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NFL Divisional – The San Francisco 49ers continue to lead the NFL in our weighted DVOA ratings after a win over Dallas that was bigger than the final score indicates. After adjusting for the quality of the Cowboys, the 49ers ended up with 61% DVOA for the game, putting them close to the dominating victories by Philadelphia (74%) and Cincinnati (78%) earlier in the weekend.
That big Cincinnati victory moves the Bengals up and the Bills down, which puts the next three teams after San Francisco very close together. Kansas City and Cincinnati, in fact, are now tied in weighted DVOA before they face each other next Sunday in the AFC Conference Championship.
This year’s NFL final four contains four of the top five teams from the regular season and four of the top five teams in weighted DVOA including the playoffs. The Buffalo Bills are the odd man out. That means that there has still never been a year where the top four teams in DVOA all made it to the conference championships. That’s part of the fun of the NFL playoffs! In fact, there’s never even been a year where the top two teams in each conference ended up in the two conference championship games, even if those teams weren’t the top four teams overall.
It’s sad to see Buffalo go, as it is surprisingly rare in recent years for the No. 1 team during the regular season to actually win the Super Bowl. (It last happened with the 2016 Patriots.) DVOA got some criticism over this during the weekend, but it wasn’t alone. Pretty much every advanced metric had the Bills as the No. 1 or No. 2 team going into the playoffs. They were No. 1 before this weekend by regular-season DVOA, ESPN FPI, and Pro Football Reference’s Simple Rating System. They were tied for No. 1 with Kansas City in PFF ELO. They were second to San Francisco in Pythagorean Wins and weighted DVOA, and they were second to Kansas City in 538 ELO. The Bills were also higher than the Bengals in EPA/play on both offense and defense during the regular season. Sometimes, you just get outplayed… and as we pointed out in the Monday livestream, outcoached as well.
The final four teams are very balanced according to the Vegas odds, with all four given roughly 25% chance to win it all. At BetMGM, for example, they’ve got the Chiefs at +250, Bengals at +260, Eagles at +270, and 49ers at +280. Our playoff odds simulation prefers the NFC teams but also comes out very close, with all four teams listed between 21.2% and 29.4%. I was asked this morning on Twitter whether this is the most balanced final four we’ve ever seen by DVOA. The answer is no, but it’s a very balanced final four depending on which version of DVOA you want to look at.
Based on regular-season DVOA, this is the most balanced final four in nearly 25 years. I went back and looked at the standard deviation of DVOA for the last four teams in each season, all the way back to 1981. The most balanced year of all was 1997, where all four teams finished the regular season between 26% and 30% in DVOA. Then came 1986, 1998, and 2022 is fourth. Here’s a look at the closest final fours since 1981 by regular-season DVOA, with the eventual Super Bowl champion of each year in bold:
| Closest Final Fours by Regular-Season DVOA, 1981-2022 | |||||||||||||
| YEAR | STDEV | RK1 | TM1 | DVOA1 | RK2 | TM2 | DVOA2 | RK3 | TM3 | DVOA3 | RK4 | TM4 | DVOA4 |
| 1997 | 1.5% | 1 | DEN | 29.9% | 3 | GB | 29.1% | 4 | SF | 27.5% | 5 | PIT | 26.7% |
| 1986 | 3.5% | 4 | NYG | 19.9% | 5 | DEN | 19.0% | 8 | WAS | 15.0% | 9 | CLE1 | 12.3% |
| 1998 | 3.8% | 1 | DEN | 32.2% | 2 | NYJ | 28.0% | 3 | MIN | 27.4% | 6 | ATL | 22.9% |
| 2022 | 4.1% | 2 | SF | 27.6% | 3 | PHI | 25.2% | 4 | KC | 23.0% | 5 | CIN | 18.1% |
| 1981 | 4.1% | 2 | DAL | 18.2% | 3 | SD | 17.1% | 5 | CIN | 16.4% | 12 | SF | 9.2% |
| 2009 | 4.3% | 6 | NO | 25.2% | 7 | MIN | 22.8% | 8 | IND | 17.0% | 9 | NYJ | 16.5% |
| 2020 | 5.0% | 2 | TB | 31.5% | 3 | GB | 25.8% | 4 | BUF | 23.8% | 6 | KC | 19.6% |
| 1990 | 5.0% | 1 | NYG | 30.6% | 2 | LARD | 24.1% | 3 | BUF | 23.0% | 7 | SF | 118.5% |
Which final was was the least close, you might ask? The answer is 1991. Not only was Washington the best team ever measured by DVOA, but the other three teams included Buffalo (fourth), Denver (13th), and Detroit (15th).
