Oswlek
Veteran Starter w/Big Long Term Deal
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 9,086
- Reaction score
- 5,955
For those of you with the patience to read a rather long, heavily math related article, football outsiders has a very good piece on regular season successes and how they correlate with postseason championships. A Pats related paragraph at the end should give all of us hope:
Let’s look at the top seeds in each conference, along with that defensive juggernaut in Baltimore, and one mystery team:
{chart that I can't get cleaned up enough to make sense here}
The team whose **** might, in fact, work in the playoffs? The New England Patriots. They do extremely well in each of these categories except for rushing DVOA over the second half of the year.
Does this mean the Patriots are the favorites? No. They’re still most likely going to have to play a playoff game at either San Diego or Baltimore, and that could very well be too much for them to overcome. But if they do make it through the AFC minefield and are hoisting up the Vince Lombardi Trophy on February 4th, well, you can tone down the platitudes about respect from Rodney Harrison and Tom Brady’s clutch gritty manly leaderness by the media and tell your friends that the Patriots are a team just built for the playoffs — and that you knew all along they wouldn’t be facing Dallas.