FanShot

Advanced NFL Stats Efficiency Rankings: Dallas #1

3

The rankings are interesting. The comments are even better: This might sound cranky. If so, I apologize. You ask a very fair question. It's just tiring answering the similar questions every week when the answers are already provided. ESPN's power rankings? Seriously? As for DVOA, it's a measure of how well teams have played in the past. It's a black box based on tortured formulas designed to correspond with what everyone thinks already anyway. It's constantly chasing the previous year's numbers. (That should get the trolls going!) Do I personally think Dallas is the best team in the NFL? That's irrelevant. Do I believe that Dallas is the best team in terms of the facets of the game that are most predictive of future performance? So far, yes. Is that likely to change? Yes, to some degree. Should everyone take a second look at their opinion of Dallas? Absolutely. Would Dallas be 4-0 except for a couple very poorly timed turnovers? Yes. Besides, I shouldn't even have to answer these kinds of questions when all the necessary data is right there in the tables above. Off passing efficiency: 3rd Def passing efficiency: 7th Def run SR: 1st To-date strength of schedule: 2nd Again, sorry for the crankiness. Fair question. _________________________ Anonymous, who is it exactly that you are getting cross at here? It isn't like these represent a person's opinion and you happen to disagree with them, it in fact represents the outcome of a body of work that was performed in order to discover which statistics are most predictive of a team's chances of winning. It is not like Brian sits there each week and orders the teams, they have ordered themselves. Hell, you can hardly even say Brian chose the criteria, he simply tested the criteria against historical data to find which pieces were most predictive. He chose repeatable common instance statistics so that even though there are few games in a season, the information he uses is over far more data points than the number of games (or points), helping to remove an amount of noise in the data. No model is perfect, but Brian's has a key factor that your simple thought processes do not, it has convincing evidence. __________________________ If you want to see teams ranked by their record, go look at the standings. If you want to see teams ranked by how they are performing against the statistics that correlate with future wins, then these are a pretty good set of numbers for that purpose.