Preliminary SRS Teams of the Decade
Posted by Neil Paine on October 19, 2009
We've done a Players of the Oughts (or at least 90% of them) post, so I figured it was time to put out a preliminary list of the teams of the decade. The ranking method? SRS, of course. I used all games, regular-season and playoffs, and accounted for home-field advantage by adding 2.66 points (the average home-team margin of victory this decade) to the margin for away teams & subtracting the same amount from home teams.
And no, playoff games are not arbitrarily weighted more than regular-season ones, other than the fact that they will boost your strength of schedule score. I'm certainly open to different weightings, but they have to be grounded in something more legitimate than "I feel like playoff games should count five times as much", or whatever.
Anyway, here are the best NFL teams by SRS from 2000 through yesterday's games:
| Rank | Team | MOV | SOS | SRS | W | L | T | PO_W | PO_L | SB_W | SB_L |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NewEnglandPatriots | 6.79 | 0.47 | 7.26 | 106 | 44 | 0 | 14 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| 2 | IndianapolisColts | 5.90 | 0.43 | 6.33 | 106 | 43 | 0 | 7 | 7 | 1 | 0 |
| 3 | PittsburghSteelers | 5.15 | -0.04 | 5.11 | 98 | 51 | 1 | 10 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| 4 | PhiladelphiaEagles | 5.33 | -0.64 | 4.68 | 95 | 53 | 1 | 10 | 7 | 0 | 1 |
| 5 | BaltimoreRavens | 3.72 | 0.16 | 3.88 | 86 | 64 | 0 | 7 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| 6 | SanDiegoChargers | 2.03 | 0.47 | 2.50 | 74 | 74 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | DenverBroncos | 1.85 | 0.54 | 2.39 | 90 | 59 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 8 | GreenBayPackers | 2.99 | -1.13 | 1.86 | 87 | 62 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 9 | JacksonvilleJaguars | 1.08 | 0.54 | 1.61 | 72 | 78 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 | NewYorkGiants | 1.45 | -0.24 | 1.21 | 85 | 65 | 0 | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 |
| 11 | TampaBayBuccaneers | 1.69 | -0.69 | 1.01 | 76 | 74 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| 12 | MiamiDolphins | -0.13 | 0.98 | 0.85 | 74 | 75 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 13 | NewYorkJets | -0.21 | 0.93 | 0.72 | 74 | 76 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 14 | KansasCityChiefs | 0.09 | 0.48 | 0.56 | 67 | 83 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 15 | TennesseeTitans | -0.25 | 0.74 | 0.49 | 83 | 67 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 16 | SeattleSeahawks | 0.84 | -1.00 | -0.16 | 79 | 71 | 0 | 4 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
| 17 | NewOrleansSaints | 0.16 | -0.70 | -0.54 | 75 | 74 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 | MinnesotaVikings | 0.00 | -0.71 | -0.70 | 78 | 72 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 19 | ChicagoBears | -0.12 | -0.71 | -0.82 | 77 | 72 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| 20 | DallasCowboys | -0.85 | -0.20 | -1.05 | 74 | 75 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 21 | CarolinaPanthers | -0.43 | -0.71 | -1.14 | 73 | 76 | 0 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| 22 | BuffaloBills | -2.56 | 1.14 | -1.42 | 62 | 88 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 23 | WashingtonRedskins | -1.61 | 0.07 | -1.54 | 68 | 82 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 24 | OaklandRaiders | -2.44 | 0.73 | -1.71 | 59 | 91 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| 25 | AtlantaFalcons | -2.14 | -0.42 | -2.56 | 70 | 78 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 26 | CincinnatiBengals | -3.57 | 0.84 | -2.73 | 62 | 87 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 27 | St.LouisRams | -1.96 | -0.90 | -2.86 | 70 | 80 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
| 28 | HoustonTexans | -5.04 | 0.80 | -4.24 | 43 | 75 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 29 | ClevelandBrowns | -5.36 | 0.98 | -4.37 | 53 | 97 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 30 | SanFrancisco49ers | -3.62 | -0.94 | -4.55 | 63 | 86 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 31 | ArizonaCardinals | -5.23 | -0.79 | -6.02 | 55 | 94 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 32 | DetroitLions | -7.19 | -0.19 | -7.38 | 41 | 109 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
October 19th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Interesting that numbers 27 and 31 both have conference championships (and Super Bowl losses) during the timeframe.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Neil--shouldn't you just add/subtract 1.33 to make it =0?
October 19th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I would posit it's more interesting that the Raiders are somehow better than 8 teams on this list... seems like a long, long time ago they were getting rolled in the Super Bowl.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:50 am
The SRS is all about measuring point differential vs. expected MOV. So when the Broncos play at the Chargers, for instance, a super-naive expectation would be to just look at who is at home and expect San Diego to win by the margin the average home team wins by, or 2.66 points. This is why we add/subtract the full 2.66 points to/from teams based on game location -- everything else being equal, you wouldn't expect the Chargers to win by half the HFA, you'd expect them to win by all of it. It's going to add up to 0 either way (the visiting team gets +2.66, the home team gets -2.66), so it's just a matter of determining the correct expectation relative to point differential.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Shocking that the Dolphins are #12. But the horribleness of the past 5 years make me forget about the good times in the first half of the decade.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Playing the 2nd-toughest schedule helps their SRS, too -- specifically, being in a division with a team whose SRS is several standard deviations better than the majority of the league.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Interesting that the Lions have been almost exactly as bad as the Patriots have been good.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Millen was the Bizarro Belichick.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Are you adding and subtracting 2.66 to the margin or adding and subtracting 2.66 to the scores?
Given a 10-7 game (home team wins), you'd get +0.33 vs -0.33 for the margin (correct) but if you apply it to scores, 7.33 vs 9.67 for the score (resulting in an incorrect -2.33 margin).
October 19th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The margin. So a 3-point win by the home team looks like +0.33 for the home team and -0.33 for the away team.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Okay. I don't think a decade-long SRS calculation is very good though -- Take the Raiders. They had some very good teams early on and some very bad teams more recently, so they average out to be a bad team for the decade. But now every team that lost to them in 2000-2002 is being adjusted as having lost to a BAD team, which isn't right.
I think it'd make far more sense to calculate yearly SRS and average those, since team strength is less likely to change drastically over the course of a season, and any errors caused by teams changing strength over the course of one season are limited to just that, one season.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
That's a great point. I can run it that way tomorrow.
October 19th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Do you have one of these lists for the 90s?
October 19th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I'll go ahead and predict that it won't change the rankings significantly because of the fairly large sample size. But it'll feel a lot more clean to me.