Rams by the numbers
by Ryan Van Bibber on Sep 16, 2009 11:27 AM CDT
in 2009 St. Louis Rams regular season
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PrintFootball Outsiders has their first DVOA calculations for the 2009 NFL season. (For those of you new to the site or new to DVOA, it's Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, a number that gauges success on a play-by-play basis. The full definition is here). One thing to keep in mind is that negative numbers for offense are bad, correlating to less likelihood of plays being successful. Vice versa for defense.
The numbers of the Rams are, well, they're not good, which is what you would have expected after last week's game.
The Rams overall DVOA ought to be enough to put a final nail in the coffin of ridiculous weekly power rankings. It won't, but it does confirm that, statistically speaking anyway, the Rams are not the worst team in the league in the wake of National Jump to Conclusions Week. Combining the total team performance, offense, defense and special teams, the Rams have an overall DVOA of -60.5%. That's not good, but is better than the overall DVOA for the Detroit Lions (-100.2%) and the Carolina Panthers (-116.4%). Let's dig into the individual units.
OFFENSE
| Total | Pass | Rush | |
| 2009 | -43.6% (29) | -31.1% (26) | -6.8% (17) |
| 2008 | -24.0% (32) | -26.1% (32) | -10.4% (29) |
Those number confirm what we saw on the field this weekend. What sticks out is the (relative) success of the run, and the decision to abandon it. You can expect the overall DVOA to rise in the coming weeks...at least I hope.
DEFENSE
| Total | Pass | Rush | |
| 2009 | 17.3% (24) | 34% (22) | 1.4% (21) |
| 2008 | 23.4% (25) | 23.7% (27) | 23% (32) |
The pass defense suffered the most because of the damage done in the middle. Hasselbeck and TE John Carlson had a thread between them. He caught six of eight passes thrown to him. Laurinaitis played a helluva game, but he struggled with coverage, as did David Vobora. Those are the guys that have to keep a read on the TE, lock him out of the play or keep him restrained to short dump off stuff. We'll see how much film review and practice has beefed them up in coverage since they face another tough TE matchup against Washington's Chris Cooley. You wonder if the run defense might have better had Adeyanju not been inactive.
Can't make too many judgements on just one game, but this already looks like a much improved unit over what we've seen from the Rams defense in recent years. There's still lots of work to do.
SPECIAL TEAMS
| Total | |
| 2009 | 0.3% (13) |
| 2008 | -0.2% (27) |
This is something that can bounce from week to week. Other than a botched field goal and an inability to count players and fumble to start the game, coverage was good and returners got some solid yardage numbers.
Hopefully, this time next week, the numbers will look a little better. At least there's a silver lininig or two here.
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numbers show a bit of optimism.
find me under the fan voices section for the st. louis rams
by stlcardinalsfang on Sep 16, 2009 11:55 AM CDT reply actions
So does this DVOA take into account the strength of the opponent?
A lot of the talk on this site leading up to the game was describing what a weak team Seattle is. One poster went so far as to give advice on how to talk smack to someone who was visiting Seattle that week. One can only hope that that advice was rejected or else the Seattle visitor is likely to be a laughing stock for quite some time.
In any case, if it is true that Seattle is as weak as some posters here thought, wouldn’t that suggest that the Rams are actually much worse than the DVOA indicates?
I can’t speak for everyone else, but I went by the very numbers VanRam posted up on this post. DVOA from 2008 showed that the Seahawks had an absolutely horrible Secondary, and with the loss of Marcus Trufant, their best CB, one could only assume they would be very suspect.
That didn’t take into account that our very fast WR’s couldn’t get separation (really what happened?).
The same numbers that said we sucked also said Seattle was weak, so there is my reasoning.
Spagamania is in full bloom
I never used that smack gameday
But it was fun telling them the official beer of the seahawks was from st. louis.
by BruinHalo on Sep 17, 2009 9:35 AM CDT via mobile up reply actions
If Seattle is that weak...
…we better find some high school and college teams to play against, cause we ain’t even NFL worthy…
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