NFL Week 6 NV: feels like I'm winning... nothing at all

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Sports Argument Stadium > The Football Funhouse > NFL Week 6 NV: feels like I'm winning... nothing at all

fsif: Jul 18, 2003

The problem with DVOA is that it's completely opaque and that even a decade in, they're still making things up as they go along.

quote:

Taking a big hit in the ratings and also in the rankings are the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills. Detroit falls from 11th to 12th with 30% adjustments and then down to 17th with 100% adjustments. Buffalo drops from ninth to 15th with both sets of adjustments. I will admit that those rankings feel a bit more in line with how these teams have played this year, suggesting that maybe we do need to incorporate opponent adjustments even after only three weeks of the season.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 13:26

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 20:38

fsif: Jul 18, 2003

Rooster Brooster posted:

DVOA includes two great ideas you don't get in "normal" stats - success rate and opponent adjustments.

Success rate being the number of times a play is successful, something like get 40% of needed yards on 1st down, 80% on 2nd down, 100% on 3rd or 4th down. That's a neat idea, since it weeds out plays such as when a draw on 3rd and 25 gets a running back 15 yards; it wasn't really successful, so the running back doesn't get much credit for it.

Opponent adjustments are also a good idea, it's the formal way of saying "Yeah, but they've only played Miami, Washingon, and the Jets so far, wait until they play a real team!"

The problem with DVOA is it takes these two basic, good ideas and mushes them into an opaque mega-Excel document. They also do this stuff with "greatest team of all time!" every year to fill content, and it almost always winds up being due to small sample sizes that vanishes by week 8 or 9.

I wish they'd just post success rate percentages and opponent-adjusted yards and left it at that; maybe they do have that info in their paid site I dunno. I have written too much about DVOA

Well said.

I like DVOA and think it's better than citing, like, just counting stats, but if their weekly ratings are so volatile and subject to pontifications about changing their calculation because they don't "feel" right, I'm not entirely sure they have much more intrinsic value than Dan Hanzus's power rankings.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 17:36

fsif: Jul 18, 2003

Subtle.

https://twitter.com/arifhasannfl/status/1182802849027252224?s=21

# ¿ Oct 12, 2019 15:00

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