NFL Standings Ordered by Total DVOA: Who Leads the League?

The 2024 NFL season is now five games old, and it's a good time to take stock of the league landscape. A month and change of football is a large enough body of work to draw definitive conclusions in some ways—like the Kansas City Chiefs being fine as long as they have Patrick Mahomes, or the New England Patriots being one of the worst teams in the NFL.

There's still plenty of football to be played and a lot can change, but we're now far enough along that we have a general idea of who these teams are.

To help further identify the contenders, bottom-feeders and everyone in between, it's useful to look at advanced statistics. No matter where you fall on the analytics spectrum, it's undeniable they are a useful and sometimes fun way to take a different angle on how teams are performing. They help capture the full picture in ways a simple win-loss record cannot.

To that end, we wondered: what would the NFL standings look like if they were ranked by Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, or DVOA?

What is DVOA and why does it matter?

For those who have yet to be introduced, DVOA is a metric initially hosted on Football Outsiders that aims to identify how much better or worse a team performs relative to league average. The stat now resides on FTN Fantasy, and is explained thusly:

"DVOA is a method of evaluating teams, units, or players. It takes every single play during the NFL season and compares each one to a league-average baseline based on situation. DVOA measures not just yardage, but yardage towards a first down: Five yards on third-and-4 are worth more than five yards on first-and-10 and much more than five yards on third-and-12. Performance is also adjusted for the quality of the opponent. DVOA is a percentage, so a team with a DVOA of 10.0% is 10% better than the average team, and a quarterback with a DVOA of -20.0% is 20% worse than the average quarterback. Because DVOA measures scoring, defenses are better when they are negative. Every year is normalized so the average for that year is 0%."

In essence, DVOA is a catch-all statistic that measures how far above or below average an NFL team performs in the three stages of the game. For example, the Vikings are in first place in terms of total DVOA. The stat estimates Minnesota is performing over 40% better than the average team in 2024. The Cleveland Browns, on the other hand, are performing nearly 50% worse than the average NFL team this year.

More information about how exactly it is calculated can be found on the FTN Fantasy website.

Now that you've got a handle on what the stat means, let's put it to use. How would the current NFL standings shake out if they were ordered by total DVOA instead of record?

NFL standings ordered by total DVOA

NFL Division Standings by Total DVOA

AFC East

AFC West

AFC South

AFC North

NFC East

NFC West

NFC South

NFC North

Takeaways

This new iteration of standings won't tell us who's going to the Super Bowl, but it does provide an interesting look at who's good and who's bad around the league.

It is safe to say the NFC North is as good as advertised. The Vikings are still head and shoulders above the pack in terms of overall play and the Lions reminded everyone why they were pegged as a contender by destroying the Cowboys and rocketing up their DVOA. All in all, the division boasts four teams with positive DVOA, something no other division can say.

It will come as somewhat irritating to AFC West fans outside of Missouri that the Kansas City Chiefs are still the fourth-best team in the league by DVOA despite coming across as worse than last year's Super Bowl squad. The Patrick Mahomes effect.

And the Browns ... man, they are bad beyond words. The teams in their general vicinity on the DVOA chart have reasons for being that low. The Dolphins are playing backup quarterbacks. The Panthers are generally a disaster. Cleveland was supposed to compete in the AFC North this season and instead are the worst team in football by a significant margin.

A fun, different way to look at the standings.