So who's gonna take the trophy this year? It's time to play the post-season prognostication game again.
According to DVOA, that statistic that rolls up situational play-by-play team performance, the best team in the league has been changed in each of the last four weeks. For most of the year Chicago had been on top. Then two weeks ago it turned into a merry-go-round. Baltimore usurped them and promptly had a nasty game against the Bengals. So Dallas took the top spot and now they get waxed by the Saints. The latest ratings have Chicago back on top, where I am confident they will remain for at least a week.
Misery loves company so I take a certain comfort in the fact that absolutely no one has been able to get a handle on this year from a competitive standpoint. Get comfortable with a team and develop expectations and they will invariably be dashed. It started in pre-season when both Sports Illustrated and ESPN picked the Dolphins to dominate and every adjustment of judgment since then has turned out equally dumb.
As I mentioned last week, Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders, Grand Poobah of DVOA, stated a couple of weeks back that the odds of anyone except the Bears, Colts, Chargers, Ravens, Cowboys, or Patriots winning it all was at least 100-1. Something tells me that Aaron has closed the window on that bet.
I'm picking on Aaron because if someone who has made a career of the cold-eyed analysis of football teams can get snookered like that, it can happen to any of us. It's just been that kind of year.
In the NFC things really haven't changed much. It's been a crap shoot of mediocrity for years and it remains so.
For a while it seemed like the Bears we're the 800-lb gorillas (zoology was never my strong suit). Then Grossman fell apart. He recovered a bit last Monday, but I wouldn't be so quick to pronounce him fully rehabbed; the Rams feature a bottom of the barrel pass defense.
Still, the two things that Chicago has depended on — defense and special teams — came through. The Rams clipped off two good field length marches in the first half but then got shut down cold. And two touchdown returns could be thought of as a fluke, but DVOA has never seen a special teams rating as high as the Bears have managed this year.
Article comments
1 - RJ Elliott
Great stuff, as usual.
2 - david mazzotta
Well, I'm toast again.
It all came down to Monday Night.
If the Bengals won I would have been up in both money line and spread.
If they lost by 3 or less, I would be down on the money line and up on the spread.
If they lost by more than 3 -- I'd be toast.
There's three and a half minutes left and the Bengals are down by 18. I'm toast.
I have no other words that do not contain four letters.
3 - Matthew T. Sussman
But remember, you're a Peyton Manning fan this year, right?
So money's not the only important th..HAHAHAHAHA