The only numbers people bring up are total points scored, total rushing yards, total ranking, etc. The whole point of this post was to look beyond those numbers, so why should I bother continually arguing them? If that is all you want to look at, that is fine, but I was hoping to use this thread as a place to hold an argument slightly more intellectually challenging than "pats defense lets up mad rushing yards, and they lost to cleveland, no way they win".
They are not even teams. Not from any standpoint are they even teams. On offense the Jets have the deep ball threat and the rushing threat, the Pats have niether of these. On defense the Jets are 3rd against the run and have Revis and Cromartie to prevent the deep ball. How anyone can think these two teams are "even" in any way is beyond me.
His response was that both teams' offenses put up points corresponding with the defenses' averages. If a team allows exactly 100 points per game, and the jets put up 100, that doesn't make them above average in the context of the statistics. I am not arguing that the jets defense is average. I said that sarcastically to prove that one single game does not prove anything about overall performance because if it did, both teams would have average offenses.
I can only see one clear advantage that they have, and that is Brady. They have a more experienced and resourceful quarterback. The problem with that is I can rattle off a list of advantages the Jets have in this game. There's no shame in admitting the Jets are the better team here. Even a Pats fan can admit.
They don't pay people who are "good and unbiased", they put numbers into a spreadsheet using an algorithm that a fourth grader could write. If you don't want to look beyond those numbers, fine, but don't act like they've got experts out there making educated judgements on defensive quality.
The basis of this argument is very flawed. For one, we would need to know how many drives each defense faced in each category to put it into real context. What percentage of the number of drives resulted in TD's and FG's? Then we'd need to know the starting position of those drives and whether or not a "prevent" defense was being played. The bottom line is that if you want us to "dig deeper", you had better dig deeper than splitting up the numbers into 4 categories without any context.
I mean it's quite possible that the percentage of points allowed at each interval you defined is in direct correlation to the percentage of drives that occurred for each team within that interval. If the points allowed per interval is very closely correlated to the drives faced per interval than your argument is pretty useless.
I agree that the basis of this argument is flawed, but I also think that some inferences can be made. I agree that the #1 offense creates leads that skew these numbers, but if we are always ahead so much, why do the jets have a better point differential? If it is because the pats create early leads, whereas jets win games late (which seems to be the common opinion here), that plays into my theory that much of the yardage and points holding the pats back in rankings are coming late in games that pats have all but won.
http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/33000/patriots-third-down-d-historically-bad Yea, awesome defense.
You can't discredit them for giving up all those 3rd down conversions, they were ahead by 8+ points when most of those happened.
That is hardly the only conclusion you could draw. It's the conclusion you want to arrive at, but you haven't provided enough evidence to prove that. Dig deeper.
Why bring the Chargers into this? They have the top rated offense. The pats offense is ranked lower than the Jets.... BY THE NFL. The pats have the worse point differential because the LOST the JETS by 14, and the LOST to the BROWNS by 16. The Jet's combined losses amount to 10 total points.
Well first of all I was responding to claims that these numbers are distorted by the pats "#1 offense" (which is true if ranked by points not yards) and i'm not even going to bother responding to your other comments because they do nothing to address the questions that I was actually asking
Oh yeah because BB is known for letting up, it's his goal now to let teams back in games? Like the Colts, Bills ....
I don't see any other conclusions that really make sense... the pats let up tons more points ahead of other teams than behind: fact either they defend more drives ahead (option 1) or they simply play worse while ahead (option 2) Option 1: The Pats spend most of a game ahead in the score, because of their offense (unless you want to argue it is the defense). They rack up points early in games, then allow teams to come back late in regulation without giving up wins. CONCLUSION: pats defense allows offensive yardage/stats due to prevent defenses/ lack of effor while ahead in games. Option 2: Pats defense simply plays better when the team needs it to perform under any of these circumstances it is fair to assume that the pats defense performs better than its rankings show (when it needs to) If you can give me another option that seems to fit, and does not support the pats, I will sincerely try my best to wrap my head around it and respond
