Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 3

The return of the team efficiency rankings comes with some important changes for 2014.  As most of you know, Brian revamped the win probability model for this year to provide more precise estimates in a greater variety of contexts.

This obviously holds big implications for the rankings, which are based on the generic win probability (GWP) of a particular team against an average team.  But more importantly, both are predictive models which emphasize factors that best suggest how likely a team is to fare in the future.  When one improves, the other should theoretically improve alongside it.

We'll keep an eye on that hypothesis as the season moves along.  Perhaps I'll write something at the end of the season comparing the accuracy of this year's model to 2013's.  For now, let's take a look at some of the most notable trends from the first rankings of 2014 (click here for a full explanation of the rankings methodology).

Final Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 17

Since these are the final efficiency rankings of the season, I thought I'd take a look at not only where we are, but where we've come from.  Here is a link to an interactive chart displaying the progression of each team's standing in the rankings, which the HTML editor was not very happy with when I tried to embed it in this article.

Instead of focusing on a couple teams as usual, we'll be more broad in evaluating the final rankings.  Consider this a mega-version of the quick hits section that typically ends each write-up.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 16

With only one more slate of games to examine, it's more useful to use our penultimate rankings write-up to examine the two do-or-die scenarios on the Week 17 schedule.

Well, technically there are still four more playoff spots available.  However, the Saints only need to beat the 4-11 Bucs at the Superdome to secure a wild-card berth (or better, if Carolina somehow stumbles against Atlanta).  And though Dallas is actually hosting Philly in their annual NFC East championship clash, Tony Romo's back injury is a devastating blow for an already inferior team. 

But the NFC North crown and the AFC sixth seed are much more competitive races.  Picking a team to win one of the last two golden tickets isn't simple, and among the six teams in contention, the one most likely to inflict damage in January is the least likely to make it that far.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 15

It's axiomatic to say that late-season momentum bodes well for a team in the playoffs.  That's a debatable statement in itself, one I'll probably explore further at the end of the season.

Of course, whatever momentum may or may not exist is totally irrelevant if the team does not actually make the playoffs.  The playoffs reward the teams that have performed best over the course of a 16-game season, but due to injuries and player development, the 16-game sample does not really accurately reflect team strengths by the end of the year.  It's why Football Outsiders has weighted DVOA to quantify a team's recent performance.

Looking at the second half of the season (since Week 9, though bye weeks make it tough to neatly divide up the schedule), we can see that one of the best second-half teams is highly unlikely to make the playoffs, and one of the worst is already in:

So what's changed?

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 14

It's never wise to pencil teams into the Super Bowl in December, but anything besides a Denver-Seattle showdown would be an upset at this point.  The two teams are currently co-favorites to win at 11-4; the Saints and 49ers are next in line at relatively distant 8-1 odds.

Of course, the top two seeds rarely meet in the Super Bowl.  The Colts-Saints matchup was the first one since 1993-94, when the Bills and Cowboys faced off.  Right now, it looks like a stretch envisioning either team falling at home, though the postseason's one-and-done format certainly helps.  Taking a closer look at these efficiency statistics, let's evaluate how far above the field the Broncos and Seahawks really stand.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 13

While the rankings are usually fairly in line with the eventual postseason picture, there seems to be one playoff team a year that throws a major curveball.  Last season, the 24th-ranked Colts rode a terrific record in one-possession contests to an 11-5 wild card berth, and in 2010 the 20th-ranked Saints faced off against the 29th-ranked Seahawks in a wildly entertaining first round game.

As you would expect, these types of teams are only fringe contenders, with far too many deficiencies to make a serious Super Bowl run.  Of course, we could easily have said that about last season's champs, who look like the favorites to become this year's postseason party crashers.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 12

The old adage that a championship team must "run the ball and stop the run" is out of date, as this site has expounded in great detail.  If it's true that today's NFL is a passing league (spoiler: it is), then the exact opposite of the original saying must be true, right?  It seems logical to assume that in order to win the Super Bowl, a team must be able to pass and stop the pass.

While the first part of that formula is likely true, the second part is a bit more ambiguous.  Super Bowl XLVI pitted two below-average pass defenses in the Giants and Patriots, but the year before, the Packers and Steelers met for the title with two of the three best pass defenses in the league.

Those are only two examples, but there's nothing that tells us that a super pass defense is absolutely essential to a Super Bowl champion or contender.  Of course, there's no denying that it helps—last year, only the Patriots, Redskins and Colts made the postseason with a negative pass D EPA.

Therefore, if we consider good pass defense an important but not indispensable quality, that bodes well for a contender who, despite this past weekend's results, is showing quiet improvement in that area.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 11 [Corrected]

[Edit: My personal apologies for a bug since 2 weeks ago that penalized teams who had already had their byes. (I believe) it's been fixed, and I've made the corrections to the rankings below. -B.B.]

Strength of schedule is a fickle variable, one that should tell us more about a particular opponent but really does not.  Though this formula does account for S.O.S, that's not always the best indicator of whether or not a team has faced "legitimate" competition.

