Final 2024 DVOA Ratings

The Baltimore Ravens finish the 2024 season on top of the FTN DVOA ratings, followed by the Detroit Lions. There’s a big gap between the top teams and the rest of the league but Green Bay, Buffalo, and Philadelphia fill out the top five.

Every year, we have to deal with teams sitting starters in Week 18 and this year is no different. As usual, I include all plays in the official DVOA ratings. That means that teams such as Buffalo and Kansas City drop this week while Denver moves up six spots from 12th to sixth. We’ll get to Denver’s big day in a little bit, but remember to adjust numbers in your head for teams that sat starters in Week 18. This is what I do in the ratings that go into the playoff odds report. Those ratings, for example, have Kansas City higher than Denver despite yesterday’s game. Here’s a look at the weighted DVOA for the 14 playoff teams with adjustments for Week 18 as well as two other games missed by Jalen Hurts in recent weeks, assuming he will return for the wild-card round.

The big surprise here is probably that the Minnesota Vikings come out lower than the Los Angeles Rams in weighted DVOA. In fact, the Vikings are lower in weighted DVOA even if we don’t remove Week 18 from the Rams. We’ll look at that more when we get to wild-card game previews later this week. (Or next week, because the Vikings at Rams preview will likely run on Monday.)

Ravens and Lions Lead 2024 DVOA Ratings

OK, back to the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens finished the season as the No. 7 team in DVOA history. As I noted a week ago, many people will be skeptical about this because two other recent Ravens teams (2019 and 2023) also appear on the all-time list of top DVOA teams, and those teams did not win the championship. It doesn’t help that the Ravens probably would have to go on the road for the Divisional Round and the AFC Championship. But for the regular season, the Ravens were excellent in the kind of statistical performance that usually indicates future success.

Now, here’s the other bad news for the Ravens. It has been over a decade since the top regular-season team by DVOA won the Super Bowl! Using the current DVOA formula, that team was the 2013 Seahawks. Most of the Super Bowl champions since then have ranked between third and fifth in DVOA for the regular season. The 2016 Patriots were second, the 2018 Patriots were seventh, and the 2015 Broncos were eighth. The top team in DVOA won much more often in the pre-salary cap era; for example, the No. 1 team in DVOA won the Super Bowl for five straight years from 1988-1992. However, this didn’t necessarily stop with the salary cap. The Super Bowl champion ranked either first or second in regular-season DVOA for 12 straight years from 1988-1999.

The most dominating unit for this year’s Ravens was the offense, which finishes as the fourth-best offense in DVOA history. Note that some of this is because DVOA does not include most penalties, and the Ravens had a lot of penalties this year. However, the Ravens also finished with 6.85 yards per play, which ranks third in NFL history behind only the 2000 Rams and the 1954 Rams, just ahead of the 2018 Chiefs. This table has every team that has finished with offensive DVOA above 30% since 1978:

Although the Lions finished behind the Ravens in the final DVOA ratings, they accomplished something very rare: they finished in the top five for all three units. The Ravens managed to do this last year, but not this year. The Lions are only the seventh team since 1978 to pull this off.

Denver’s Big Score

As noted earlier, the Kansas City Chiefs kind of messed up DVOA by sitting their starters and playing from a very limited playbook against Denver in Week 18. The Broncos won 38-0 and held the Chiefs to a miserable 3.0 net yards per play. Add in the opponent adjustments for playing Kansas City, and Denver’s win comes out as the third-best single game in DVOA history.

We all know their 38-0 loss was nonsense and doesn’t reflect at all on the actual Kansas City Chiefs, but because of that loss, the Chiefs finish the season as the biggest overachievers of the post-merger era according to Pythagorean wins, the formula that estimates wins and losses based on points scored and allowed. The Lions led the NFL with 13.3 Pythagorean wins, followed by Philadelphia and Baltimore. Kansas City was only 11th with 10.2 Pythagorean wins. Here’s a list of the biggest overachievers since the AFL-NFL merger:

This year’s biggest underperformers by Pythagorean wins were the three 5-12 teams, with the Jets and Bears projected with 6.7 wins and the Saints with 6.8.

Big Changes from 2023

Unlike 2022-2023, which saw an unusual amount of consistency in how good teams were from year to year, 2024 saw the usual amount of disruption with teams moving up and down the ranks compared to a year ago. Denver was one of those teams, thanks in part to that big Week 18 win moving them up six spots.

• Denver went from 24th last year to sixth this year.
• Minnesota went from 23rd last year to seventh this year.
• Washington went from 31st last year to 10th this year.
• Although they finished with a losing record, Arizona went from 29th last year to 12th this year.

As far as teams going in the other direction…

• San Francisco dropped from second to 14th, although that’s still a pretty good rating for a 6-11 team.
• Miami dropped from sixth to 21st.
• Dallas dropped from fourth to 24th.
• Jacksonville dropped from 10th to 26th.
• Cleveland dropped from eighth to 32nd.

The Browns finished particularly poor on offense. With DVOA of -31.7%, the Browns were the 12th worst offense in DVOA history. Remove the games started by Jameis Winston, and the Browns would have been the worst-rated offense in DVOA history at -45.7%.

The top four offenses belonged to the top four teams in overall DVOA, but in general defense correlated better with success this year. That’s a bit unusual. The top nine teams by defensive DVOA all made the playoffs, as did 11 of the top 12 defenses. Seattle at No. 10 was the exception, and they finished 10-7 and almost made it.

Philadelphia, Minnesota, and Houston were pretty tightly packed together as this year’s top three defenses. Carolina and Jacksonville were the worst defenses, then a gap and then the New England Patriots, whose defense collapsed to 30th.

As noted above, the Lions snuck ahead of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the final week to finish first in special teams. Dallas was third. The Tennessee Titans easily had the league’s worst special teams unit, although not historically bad as it looked at midseason.

Cleveland finished the year with the hardest schedule by average DVOA of opponent, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate that the worst teams had the hardest schedules. The second-toughest schedule belonged to San Francisco, with Chicago third. Miami had the easiest schedule by average DVOA of opponent, followed by Washington and Jacksonville.

More to Come!

We’ll review the best and worst player stats of the year in a special Quick Reads later this week. Then we’ll have playoff previews near the end of the week for the five games on Saturday and Sunday.

Please note that while this article is called “Final 2024 DVOA Ratings,” we will continue with postseason weighted DVOA ratings each Monday through the playoffs. There also may be small changes in the final 2024 DVOA ratings based on postseason changes to the play-by-play.

Full DVOA Table Through Week 18

These are the FTN DVOA ratings through the entire 2024 regular season. Our Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) system 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.)

OFFENSE and DEFENSE DVOA are adjusted for 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.

WEIGHTED DVOA gives more weight to recent games and less weight to early-season games to get a better idea of how teams are playing now. Unlike the ratings in our playoff odds report, these ratings are not adjusted to reflect teams sitting starters in Week 18.

LAST YEAR represents final 2023 rank.