Week 4 DVOA: Buffalo Bills Greatest 3-1 Team Ever

Daniel Kelley wrote yesterday about the NFL storylines we would be talking about if Weeks 1-2 had never happened. Well, what if just Week 1 had never happened? If the Buffalo Bills had not lost to the Zach Wilson-led Jets on Monday Night Football, would we be talking about them the way we talked about the Patriots dominating the league early in their undefeated 2007 season?

I’m serious about this. The 2007 Patriots won their first three games by a combined score of 114-35. Well, the 2023 Bills have won their last three games by the combined score of 123-33, and this week’s win came over a team that scored 70 points the week before.

Buffalo’s victory over Miami had a single-game DVOA of 107.5%, partly because this week we introduce opponent adjustments into DVOA for the first time. That’s the best single game any team has played so far in 2023. The Bills were already No. 1 in DVOA through three weeks, and this big win boosted their rating into the stratosphere. The Bills now have a DVOA of 59.1%, one of the highest ratings ever through four games. In fact, the Bills are the best 3-1 team we’ve ever tracked since 1981, moving ahead of the great 1996 Green Bay Packers.

(Asterisks on this table represent teams that had an early bye week, so the listed DVOA is the rating after Week 5 instead of Week 4.)

Obviously, it’s great to be this dominant early in the season. You would rather be a good team than a bad one! But it’s remarkable to note that being No. 1 in DVOA through four weeks doesn’t assure you of anything. The No. 1 team after Week 4 has not won the Super Bowl since the 2009 New Orleans Saints. In the 90s, most teams that dominated early went on to win it all. The No. 1 team in DVOA after Week 4 went on to win the Super Bowl in 1990, 1991, and every year from 1995 to 1999.

Recently, a lot of teams that ranked No. 1 at this point were Super Bowl losers, such as last year’s Eagles and the 2018 Rams. Most teams that win the Super Bowl are in the top five or six at this point, but the recent Patriots sort of screw that up. The last four Super Bowl champions were all in the top five after Week 4, but the Patriots ranked 24th, 19th, and 18th in 2014, 2016, and 2018, respectively.

There are five teams that currently rank in the top 10 for DVOA on both offense and defense. Buffalo and San Francisco are two of them. The third team is the red hot Detroit Lions, who climb six spots to No. 3 this week and rank in the top five for both sides of the ball. Their Thursday night victory over Green Bay was huge, with a single-game DVOA of 78.3%. The fourth team is a bit of a surprise, the Baltimore Ravens. They’ve gone a bit under the radar this year, in part because people aren’t expecting as much from them with all their injuries, but the Ravens move up four spots this week to No. 4. Their defense has been excellent this season, currently ranked fourth. Their offense is 10th. The biggest surprise might be that their special teams are just 26th. The Ravens are always good on special teams, so that’s going to improve.

The fifth team that is in the top 10 for both sides of the ball is Philadelphia. The Eagles are sixth overall, ranking seventh on offense and 10th on defense. It feels like they’re not playing as good as they really can, doesn’t it? The results have still been excellent. They’re undefeated, of course. Our preseason projections did expect a little regression from the Philadelphia defense, and the defense has in fact regressed a bit.

One spot below the Eagles you’ll find the Miami Dolphins. They drop five spots from No. 2 to No. 7 this week. I know that EPA models have the Dolphins higher, usually behind just the Bills. I’m guessing some of the difference here is that the new version of DVOA down-weights the big fourth quarter Miami had against Denver when the Dolphins were already winning 49-13.

The Bills mostly slowed down the Dolphins offense, which had just 6.2% DVOA this week, but the Dolphins were so good in the first three games that they still rank among the best offenses we’ve ever tracked through the first month of the season.

By the way, a few people have asked me about the 1999 Redskins and how on earth they end up on top of this list instead of all-time great offenses such as the 2013 Broncos or the Greatest Show on Turf Rams. Washington put a 50-burger on the New York Giants in Week 2 and scored 35, 27, and 38 points in the other three weeks to start the season. They only had one other game over 30 points all year (48-22 vs. Chicago in Week 8) but that start was enough to make Washington, not the Rams, the No. 1 offense of 1999 in the new version of DVOA. (The Rams take a big hit from a very easy schedule and another hit from adjustments for playing so many games indoors. Also, their defense was really good and helped the offense look even better than it really was.)

Stephen Davis had a monster year in 1999 and scored nine touchdowns in those first four games! His 526 rushing DYAR for the season are tied for the second-most all time even though Davis was inactive for the last two games of the regular season. (Terrell Davis has the No. 1 rushing season in 1998 and his 1997 season was tied with Stephen Davis; Jonathan Taylor’s 2021 is fourth.)

Back to 2023: A couple of surprise teams are big risers in this week’s rankings. The Houston Texans move up 10 spots from 21st to 11th, and C.J. Stroud is having an absolutely fantastic start to his career. Houston ranks 14th on offense right now, but that’s dragged down by a running game that ranks 30th. The Houston pass offense DVOA is fifth in the league! The Texans only trail the Dolphins, 49ers, Bills, and Lions.

Also impressive are the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bucs are close to average but that’s still a lot better than anyone expected. They move up six spots to 13th this week and currently rank sixth on defense.

On the flip side, the New Orleans Saints drop seven spots to No. 18 after losing to Tampa Bay. Other teams falling big this week include the Patriots (from 14 to 20), the Packers (from 12 to 21), and the Steelers (from 17 to 25).

Finally, I’ve got one more table to share. Last week, the Denver Broncos had the fourth-worst defensive DVOA ever through three games. Then they let Justin Fields and the terrible Bears offense score 28 on them. So now, the Broncos stand as the worst defense we’ve ever tracked through four games.

I’ll be writing more about these teams in an article on ESPN+ later this week.

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If you’re an FTN Stats+ or Fantasy+ subscriber, make sure to check out the new Historical DVOA Archive page. We’re going to be adding all kinds of DVOA data in the coming weeks. Right now you can download a workbook with DVOA for every team going back to 1981. You can download pace and drive stats going back to 1993. And you can download player stats and team splits for 2016-2022, with more years coming.

We’ve also added 2023 drive and pace stats to our page for subscribers. These will be updated every Tuesday afternoon. Thanks again to Jim Armstrong, who compiled these stats for me when I ran Football Outsiders and is still doing so for FTN.

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These are the FTN DVOA and DAVE ratings through four 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.) Opponent adjustments are currently at 40% strength.

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.

DAVE is a formula which combines our preseason forecast with current DVOA to get a more accurate projection of how a team will play the rest of the season. DAVE is currently 70% preseason forecast and 30% actual performance.