So, a lot of people have sent e-mail or made comments in the FO discussion threads about our ratings, which still have Pittsburgh in the top 10 despite a 2-5 record. The complaints come in two flavors:

• We're wrong to say that things like fumble recovery, interception returns, and opposing kickoffs are random.
• One single game, Pittsburgh's blowout win over Kansas City, is screwing up our ratings and we need to figure out a way to count blowouts less.

At this point, we're done trying to convince the people making complaint number one, but the second comment is made by readers who generally get what we're trying to do at Football Outsiders. So let's talk about blowouts.

I've mentioned this a few times, and it comes up in our book, but I have tested the DVOA ratings numerous times in an attempt to minimize the importance of blowouts. Every single time, the ratings become less accurate. I'm still not personally convinced that the ratings are treating blowouts properly, but until I figure out a way to make them less important while also improving the ratings, I'm not going to take them out or change them in any way.

Furthermore, the Pittsburgh situation is really strange, and somewhat unprecedented. I went back to see if there had ever been a team where DVOA and record disagreed so strongly because of one big blowout win.  I decided to look at nine weeks, not eight, simply to save time -- I just ran every year through nine weeks as part of improving my midseason projection formula, so these numbers represent DVOA as it would have looked after nine weeks of that season, not how it looks at the end of the year when opponent adjustments are different.

Pittsburgh has a single-game DVOA of 94.7% for their victory over Kansas City. The next highest rating is 27.7%, for the overtime loss to Atlanta, and the Steelers also have positive DVOA ratings in their losses to Cincinnati and San Diego. They have one large negative, -42.0% for the loss to Jacksonville, and two small negatives for the win over Miami and the loss to Oakland. 

I went looking for other teams between 2000-2005 who qualified under these parameters during the first nine weeks of the season:

• One blowout win, defined by single-game DVOA of 75% or more;
• all other games with DVOA below 40%;
• but also, no blowout losses, defined by DVOA below -75%.

Nine teams qualify.

Two of them aren't good comparisons for the Steelers because they were terrible in pretty much every other game of the first half: the 2002 Vikings and the 2003 Jets. Those teams were also near the bottom of the league in DVOA despite one blowout win.

Other teams don't make good comparisons for Pittsburgh because even though they had one blowout that looked out of place on the schedule, they were winning their other games too -- often, with luck as good as Pittsburgh's has been bad. Teams like this include the 2005 Redskins, the 2004 Chargers, the 2001 Bears, and the 2003 Seahawks.

That leaves us with three teams that I think are somewhat good, but not great, comparisons for the 2006 Pittsburgh Steelers.

The 2005 Packers had five bad losses in their first six games. The other game was a 52-3 blowout over New Orleans. Then the Packers started to play better and narrowly lost in Weeks 8-9. At the time, people thought the 1-7 Packers were way too high in DVOA at -5.5%, I think they were ranked 21st if I remember correctly. The next week, of course, was the famous Football Outsiders Message Board Curse game where 1-7 Green Bay beat 6-2 Atlanta, which was ranked 20th.

The 2000 Green Bay Packers were 3-5 after nine weeks, with a DVOA of -5.5%. They had one huge 29-3 win over Arizona in Week 4, but they won their other two games by just 3 points each, and their losses were all very close: 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9 points. The Packers went 6-2 over the rest of the season, although they missed the playoffs.

The 2001 Tampa Bay Bucs were 4-4 after nine weeks, with a DVOA of 17.4% -- which was fourth in the entire NFL at the time, behind only St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Oakland. Those four Tampa losses came by 1, 3, 4, and 7 points and the wins came by 3, 4, 4, and 27 points. Which number does not belong? The Bucs went 5-3 over the rest of the season to slip into the playoffs as a wild card.

That's it.  There really never has been a team with a record as bad as Pittsburgh's and DVOA so high due in large part to one big blowout. One team had a record as bad (2005 Packers) but the DVOA rating wasn't anywhere near as high.  Two teams had DVOA ratings as high, but better records. All three teams won more games over the second half of the season.

The moral of the story, I guess, is that I think the Steelers are still a good team if they have a healthy quarterback, and it isn't out of the realm of possibility for them to finish the year 6-3 or even 7-2. Of course, that won't get them into the playoffs, but it will make things interesting.

Post by Aaron Schatz