What does DVOA mean in FOOTBALL

What Is DVOA?

As mentioned before, DVOA stands for Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. Essentially, it is an attempt to measure how good each team is at producing points on offense or preventing points on defense, adjusted for the quality of opponents faced. To create this statistic, two components need to be taken into account: how well a team does overall (value over average) and how much better they do than their opponents' defenses (defense adjustment).

First off, the value over average part of DVOA looks at how many points a team scores compared to what their opponents allow. This means that if a team scores 30 points but their opponents typically allow 25 points per game, then they have a 5 point VOA (Value Over Average). The defense adjustment part takes this VOA score and further adjusts it based on how difficult the remaining opponents are according to their defensive stats. Therefore if these remaining opponents normally allow 23 points per game rather than 25 then this would result in further adjustment being made to make the DVOA more accurate.

How Is It Used?

DVOA can be useful for looking at specific matchups between two teams as it can provide context beyond just final scores. For example, if Team A loses 20-17 but has a higher VOA than Team B then we could assume that Team A was playing well before perhaps making some mistakes in the fourth quarter which cost them the game despite being outplayed overall by Team B. This metric can also be used for comparing teams across different seasons as it adjusts for schedule strength when generating its calculations which allows us to accurately compare teams even from different decades more effectively than other traditional statistics like total yards gained or total points scored.