Introducing Havoc Ratings, by Field Vision

Setting a New Standard for Evaluating Defensive Player Value

‘Havoc’: To completely disrupt, or cause serious damage to.

At Field Vision, we think havoc is the perfect word to describe defense in the modern NFL. The definition of it tells you all that you need to know. At the most basic level of football, what defenses, and defensive players, are trying to do on every snap of every game is to create havoc. To completely disrupt the offense, and cause ‘serious damage’ to their ability to move the ball down the field. The best defenders create the most havoc. The worst? Well, you get the point…the image of a Miami Dolphins player repeatedly streaking down the field en route to 70 points against the Broncos comes to mind.

It's with this idea in mind that we at Field Vision are introducing our Havoc Ratings to the world, as the most comprehensive, data-based, outcome-driven method for evaluating players. From here on out, when we talk about defensive players, and defensive teams, we’ll refer to their Havoc Rating as a way to rank them in relation to their peers.

But before we start throwing numbers at you, we need you to understand how we actually got there. Let’s dive in.

How is Havoc Rating Calculated? The Idea of Relative Value on a play-by-play basis

Field Vision's Havoc Ratings were built by creating a model that calculates Individual player impact on a play-by-play basis, accounting for virtually every outcome a player is responsible for that creates (or degrades) value for their team. We did this by training a model to learn the value of individual player contributions (both positive and negative) based on years of NFL defensive play-by-play data. These contributions include everything we could measure, while excluding those that have a large element of randomness. Here are some things our model found:

• An Interception is the most valuable defensive play in football (on average worth ~4pts of EPA)

• A Forced Fumble is the second most valuable, but substantially less valuable than an interception

• A sack is worth almost a full point of impact on a given game

• Pass Breakups are always good, but the value created varies widely depending on depth of the target

• Allowing a reception is always bad, but it obviously hurts your team substantially more when that reception occurs deep down the field (worth ~3pts of EPA, on average)

With this model, we have been able to measure every player's impact on every snap, in every game over the last 5 NFL seasons. We then aggregated this data over games, over seasons, and (accounting for injuries and time) have projected their scores forward into 2024 to determine who are the most valuable defenders at their given position, and understand why they are so valuable.

Cool. But what EXACTLY is Havoc Rating?

Field Vision's Havoc Rating is an expression of a players value (i.e. How good they are) relative to others in their position group, accounting for the scheme that they play in. Our goal is to get to the most precise, data-based ranking of players and how good they are relative to their peers based on the play-by-play results they actually produce on the field.

We express this rating in the form of a percentile from 0-100, weighted within each position group. What does that mean? We are comparing the Havoc that DBs create to other DBs, Linebackers to other Linebackers, DEs to DEs and Interior Defensive Lineman to other interior Defensive Lineman. You get the idea.

As one example: The first set of positional Havoc Ratings you’ll see from us are Safeties. We have (spoiler alert), Antoine Winfield as the top rated safety in the league – as such, he has a Havoc Rating of 100. You’ll hear more in our detailed rankings, but Winfield is a do-everything safety: he’s good in coverage, good against the run, and an elite pass-rusher. Second on our list, slightly below Winfield, is Jessie Bates III with a Havoc Rating of 99.4.

There is one other thing that’s important: Because we’re building our Havoc Ratings up play-by-play, we can also understand relative performance of different players in different situations, and have accounted for that in how we evaluate players. For example, who is the best corner in the league when playing Man Coverage? Zone Coverage? Who is the best pure pass rusher, but struggles against the run? Do teams take advantage of these weaknesses on a week-to-week basis? These nuances are all extremely important to understand when evaluating player performance, and their relative value in Matchups against specific players and teams.

So What's Next?

From here on out, you’re going to hear about Havoc Ratings a lot from Field Vision. It’s our unique, proprietary, football outcome + data-driven point of view on who’s good, and who’s not. In our (completely unbiased) opinion, our Havoc Ratings will set the standard for how we truly evaluate defensive player performance based on the outcomes they have actually produced, and the math behind what truly matters to winning.

This week, we’ll release our Safety Havoc Ratings, our Cornerback Havoc ratings and get into the nuance of what DBs are good at specific types of coverages. From there, we’ll roll through Linebackers, Defensive ends, Interior D-linemen, before we finish it off with comprehensive Team Defense Havoc Ratings.

As we dive in, we look forward to the conversation, debate and your feedback. Hit us at @fieldvisionmi on X, @fieldvisionsports on Instagram, or on our website www.fieldvisionsports.com.

Only 51 days til football season…