Despite what Bill Parcells may have you believe, a team is not always what their record says they are.  They are often a flawed representation of late-game variance and fluky injuries, especially when you're splitting hairs among closely contested teams.  That's how you end up with Tampa Bay being the 20th-ranked team in Football Outsiders' DVOA despite entering the week a single win.

Still, there are instances where a team shows some pretty alarming splits among the haves and have-nots.  In the case of one likely playoff team, that makes for some troubling signs going forward.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 8

If you've read this column before, you know these rankings are all about cancelling out the noise of past perception and evaluating every team's performance based solely on their data from this season.  That does have some limitations, such as not being able to account for injuries, but once the sample size of games gets large enough, it's a fairly accurate predictor of future success.

Halfway through the season, there are no more huge swings waiting to happen.  That does not mean teams cannot rise or fall—last year, the 3-5 Bengals and Redskins made the playoffs while the 7-1 Bears and 6-2 Giants missed the dance—but the teams near the top are quite likely to stay there.

If we accept that, then perhaps we should start taking our new number team a bit more seriously.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 7

For the first time all year, the top 10 teams from last week remained the same.  In fact, no team moved more than five places in the efficiency rankings, the least movement we've seen so far.  This does not means things won't change, however, especially considering the spate of critical injuries we've seen the past couple of weeks.  Something tells me the Bears won't remain the ninth-most efficient passing offense with Josh McCown at the helm for the next month (#analysis). 

The top was not entirely constant, as only the top-ranked Seahawks, second-ranked Broncos and ninth-ranked Chargers remained in their spots.  The Bengals sitting at fourth looks a bit curious, but the majority of the top-10 seems fairly reasonable.  In fact, apart from the offensively-uberefficient Eagles, these rankings seem to agree with the mainstream perception.

However, there is one particularly curious disagreement, as the team at the top of the league standings is nowhere near the top of these rankings.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 6

Not much movement in the rankings this week, at least compared to the first three installations.  As I alluded to last week, the GWP gaps should start to solidify as the sample size becomes larger and teams separate themselves more definitively.

We can see that immediately in our top 10, where only the Lions fell out.  This does not necessarily mean a team outside the top-10 cannot become a legitimate contender of course—at this time last year, the Super Bowl champion Ravens were 11th, and eventual playoff participants Washington and Indianapolis were 22nd and 27th, respectively.  Four of the top 10 teams also finished outside the postseason.

To figure out who might fall into that ignominious category in 2013, let's take a look at two of the most likely teams to miss the playoffs, despite what their current ranking might suggest.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 5

Take a look at this week's rankings and you might notice happening: as we move away from the small sample size caveat, teams are beginning to stratify themselves by tiers.  Not only does this allow ESPN talking heads to scream about whether or not teams are "elite," but it also begins to validate some early-season surprises.

Most tellingly, we can see the separation in the top 10 teams, and not simply because 10 is a nice round number highlight shows like to use.  Removing the ridiculous outlier that is the Denver Broncos, and all the teams from second-ranked Seattle to 10th-ranked Cincinnati have a GWP somewhere in between 0.67-0.59.  The 11th-ranked Jets immediately drop off to 0.55, providing a convenient mark-off point.

Examining the top 10, there's one team in particular that few believed in before the season, but now looks like a viable contender.

Team Efficiency Rankings: Week 3

Though three games seems like an insufficient sample size, we've already zoomed our way through nearly one-fifth of the NFL season.  No one should be making any sweeping coronations or condemnations yet, but it is also time to stop resting on one's laurels and start evaluating which teams might become relevant contenders.

That brings us to the first team efficiency rankings of the 2013 season.  For those who need a refresher, these rankings consider passing, running, turnover and penalty efficiency to create a logistic regression model.  Using these values of team efficiency, we can determine the Generic Win Probability (GWP), a theoretical measure of a team's long-term true winning percentage.  For more details, check out Brian Burke's explanation from the start of last season.

Again, three games is hardly a significant sample size.  And as you might expect, that has led to some wacky results thus far.

2012 Team Efficiency Rankings - Final *Corrected*

Correction--There was a bug in the ointment the first time around posting the rankings this week. These numbers have been updated with the correct

There are a few sore thumbs every year in the rankings. A few weeks ago I wrote about how the then 2-8 Panthers were much better than their record indicated. Since then, they went 5-1 to finish 7-9. Do I think CAR is really the 4th best team in the league? No. But they were the 4th most efficient on offense and defense in 2012.

The following week I wrote about how the Ravens were a mystery. They were ranked 19th in the rankings but held a 9-2 record. I was grasping to explain their good fortune. Maybe no explanation was needed, as BAL went 1-4 since then. (1-3 if we throw out week 17's loss in fairness.)

It might seem like I'm cherry picking the model's 'hits' and ignoring its 'misses.' I'm obviously not pointing out how the model ranked PHI 2nd in its first iteration after week 3. Oops, I guess I just did. But it's not week 3 anymore, and we have a lot more information now.

