DVOA stands for Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, and it is the NFL’s answer to a simple problem: raw yardage lies. A three-yard run on third-and-2 wins a game. A three-yard run on third-and-15 loses a drive. Traditional box scores treat them the same. DVOA does not.
The metric grades every single play against a league-average baseline for that exact situation, then folds in the strength of the opponent. The result is a percentage that tells you how much better, or worse, a team, unit or player performed than the average NFL play in the same down, distance, field position, score and time remaining. A team with a 15.0% offensive DVOA is playing 15 percent better than average. A defense wants to be negative, since it is graded on preventing that same value.
Who invented DVOA and who tracks it now?
Aaron Schatz built DVOA in the early 2000s at Football Outsiders, the analytics site he founded in August 2003. Football Outsiders effectively shut down in September 2023 after what has been described as financial mismanagement by its former ownership, and the site went dark. Schatz did not disappear with it. He joined FTN as chief analytics officer, and DVOA now lives there, still built on the same core methodology he developed nearly two decades ago, just refined through several version updates, the most recent labeled DVOA v8.0 in 2023.
How is DVOA actually calculated?
Every play gets a success value first. On first down, a play counts as a success if it gains 45 percent of the yards needed; on second down the bar rises to 60 percent; on third or fourth down, only a fresh first down counts. From there, bonus points stack up for explosive gains, penalties apply for turnovers and losses, and touchdowns get extra weight because crossing the goal line is harder than the 99 yards before it.
Those success values get compared to how an average NFL play performed in that identical situation, accounting for down, distance, field position, score and time remaining. That comparison produces VOA, or Value Over Average. The final step adjusts each play for the quality of the defense (or offense) on the other side of the ball, since a run against a stacked box means something different than one against a two-deep safety look. That opponent adjustment is what turns VOA into DVOA.
What is the difference between DVOA and DYAR?
DVOA is a rate stat, expressed as a percentage, so it measures efficiency regardless of how many plays a player or team ran. DYAR, or Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement, measures total value instead, comparing a player’s output against a hypothetical replacement-level player facing the same volume of snaps. A backup who posts a strong DVOA on 40 pass attempts might still trail a starter with a lower DVOA but 550 attempts in DYAR, because DYAR credits players for doing damage over a full workload, not just doing it efficiently in limited chances. Think of DVOA as batting average and DYAR as total bases.
A real example: how the numbers actually read
Scale matters when a raw percentage does not mean much on its own. In the 2022 season, the Kansas City Chiefs led the NFL in offensive DVOA at 25.2%, meaning their offense produced roughly a quarter more value per play than the league average across every situation the metric tracks. On the other side of the ball that same year, the San Francisco 49ers ran the league’s best defense at -14.1% DVOA, since negative numbers favor the defense. Individually, DYAR tells a similar story with a different lens: Joe Burrow finished sixth among quarterbacks in passing DYAR in 2022 with 951 yards above replacement, a figure meant to represent how many more yards of value he generated than a generic backup would have in his exact usage.
Most seasons see the best and worst offenses land somewhere around plus or minus 30 percent, while defenses tend to cluster tighter, closer to plus or minus 20 percent. That range is useful context the next time a broadcast flashes a DVOA number on screen during a Sunday broadcast.
Why bother with DVOA at all
Conventional stats reward volume. A running back who piles up 100 yards on 30 carries against a bad defense looks identical to one who does it against a great defense, even though the second performance took more skill. DVOA strips that noise away and asks a narrower question: how much did this play outperform what an average NFL team would have done in the exact same circumstances? That is why DVOA shows up so often in roster-building debates, since it can isolate whether a struggling offense is a play-calling problem, a personnel problem, or just a brutal run of opposing defenses. It is the same instinct behind other adjusted metrics across sports, whether that is expected goals in soccer or how a franchise tag number gets calculated. None of it replaces watching the games. It just gives fans a sharper baseline for arguing about them.
