1. The Patriots maintained their ninth overall ranking in Football Outsiders’ overall team DVOA through six weeks of the NFL season, even after their adrenaline pumping victory last Sunday over the high-powered Chiefs. Interestingly enough, Kansas City went into Foxborough ranked third in overall DVOA, and, despite having taken the loss, rose to the league’s number one spot.
Naturally, critics of the metric and of football analytics as a whole are fueled by such hand-picked, small-sample-size-based narratives. Yet, they always fail to note how minor fluctuations in weekly rankings actually impact the overall figures at the end of the season.