -181.6% offensive DVOA and 1.3 yards per play before halftime. Kyle Allen is not the answer.)<\/p>\n

Returning to a discussion of good teams, Baltimore’s DVOA stayed exactly the same after their close loss to Jacksonville but the Ravens got to move up a spot from third to second because the Dallas Cowboys fell after a close Thanksgiving win over the New York Giants. The Cowboys dropped from 29.1% to 26.0% this week and from second to fourth behind both Baltimore and Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

There were some bigger moves further down on the table. The New York Jets climbed from 13th to ninth after getting a more than competent offensive performance from Mike White against the Chicago Bears. Even after adjusting for the poor Chicago defense, currently 31st in the NFL by DVOA, the Jets had the best offensive performance any team this week and their best offensive performance of the year. That moves their offense up to 18th overall to go with a defense that now ranks fourth behind only Dallas, New England, and Buffalo.<\/p>\n

Seattle dropped from eighth to 12th this week after losing to Las Vegas in overtime. The Raiders had the higher DVOA for the game (13.0% to -13.4%) although the Post-Game Win Expectancy formula has the game as a 50\/50 result. The Raiders move up three spots from 26th to 23rd.<\/p>\n

The two teams that won this week on last-second two-point conversions also won with reverse PGWE. The Jaguars had only 13% PGWE against the Ravens, although they still move up slightly in DVOA. The Chargers had 26% PGWE against the Cardinals and drop two spots to 24th in DVOA, making them the lowest team with a winning record this season.<\/p>\n

Speaking of winning teams with low DVOA, The Minnesota Vikings had a slightly higher DVOA than New England for their Thanksgiving night win, 2.4% to -0.6%. What can I say, running into the kicker penalties don’t count in our ratings. The Vikings moved up slightly in DVOA and now rank 22nd. They are the first team to ever have a negative DVOA with a 9-2 record, more than 10 percentage points lower than any other 9-2 team since 1981. <\/p>\n

Fun with Divisions<\/h3>\n

In our latest playoff odds simulation, the entire NFC South has a losing record 34% of the time.<\/p>\n

The entire NFC East has a winning record 53% of the time, and the entire division makes the playoffs 17% of the time.<\/p>\n

The entire AFC East has a winning record 60% of the time, and the entire division makes the playoffs 15% of the time. That 60% mark is impressive considering that the four AFC East teams rank second, fourth, fifth, and sixth in strength of remaining schedule. Primarily this comes from playing each other, since all four AFC East teams are now ranked 11th or higher in DVOA.<\/p>\n

Has any division ever put all four teams in the top 10 of DVOA since we went to the 32-team setup in 2002? Actually, yes, this happened just last year! The 2021 NFC West had all four teams in the top 10 with three teams making the playoffs and then Seattle ranking higher in DVOA than their 7-10 record suggested. The division ended up with the 12-5 Rams (5), 10-7 49ers (6), 7-10 Seahawks (9), and 11-6 Cardinals (10). This was the second division to put all teams in the top 10. The other was the 2016 NFC East, with the 13-3 Cowboys (2), 7-9 Eagles (6), 11-5 Giants (8), and 8 -7-1 Redskins (9). That high DVOA for the Eagles made more sense when the team won the Super Bowl the following season. <\/p>\n

How Good is Kansas City Anyway?<\/h3>\n

I wanted to say a little bit about Kansas City this week because it keeps standing out that DVOA only has the Chiefs ranked fifth in the NFL. This stands in contrast to other advanced metrics around the Internet, most of which are based on expected points added (EPA) models. Pro Football Reference’s Simple Ratings System is an exception, based on just points scored and allowed, and it has the Buffalo Bills way ahead of the rest of the AFC. But most models have the Chiefs on top.<\/p>\n

