To me this defense is elite. By elite I mean that they can win a game when the offense stinks. They are not the best defense but they did throw a shutout on the cowgirls. We are good enough to play with anyone on any given Sunday. If you want to call that just good I’m fine with that. To be clear I want us to focus on defense this offseason

Well, here a stat (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average - DVOA) at Football Outsiders which purports to measure the quality of a defense based upon their opponents, among many of other factors such as defensive situations, home-road influences, etc. The goal is obviously to come up with a more meaningful read on the basic statistics that I mentioned in my prior post.

https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/teamdef

After considering these factors, and prior to this week’s game, they have the Colts’ defense ranked11th. Maybe now they'll be a slot or two higher after Sunday’s game?

Keep in mind that, in a way like Pro Football Focus, stats like these are based in part upon assumptions and judgments made by the evaluators – i.e. how much weight to give to a particular situation, home/road influence. So I think it’s fair to take all of this with a grain of salt, though to my untrained eye Football Outsider’s approach seems to be more scientific than Pro Football Focus’s (which as I understand it, simply involves a bunch of guys sitting around a TV rating each player’s play-by-play performance on a -3 to +3 scale, followed by an unexplained adjustment to “normalize” the ratings).

Since the 7th game of the season (which I think includes enough games to be worth looking at) our defense has given up an average of 15 points per game. That is the best in the NFL. Taken as a whole this defense is better than its individual parts and has morphed into something resembling 'elite' if you go by the only thing that really matters, points allowed. It's great to no longer be a 'soft' finesse football team

https://i.ibb.co/48Pr0Zw/weighted-PA2.png


I weighted the PA against the offensive ranks of our opponents. the 16th ranked offense gets a multiplier of 1, any rank better than 16 gets a multiplier of 0.95, 0.9, 0.85 etc.... any offense ranked worse than 16th, gets a multiplier of 1.05, 1.1, 1.15 etc...

So in this scenario, the 21 points we gave up to the texans in our win counted as 16.8 because they are the 12th best offense. the 38 we gave up to the patriots counts as only 17.1 as they are the 5th best. conversely, the 34 we gave up to Cincy is more Like 49.3 because they are ranked a lowly 25th.

So in this way, a PA against the worst offense counts as 1.8 PA... a PA against the best offense counts for 0.25

So our actual PA was 313
Our weighted PA was 390.05
the average rank of our opponent is 22.2

We've only beaten two teams in the top half. We had an easy schedule.

Who are the top ten? You might be shocked.

Top ten scoring offenses according to NFL.com are as follows:
1. Baltimore
2. Tennessee
3. Chicago
4. Dallas
5. Houston
6. Jacksonville
7. Seattle
8. Chargers
9. Denver
10. Indianapolis

Houston is the only one of those to put up more than 4 TDs. The rest, we have held in check for the most part.

Weird, no KC, no LAR, no Saints?

in 2006, the colts gave up 14 sacks and forced 25.

in 2018, the colts have given up 16 sacks and forced 38. That's almost 3 a game.

This has got to be defenses. No way Baltimore is a top ten offense.

Say it with me now: "E - Ber - Flus!"

I really REALLY hope this doesn't become an Arians situation where the guy gets hotlisted for a HC job after this season. I'd really like to see what he can do with this team over several years.

FO is WAY better about disclosing their methodologies and using standardized measurements to produce their metrics than PFF. Whereas PFF is hot garbage, FO is quality, at least to me.