There is one more sore thumb to be addressed. That's the 11-5 Colts, who are ranked 24th in efficiency. Their Generic Winning Probability (GWP) is 0.44, which if correct would make an 11-win record highly unlikely. It's very possibly they're better than 24th, but notice that their opponent average GWP is 0.46, so despite a low efficiency ranking, we should not be too surprised to see IND end up its winning record.

[Edit: 0.46 Opp GWP might not seem like much, but that's not far from the equivalent of having an additional home field advantage effect for every game, ...if that makes any sense.]

Team Efficiency Stats - Week 17

Who's surprised by the suddenly dominant Seahawks? Not readers of ANS, who saw that SEA was ranked   5th in adjusted team efficiency as far back as following week 9, when they were 5-4 and on almost no one's radar. After week 7, the model had them ranked 6th in the league. I'm obviously cherry picking one example, but that's really the value of this sort of model. We can see where it diverges from actual wins and losses to ask questions and maybe learn something we didn't know before. In this case, we could see that SEA was improving from week to week, had faced one of the toughest schedules in the early season, and was quietly putting together a very solid season.

Here are the team efficiency rankings heading into week 17. See the second table below for the raw inputs. Click the table headers to sort.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 15

NE moves up a couple spots and HOU slips a couple spots after Monday night's blowout. CAR and BAL remain the two big curiosities. Is CAR really the 3rd best team in the league? Well probably not, but they are the 3rd most efficient and definitely much better than their record indicates. Is BAL really the 21st best team? Again, probably not but they certainly are the 21st most efficient. They've dropped two straight games for the first time in the Harbaugh-Flacco era and are now 9-4. They face DEN, NYG, and CIN to finish the regular season, and all three opponents are playing much better than BAL lately. It's plausible that the once 9-2 BAL finishes the season losing six straight games, five regular season losses to finish 9-7 but squeaking into the playoffs to lose in the wildcard round. Unlikely but plausible.

Here are the rankings headed into week 15. Click on the headers to sort. Raw efficiency stats are in the second table below.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 14

Very little movement this week.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 12

Let's play a game. It's called Guess Who Won. Team H was at home hosting Team V. Team H threw for 7.5 YPA with no interceptions. Team V threw for 5.0 YPA with 2 interceptions. The adjusted YPA was 7.5 for team H and 3.2 for team V. Each team lost one fumble and had the about the same sack yards. Team H was outrun by team V, by 167 yds to 97. But both team's run SR were within 2% of each other. Also, team H had 133 return yards (not counting kickoffs) compared to only 15 for team V.

Which team won?

Extra hint: Before the end of 60 minutes, Team H scored 3 TDs compared to Team V's 2 TDs.

Extra, extra hint: Team V received a kickoff down 8 points with a 0.05 WP with 6 minutes to play, needing a TD and a 2-pt conversion just to tie. And by the way, Team H has a (statistically) above average defense so far this season.

Guess who won! If you guessed Team V, you're correct. TB beat CAR in OT.

My point is not to find a sniveling weasel-like excuse for the efficiency model's ranking of CAR as a top 5 team despite it's 2-8 record. (Ok, you got me, that's partially why I'm pointing this out.) The other reason is far more interesting.

What team does CAR remind you of in terms of GWP vs actual record? It reminds me a lot of the San Diego Chargers from a couple years back. SD had gaudy stats across the board. The efficiency model had them ranked exceptionally high week after week, but they defied the probabilities and found ways to lose games despite having better athletes and very often better bread-and-butter performance on the field than their opponents.

I am not saying the model is the true measure of a team and therefore any significant deviations are statistical flukes. I'm suggesting the opposite. There are significant factors not captured by the model, and one of those factors is Panthers head coach and former Chargers defensive coordinator Ron Rivera.

Admittedly I don't follow the Panther's from play to play and game to game, so I won't jump to conclusions.  but to those out there who do follow Carolina, please tell me why he should be kept on as the head coach.

Here are this week's rankings. As always click on the headers to sort. Team efficiency inputs can be found below.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 11

The equation here is pretty simple. Take a solid defense. Add Peyton Manning. You get a team that's very hard to beat.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 10

Week 10 already. The season seems like it's flying by. The biggest mover this week is PHI. They started the season high on the rankings. Their defense looked very strong, and their offense was moving the ball. The only thing holding them back was turnovers, which tend to regress very strongly. Well, they haven't in PHI's case, meanwhile their pass protection has collapsed and their defense has regressed to league average.

CAR is still the mystery team, so let's take a quick look at why a 2-win team is ranked 4th. They have the 4th most efficient passing offense, league-average run success rate, and a better than average offensive turnover rate. They have an above average defense, ranked 11th in both the run and pass--which makes them much better than 11th, by the way. Plus, CAR has a slightly better than average penalty rate. Add in that they've faced the 4th toughest schedule so far, and they look like a team that should win nearly 2 out of every three games.

Here are the efficient rankings for week 10. Click on the headers to sort. The efficiency components of the model are in the second table below.