AFC South Advanced Stat of the Week: Tennessee Titans

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 often 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.

The 2012 Titans were a fascinating case study offensively. By DVOA, they were 15th in the NFL on offense. That doesn't begin to tell the story, however.

The Titans were an example of the old saying about statistics that if you put one foot in the oven and one in the freezer, stats say that you feel just fine. They were middle of the pack overall on offense, but there was a severe split between their pass and run efficiency.

When throwing the ball, the Titans posted a DVOA of 21.8 percent. That means they were roughly 20 percent better per pass than the league average over the last several years. That number takes into account game situations and the strength of the defenses the Titans faced.

When they ran the ball, it was a different story. The Titans were 32nd in the NFL in rushing DVOA. They were 9.5 percent worse than league average. This is reflected by other numbers as well. The Titans were last in Adjusted Line Yards. Oddly enough, they were very good at power runs, but very bad at getting stuffed behind the line.

While the result in 2011 for the Titans was an average offense, DVOA clearly shows a team that in terms of skill is weighted heavily toward the pass. Given the selection of Kendall Wright in the first round, that should become even more pronounced in 2012.