We can also look at which final four was closest going into the conference championships by looking at weighted DVOA. These ratings include the first two rounds of the playoffs and discount early-season games. Since they include fewer games, they naturally have a wider spread and higher standard deviation. I don’t have these ratings as handy as regular-season DVOA, but I did go back and look at the last dozen years. Because San Francisco has pulled out to a big lead in weighted DVOA with its fantastic late-season performance (not to mention dropping Week 1 out of the formula), the 2022 season is not the closest final four by weighted DVOA, even in just the last dozen years. Instead, the closest final four of the last dozen years was 2018. The 2022 final four comes out third in this group.
| All Final Fours by Weighted DVOA after Divisional Round, 2011-2022 | |||||||||||||
| YEAR | STDEV | RK1 | TM1 | DVOA1 | RK2 | TM2 | DVOA2 | RK3 | TM3 | DVOA3 | RK4 | TM4 | DVOA4 |
| 2018 | 4.7% | 1 | KC | 33.7% | 4 | NE | 25.7% | 5 | NO | 25.7% | 6 | LAR | 22.8% |
| 2015 | 7.1% | 3 | CAR | 36.8% | 5 | DEN | 25.3% | 6 | NE | 22.4% | 7 | ARI | 21.1% |
| 2022 | 7.3% | 1 | SF | 43.9% | 3 | KC | 32.4% | 4 | CIN | 32.4% | 5 | PHI | 26.3% |
| 2020 | 9.6% | 1 | BUF | 42.6% | 2 | GB | 41.1% | 3 | TB | 40.3% | 6 | KC | 22.3% |
| 2016 | 9.7% | 1 | NE | 46.5% | 2 | ATL | 31.0% | 3 | PIT | 27.4% | 5 | GB | 24.9% |
| 2011 | 10.4% | 2 | NE | 34.9% | 5 | SF | 22.4% | 11 | NYG | 15.9% | 13 | BAL | 10.9% |
| 2017 | 10.9% | 1 | NE | 39.0% | 2 | MIN | 39.0% | 7 | PHI | 24.2% | 9 | JAX | 17.3% |
| 2013 | 11.2% | 1 | SEA | 47.6% | 3 | DEN | 30.7% | 5 | NE | 26.8% | 7 | SF | 21.9% |
| 2021 | 11.9% | 2 | KC | 33.4% | 3 | LAR | 32.7% | 5 | SF | 25.8% | 12 | CIN | 7.8% |
| 2014 | 12.8% | 1 | SEA | 42.6% | 2 | NE | 36.8% | 3 | GB | 30.3% | 10 | IND | 13.0% |
| 2019 | 15.6% | 3 | KC | 44.3% | 4 | SF | 39.7% | 5 | TEN | 31.5% | 10 | GB | 9.1% |
| 2012 | 17.0% | 2 | NE | 48.9% | 4 | SF | 31.6% | 9 | BAL | 14.7% | 11 | ATL | 112.3% |
As always, the following rules apply for postseason DVOA ratings:
- All 32 teams are ranked, whether they made the playoffs or not.
- Teams are ranked in order of weighted DVOA, not total season DVOA. Since weighted DVOA is meant to lower the strength of older games, these ratings do not include Weeks 1-5, and Weeks 6-13 are somewhat discounted.
- The ratings listed do not include the adjustments used in the ratings for our playoff odds report. Right now, Philadelphia is adjusted to account for the two Gardner Minshew games and Kansas City is adjusted to try to account for the Patrick Mahomes injury.
- Only weighted DVOA is listed for offense, defense, and special teams. Total DVOA is also listed, but adding 10 games to a 271-game sample won’t change things very much.
- Teams are treated as having a bye week in any week where they did not play. Since most teams haven’t played in two weeks, that means some of the ratings for non-playoff teams can start getting a little unreliable. Really, this is only to be used for playoff teams, the other teams are just there for ranking comparison purposes.
- DVOA, as always, takes a long-term view of an NFL team’s performance. That means that the games of the last two weeks are just two games among many, so teams may be listed below other teams that they have beaten in the playoffs.
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To save people some time, we remind everyone to put their angry troll hatred into the official zlionsfan angry troll hatred Mad Libs form:
<team> is clearly ranked <too high/too low> because <reason unrelated to DVOA>. <subjective ranking system> is way better than this. <unrelated team-supporting or -denigrating comment, preferably with poor spelling and/or chat-acceptable spelling>
If you are new to our website, you can read the explanation of how DVOA is figured here. As always, positive numbers represent more points so DEFENSE is better when it is NEGATIVE.
Teams in yellow are still alive in the playoffs. Teams in gray lost this past weekend.
Click here for a look at full-season DVOA with offensive and defensive splits.
Here’s a look at the single-game DVOA ratings for the divisional round. Kansas City comes out essentially tied with Jacksonville after applying opponent adjustments, but had the higher rating before that. However, the Kansas City-Jacksonville game was much closer than the other three games this weekend. Yes, the San Francisco game with Dallas had a close final score, but DVOA does not think the game was close at all. The 49ers had more yards per play, a higher success rate on offense, better third-down efficiency, and fewer turnovers. The 49ers ended up with 98.5% in our Post-Game Win Expectancy formula.
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