Aaron Schatz of the much maligned (by Buffalo Bills fans) Football Outsiders tweeted an intriguing statistic suggesting a drastic turnaround for the Bills’ defense. In their proprietary metric of Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) the Bills ranked 30th through their first six games. In the last five they’ve shot up all the way to seventh place. DVOA is an aggregated statistic that looks to measure success rates and factors in numerous factors such as down, distance, and quality of opponent. A full definition can be found here.
While Football Outsiders always deserves credit for their number crunching, we decided to take a look at some data ourselves to check the turnaround across a variety of metrics.