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CLICK HERE to Register for a free account and login for a smoother ad-free experience. It's easy, and only takes a few moments.DVOA=trees.
Pts allowed=forest
Yardage allowed = er, nothing actually! LOL
Points allowed and points scored in the next 60-minute game = stat that matters.
Trouble is, that stat is always in the future
Any formula that has the current patriot defense rated 16th is out of touch with reality.
Here is the problem with ANY set of statistics or indexes or whatever.Problem is, people are trying to quantify this game with isolated stats, which they are doing in a vacuum.
That works to some degree with baseball and hoops, team sports that have a high degree of one- on- one matchups.
That is obviously not the case with the NFL. The sheer # of players on O and D, the multiplicity of formations, schemes, etc. not to mention that all these moving parts are not independent but rely on other moving parts working in sync. Especially a unit like the ol. So in NFL football, its about the gestalt. The #1 gestalt us W's followed by pts scored and pts allowed.
The best metric for D I've seen is Bruschis defensive index, which is weighted for most value given to pts allowed (minus pts scored by sts and opp def)with 3rd down, red zone, turnovers and rushing ydge. Passing yds allowed is basically meaningless for a winning team-since good teams often have large leads and they give up a lot of meaningless garbage-time passing yds. But for BAD teams, passing yds are NOT meaningless. So you can't apply a lot of stats to every team in the same way.
Miami is a playoff team.The DVOA measures performance across an entire season. The #16 ranking reflects 15 games played, the strength of schedule at the time of each game, etc. So, the defensive meltdown in Miami registers, in the DVOA formula, as a defensive collapse against a crappy team.
Its crap.Adjusted DVOA adjusts strength of schedule to reflect the year end records rather than real-time records. Under adjusted DVOA, the Miami game hurts less because they are now considered a quality opponent. The adjusted DVOA also acknowledged that a team changes over the course of a year by weighting recent games more heavily, thus the jump from #16 to #6.
In any case, its an artificial and convoluted statistic used to generate web hits.
Giants defense is light years ahead of everyone else according to this ranking. So one would assume they can win ugly and make it to the Super Bowl.
Just how good is this Pats defense?
Problem is, people are trying to quantify this game with isolated stats, which they are doing in a vacuum.
That works to some degree with baseball and hoops, team sports that have a high degree of one- on- one matchups.
That is obviously not the case with the NFL. The sheer # of players on O and D, the multiplicity of formations, schemes, etc. not to mention that all these moving parts are not independent but rely on other moving parts working in sync. Especially a unit like the ol. So in NFL football, its about the gestalt. The #1 gestalt us W's followed by pts scored and pts allowed.
The best metric for D I've seen is Bruschis defensive index, which is weighted for most value given to pts allowed (minus pts scored by sts and opp def)with 3rd down, red zone, turnovers and rushing ydge. Passing yds allowed is basically meaningless for a winning team-since good teams often have large leads and they give up a lot of meaningless garbage-time passing yds. But for BAD teams, passing yds are NOT meaningless. So you can't apply a lot of stats to every team in the same way.
So you can't apply a lot of stats to every team in the same way.
Here is the problem with ANY set of statistics or indexes or whatever.
First, there is nothing accounting for matchups, schemes and strengths and weaknesses.
The best team against the Giants may not be the best team against the Seahawks. The best offense against Pittsburghs defense may not be the best offense against Baltimores, or Oaklands.
Different offenses have different schemes and different players to execute those schemes. How a defense does vs the Patriots may have very little to do with how it does vs the Packers. Smaller quicker OLs will be best vs some defenses and worse vs others. etc, etc, etc.
Even after you get beyond that, you still end up with the fact that the game is about who scores the most points and there are 1000s of variables that go into who scores the most points that no statistical model could possibly account for, much less begin to assume how to properly weight.
If you want to determine who would win in computer simulations, then you can use stats, but on a real football field, DVOA doesn't exist when the ball is snapped.
I don't think BB gives a crap whether poor technique that let a receiver release inside, or a defender cross the face of an OL, or a player commit a penalty because he was out of position, means DVOA is affected. Football is not about accumulating statistics, or going back and evaluating a game based on what happened at what time and comparing it to other situations to come up with a cumulative total grade of plays. Football is about one on one battles, about getting the ball in the end zone, or keeping it out of the end zone, separating the ball carrier from the ball, exploiting the other teams weaknesses, calling the right play at the right time, and dozens of other things that don't show up in a geek analysis of stats.Interesting post. I agree with you, but IMHO, there is another reason that a statistical analysis of football is more difficult and less effective than other sports: Sample Size. It is much easier to perform a meaningful statistical analysis of a large number of events than a few.
The sport that has been statistically analyzed for the longest time is baseball, where metrics such as batting average have been used for over a century. More recently, sophisticated empirical analysis of baseball statistics (sabermetrics) were used to build teams as described in "Moneyball". Why did this work so well with baseball? Well, there are 162 games per regular season and something like 146 pitches per game per team. Thus, there are over 46,000 plays per season, a very large sample size of plays, so lucky or unlucky "bounces of the ball" are mostly averaged out.
More recently, advanced statistical analysis has been used with basketball. Basketball has 82 games per regular season and something like 90 shots per game per team, so that is almost 15,000 plays per season, once again a fairly large sample size. Statistical analysis of basketball players and games has recently been used effectively also.
What about NFL football? There are only 16 games per regular season and about 65 snaps per team per game, which is only about 2000 plays per season. That is a much, much smaller sample size, and it means that "the way the ball bounces" is not averaged out over a season the way it does with baseball or basketball because of the smaller sample size. I'm sure that BB and his group of Rocket Scientists (Patricia) and brainiacs have their own statistics that they keep and specialized team analysis of those statistics, it isn't BB's way to not take every edge he can gain. But, as you point out, statistics are just not as reliable with football, I suspect that BB mostly relies on "the eye test" as he watches film.
The DVOA measures performance across an entire season. The #16 ranking reflects 15 games played, the strength of schedule at the time of each game, etc.
Quantum Mechanic is now disliking the definitions used by his beloved statistical model. LOL.Basically they give a score, based upon a scale they created, to each play, ten add up all those scores and say that these scores should determine who is a better football team.
They include things such as:
or this
Ultimately its an attempt to take a game that isn't about statistics and make it about statistics, so the flaws are inherent.
Quantum Mechanic is now disliking the definitions used by his beloved statistical model. LOL.
So you really think that NFL teams use crap like DVOA to tell them if their team is any good?No, I'm disliking your asinine remarks about stats in general. You do realize that most or all NFL teams have analytics departments and FO (and other stats organizations your massive GM-ing experience leads you to dismiss out of hand) occasionally have consulting contracts with NFL teams.
Passer rating is a terrible stat. Its parameters are random and make no sense.DVOA is a much better stat than most and usually passes the eye test.
Defensive SRS is another one I like, Pats are currently #5.
Another one is defensive passer rating. Pats are #7, although I wish I could find one that adjusts for the opposing QB.
It is a crap thing. It places value on the steps to get to a result over the result. If you are the defense that allowed the fewest points per game, by over 2 a game, you are not the 16th most effective defense. You are only that if someone places more value on things that do not deserve them.Also, DVOA is an objective stat in that FO created a data model and then regressed it against actual win/loss records and chose weighting factors to give the best correlation with W/L. It's not some crap thing like ESPN's QBR.