The question here is figuring out just how good the Kansas City offense is and how good it will be going forward. I’ll look here at the EPA model from NFLfastR, displayed on the RBSDM.com site. Nobody is arguing about whether the Chiefs are the best offense in the league, but the question is just how far ahead they are. DVOA has the Chiefs only slightly ahead of the Miami Dolphins in the second spot. EPA has the Chiefs way, way ahead of the rest of the league. The gap in EPA per play between the Chiefs and the No. 2 Bills is larger than the gap between the Bills and the No. 13 Raiders. Other EPA models such as TruMedia’s have an even larger gap<\/a> between the Chiefs and everybody else.<\/p>\n

Looking closer, it appears that this gap between DVOA and EPA is related almost entirely to third downs, in particular passes on third downs. (I mean just third downs here, not including fourth downs.) Kansas City is averaging 10.3 net yards per pass on third downs compared to an NFL average of 5.8. No other team is above 8.0 net yards on third downs. So the Chiefs are averaging 0.66 EPA per play on third-down dropbacks with the Bengals second at 0.47. Yet because of the way DVOA scores certain long plays, the Chiefs aren’t even on top of DVOA for third-down passing! They rank third behind Miami and Cincinnati. Without opponent adjustments, they would be second behind the Dolphins.<\/p>\n

The difference also seems to come from games in the first few weeks of the year, not the last month and a half. You may remember that in Week 7 against San Francisco, the Chiefs had one of the best offensive performances in DVOA history. In Weeks 7-12, the Chiefs actually come out more impressive by DVOA than by EPA\/play. The Chiefs have 39.1% DVOA for that period compared to 29.7% for the Dolphins and 27.0% for the Bengals. Compare this to EPA\/play, where the Chiefs are at 0.209 for Weeks 7-12 and the Bengals are right behind at 0.202.<\/p>\n

However, in Weeks 1-6, EPA\/play has the Chiefs much higher than DVOA. The Chiefs led the league with 0.185 EPA\/play during the first six weeks, ahead of the Bills at 0.173 with no other team above 0.11. Compare this to DVOA, where the Chiefs rank only fourth for Weeks 1-6 behind Buffalo, Baltimore, and Miami. (Without opponent adjustments, the Chiefs would be second in Weeks 1-6. That’s a better comparison for EPA since EPA does not have opponent adjustments. Still, the Chiefs and Bills in Weeks 1-6 were much closer to the rest of the league in DVOA than they were in EPA.)<\/p>\n

I could say we’ll have to see which metric is correct but the honest truth is that what happens the rest of the season doesn’t really prove either metric correct. It would not be a surprise to see the No. 1 team in EPA lose in the playoffs. It happens plenty! It also would not be a surprise to see the No. 5 teams in DVOA win the Super Bowl. It happened just last year! So we won’t prove anything. But the difference between the metrics is interesting, and I’ll continue to tweak DVOA in the future to make it more predictive. <\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Football Outsiders playoff odds, snap counts, and the FO+ database are now all updated through Week 12.<\/p>\n

A reminder that all our free stats pages, including DVOA and player position stats, require registration to view. This is not a paywall*! You only need to register (for free) and then log in to the site to view these pages. While you’re at it, you can get a seven-day trial of FO+ and check out the FO+ features like a deeper DVOA database, weekly fantasy projections, fantasy football research tools, Derrik Klassen’s All-32 game preview column, and picks against the spread (now including projected totals for over\/unders).<\/p>\n

*New: It’s not a paywall, except<\/strong> ten Mondays! We now post DVOA data on Monday instead of waiting until Tuesday as in the past. If you want to see data from the current season on Monday, including all of Sunday’s games, you will need to be an FO+ subscriber. On Tuesday morning when we post the update with Monday Night Football added in, all of the free stats pages become free again. The exception is snap counts, which are available to everyone Monday.<\/em><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

This is the Football Outsiders Top 16 through 12 weeks of 2022, 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). Click here for the full table.<\/p>\n

OFFENSE and DEFENSE DVOA are adjusted for opponent and performance indoors and 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.<\/p>\n

WEIGHTED DVOA<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n

To save people some time, please use the following format for all complaints:<\/p>\n

is clearly ranked because . is way better than this. <\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n