FO: 1992 DVOA Ratings and Commentary

[JD_KaPow]

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing:

The time has come to add another year to our grand Football Outsiders DVOA database. This time, we're going all the way back to 1992. If you are a Dallas Cowboys fan, sad because your team didn't even come close to playing the Super Bowl in its home stadium this year, come sit and bask in the glow of the awesomeness that was the early-90's Cowboys.

When we broke down 1993 through 1995, we were surprised to see that, according to DVOA, "wrong team" won the Dallas-San Francisco rivalry each year. That's not the case in 1992, as the Dallas Cowboys are on top of the DVOA ratings. The Cowboys were even more impressive because they had to play in a killer division....

http://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2011/1992-dvoa-ratings-and-commentary

 

[percyhoward]

I look forward to their offensive line rankings for 1992-95. It looks like those haven't been done yet.

 

[sonnyboy]

Read the whole thing and this is what stuck out to me.

Michael Irvin was the loudest underrated player in NFL history. The guy really was a machine, with valuable mid-length gain after valuable mid-length gain.

I remember that well. And its one of the many things that made that team so great. To me it felt like so much of the league at that time threw so many short passes. If it wasn't a deep pass it went 10 yards or less down the field.

But the Cowboys passing game stood alone.

Irvin caught a ton of passes from Aikman 15-20 yards down the field on med range slants, out's and in's.
I think we gave teams a lot of trouble with how we attacked with that deeper mid range passing game.

Now I think Aikman's unique powerful and accurate passing along with Emmitt's running threat had as much to do with that success as Irvin.

 

[superpunk]

You may notice that there is a team listed between Seattle and New England at the bottom of the 1992 ratings, however, and you may notice that team even had a winning record. That would be the 1992 Indianapolis Colts, possibly the luckiest team in NFL history. The Colts finished 9-7 even though opponents outscored them 302-216. They had 5.0 Pythagorean wins, and the biggest difference in NFL history between Pythagorean wins and actual wins. In the first part of the season, the Colts lost games 38-0 to Buffalo, 26-0 to San Diego, and 28-0 to Miami. They were 4-7 after losing 30-14 to Pittsburgh on November 22. Then they finished the year with a five-game winning streak -- but they won those games by an average of four points. This is where Jason Whitlock would point out that Jeff George just wins football games. It didn't hurt that the Colts recovered 59 percent of fumbles that season and had a below-average schedule.

lulz.