AFC South Advanced Stat of the Week: Houston Texans

I love advanced football statistics.

Often fans and analysts use "the eye test" as a way of justifying their own unfounded biases. Stats don't replace a solid understanding of the game, but they tend to root out falsehoods.

This week's advanced stat is among the more controversial I'll cover. DVOA is the primary stat of the FootballOutsiders. It stands for Defense Adjusted Value Over Average. It creates a per-play percentage of how much better or worse a player or team is than average. The stat is expressed as a percentile with zero percent serving as a baseline: a player over zero on offense is more valuable than average; a player with a negative DVOA number is worse than average.

DVOA can apply to teams, units or players. It is an efficiency stat, not a volume stat. It indicates how well a team or player performed, rather than how much they performed. There are other numbers that better indicate volume.

There are objections to DVOA. It's complicated. It's a "black box" stat, which means that no one can calculate it thanks to the Outsiders' use of a proprietary formula. It also relies on game-charting data, which can be inconsistent.

The benefits, however, far outweigh the objections. What makes DVOA useful is the fact that it accounts for the strength of the opponent. In a short season, traditional statistics are often heavily influenced by the level of competition a team or player faces. DVOA attempts to account for that.

DVOA for units is also vastly superior to traditional NFL rankings based on yards. Yard-based rankings should never be used for serious analysis. They ignore context entirely. Teams that trail in games will typically post higher passing yard totals than teams that are winning. Good teams will face inflated pass totals and suppressed run totals. Yard-based rankings have no place or value in modern football.

DVOA is a great way to look at quarterback efficiency. It provides a nice balance to traditional passer rating. In this case, it can help us figure out where Matt Schaub ranks in the hierarchy of quarterbacks.

If we measure Schaub by yards per game, he was much less effective in 2011 than in previous years, when he was always in the top five in the league. Even the most casual Texans fan knows that wasn't the case, however.

As the Texans threw less, they improved as a team, and Schaub was well on his way to becoming a dominant quarterback. DVOA had him as the fifth-most efficient passer in 2011. In other words, Schaub was bordering on elite status before he got hurt.

The traditional passer rating usually puts Schaub in the six-to-nine range in terms of league rank. That's often where he falls when ranked in the league. He hasn't been in the Manning, Brady, Rodgers class, but fit nicely in that second tier of quarterbacks that included Phil Rivers, Eli Manning and Tony Romo.

That didn't quite go far enough, however. There has always been something frustrating about Schaub's game. Whether it was his injuries or the nebulous chargers that he was "clutch," there's been the sense that his gaudy numbers didn't quite reflect his real value. DVOA shows this as well.

Passer rating and yards put 2010 Schaub as a top-10 quarterback. DVOA moved him down to 13th. Anyone who watched the 2010 Texans knows that Schaub wasn't always as effective as he could be. It's those little inefficiencies that often get lost in a sea of yards that this metric can flesh out.

Schaub at his best is an elite quarterback, capable of winning the Super Bowl. At other times, he slides back toward the middle of the pack. No stat captures that better than DVOA.

If the Texans want to take the next jump to being an AFC power in the playoffs, they'll need Schaub to be healthy and sharp all season.