Week 17 DVOA: Ravens No. 3 All-Time

What more is there to say about the Baltimore Ravens? They destroyed the Miami Dolphins yesterday, 56-19, putting up 126% DVOA for the game. Last week, I noted that the Ravens were the first team to ever have three single games in the same season with DVOA over 100%. They are now the first team to ever have four single games in the same season with DVOA over 100%.

The Ravens had a passing DVOA over 200% for this game, only the eighth time in DVOA history that has happened. You probably won’t recognize most of the games on the list of the highest pass offense DVOA ratings for a single game, because they are mostly games with very high efficiency on very few attempts. For example, Ben Roethlisberger threw only 12 passes in the game listed on the table below! The games you do remember are the ones that ended up with the most DYAR, because that’s a total value stat and features games with lots of yards and touchdowns. That list has legendary performances such as Patrick Mahomes against Buffalo in the 2021 divisional round or Kurt Warner against Green Bay in the 2009 wild-card round. This list has some surprising games, but hey, Peyton Manning is still here twice. Yards per play here includes sacks and scrambles.

The Ravens’ win moved them higher on my list of the best teams in DVOA history. We’ve now reached 16 games, which means that we are mostly comparing the Ravens (and the San Francisco 49ers) to teams that completed full seasons. That’s good because both of those teams are likely going to sit many of their starters in Week 18 and our final DVOA ratings will be a little marred by the appearance of Tyler Huntley and Sam Darnold.

Baltimore now ranks third in DVOA history behind only the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1991 Washington Redskins. Longer-time readers may remember Washington as the best team in DVOA history and wonder why New England is now on top. The new version of DVOA introduced this year moved the 2007 Patriots ahead of the Redskins for the regular season, but Washington (and the 1985 Chicago Bears) still moves ahead of the Patriots when we include the playoffs.

You’ll notice, of course, that not all the teams on this list won the Super Bowl. They didn’t all make it to the Super Bowl. There is a lot of randomness in the playoffs when one bad day ends your season. No matter what metric you use to measure teams historically, you’ll find a number of all-time great teams from the regular season that did not win it all. That will definitely happen this year because the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers can’t both win the Super Bowl even if one of them manages to finish the job. If you’re looking for more Super Bowl winners, the next 10 teams on this list include the 2004 Patriots, the 2013 Seahawks, the 1992 Cowboys, the 1998 Broncos, and the 1989 49ers.

Here’s the insane Ravens week-to-week chart for your enjoyment. They have only one game under 0% all season, a 17-10 loss to Pittsburgh in Week 5.

The Rams’ Abominable Kicking Game

As long as we’re talking about great teams and units, we should talk about a really bad unit. The Los Angeles Rams clinched a playoff spot yesterday but DVOA is less impressed with the team as a whole. The Rams are currently only 18th in DVOA. They rank seventh on offense, 22nd on defense, and this is what we really want to talk about… dead last in special teams. They are way, way, way behind the rest of the league in special teams DVOA.

This year’s special teams units are very closely grouped together. Some of that is because of the changes in the kickoff rules in recent years, which basically take away the chance to get any real field-position value out of kickoffs. So the No. 1 special teams unit this year is Philadelphia at 4.3%. That is the second-lowest DVOA ever for a team to rank No. 1. Only the 1992 Lions were lower at 4.0%. The tightly packed teams include the bottom of the league, too. The New England Patriots rank No. 31 in special teams but they’re only -3.4% and they just had a kick return for a touchdown yesterday. That’s really not much of a gap between the Eagles and the Patriots.

And then there are the Rams. The Rams are last at -9.8% DVOA. The Rams are nearly three times as negative as the No. 31 Patriots. In this year where special teams are super packed together, the Rams currently come out as the sixth-worst special teams unit ever measured by DVOA. They have been killed all year by terrible placekicking and atrocious punt coverage. They’ve allowed two touchdowns and then 10 other returns of 15 or more yards. (Tampa Bay has allowed 13 such returns, the most in the league, but no touchdowns.) We’ll see if this comes back to haunt them in the playoffs, but it nearly cost them a win against the Giants yesterday.

Beware the Bears

There’s a bit of an assumption that Week 18 is going to work out the way everyone expects, with teams that need wins to get into the playoffs getting those wins. Surely the Steelers will beat a Ravens team that is sitting starters, right? And the Packers should easily handle the Chicago Bears and get into the seventh spot in the NFC, yes?

Not necessarily.

First of all, teams sitting starters do not just lay down and die. Those backups play hard too, and there are going to be some starters in the game for the Ravens (and San Francisco 49ers and probably Cleveland Browns). The best example I always bring up is 2004, when the Bills just needed to beat the Pittsburgh backups in Week 17 to make the playoffs. They failed and instead they rank as the best team to ever miss the playoffs by DVOA. The Ravens have even done this to the Steelers before. In 2019, the Ravens sat Lamar Jackson and let Robert Griffin start against the Steelers in the final game. The Steelers were 8-7 and still had slim playoff hopes at the time. Griffin and the Ravens beat the Steelers 28-10.

The Bears are a different issue because while nobody was looking, they went and became a good football team, especially on defense. The Chicago Bears are now seventh in the league in weighted DVOA. The Bears! The weighted DVOA formula thinks they are currently stronger than Detroit, Cleveland, or the Los Angeles Rams, who are getting a lot of “team nobody wants to play in the postseason” talk. Here’s the Chicago week-to-week graph and you can see the upward trend:

As I noted last week, this is not the work of Justin Fields. Fields has been better since he returned from an injury but he still hasn’t been very good, yesterday’s game being an exception. The Bears rank 16th in weighted offense compared to 21st in offense overall. No, this is defense. The Bears rank fifth in the league in weighted defense DVOA. Since Week 9, the only defenses which have been better are Baltimore, Cleveland, and San Francisco.

Even with the game at Lambeau Field, and even with Jordan Love playing very well of late, there’s no guarantee that the Packers are marching into the playoffs. Their rivals from Chicago will be there to try to stop them and they’re more dangerous than anyone realizes.

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These are the FTN DVOA ratings through 17 weeks of 2023. 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.

Please note that we had an error with our playoff odds simulator yesterday where it did not recognize Sunday’s three 4pm games. We’re trying to fix that now but the currently listed playoff odds are incorrect.