"They played a little bit better..."

According to Ravens QB, "they [the Patriots] played a little bit better." But from where I was sitting, that's not the case. I'm still not sure how the Patriots, with Brady playing poorly (in his own words, he "s*cked pretty bad"), with three turnovers to one takeaway, with no TD passes, settling for three field goals, with the defense unable to stop the Ravens on 3rd down in the second and third quarters, managed to come out of that game yesterday with a win.

But they did. And in two weeks, they'll play in the Super Bowl. Again. Against the Giants. Again.

Odds and ends from yesterday's game:

• I think that there's a world of difference between a "drop" and what happened on the Lee Evans play at the end of the game, and people putting Evans on a par with Billy Cundiff - or worse - are underestimating the contribution of Sterling Moore. Yes, Evans did get both hands on the ball and yes, if he held on the Ravens would have won the game. But he never had an opportunity to put the ball away, as the ball was hit by the defender as he was trying to establish control. A little more credit to Moore and less blame to Evans is appropriate than what I've heard and read.
• There is no excuse, however, for Cundiff.
• Did Terrell Suggs play?
• I did not realize, until they talked about it during the game yesterday, that Bernard Pollard was the Houston defender who tackled Wes Welker on the play in 2009 on which Welker tore up his knee. Pollard was, of course, the safety for the Kansas City Chiefs whose low tackle tore up Tom Brady's knee. And then, in the 3rd quarter of yesterday's game, he took down Rob Gronkowski, landing on and twisting his ankle in such a fashion that Gronkowski had to leave the game. Thankfully, he returned. But I don't want to see the Patriots playing against Pollard ever again...
• That was a poor performance from the Patriots quarterback yesterday. The biggest surprise from the game may be that they're going to Indianapolis despite Brady, rather than because of him.
• It wasn't just the picks. One of the most blatant mistakes came early, as Brady missed Gronkowski for a TD in the first quarter. Instead, they ended up settling for 3, and it affected everything that followed.
• He's lucky that walked off the field after his diving sneak TD, when Ray Lewis put his helmet into Brady's spine while he was upside down. (And well after the TD had been scored...)
• The best player on the field yesterday may have been Vince Wilfork. The Ravens couldn't block him.

The Giants go on to Indianapolis on the strength of not one but two blown punt returns by the 49ers - a muff in the fourth quarter that led to a NY touchdown, and a fumble in OT that gave NY the ball in field goal position (which they'd shown no likelihood of reaching on their own.)

And the number of replays of the David Tyree helmet catch that we're all going to see over the next two weeks is appalling to contemplate...

NFL Week 8 wrapup

Week 8 in the NFL...

• OK, I saw some of the Packers-Vikings game. I didn't want to, but I wanted to watch football, and my only two choices were that or the Red Zone channel. Obviously, I left it on the Red Zone channel, but I saw plenty of the game anyway. I did, however, avoid ALL of the pre-game, halftime and post-game stuff.



• As I've said before, it doesn't bother me that he comes out of retirement. It bothers me that he keeps going through the charade of retiring, which is unfair to everyone around him. And I'm convinced that he does it for the media attention, and the media, obviously, are like pushers feeding a junkie's habit.



• On the plus side, ESPN has driven me away, so I'm watching a LOT less SportsCenter...



• Note to NBC executives: The presence of Keith Olbermann drives many who would be interested in Football Night in America away from that program. Some of us don't make it back for the game. Whatever your ratings are, it is difficult for me to imagine that they wouldn't be higher without him.



• There's a lot of "wow, Ted Ginn really showed the critics" analysis this week. Which is, of course, nonsense. No one's ever disputed his speed or his ability as a kick-off returner. He's still a lousy receiver who was taken way, way too soon in the draft. That said, he almost single-handedly won that game for the Dolphins on Sunday.



• What's going on with the Giants? It pains me to see them struggling so. Not.



• It's going to be interesting to see what happens with the Broncos now that their armor's been pierced. Did the Ravens show something that people can use? Or was it just one of those games?



• Obvious pick: Oakland at San Diego



• Obvious Pick which was dead wrong: Carolina at Arizona



• Somewhere in this world, there's a man that picked Denver to start the season 6-1. I'd like to have him managing my stock portfolio.



• Evidence that you should be listening carefully to what I say:
  
  

  Denver at Baltimore - "The streak has to come to an end at some point, and this seems as likely a point as any. The Broncos have played well, but they've also been a beneficiary of some good bounces, some opponents who haven't played well and there not being much scouting film, what with the new players and coaches. They're better than I expected going in, but they're really a 6-0 quality team, and they won't go into Baltimore and beat the Ravens."
  
  San Francisco at Indianapolis - "The Colts go to 7-0, but it's a close game and they win by 10 or less."




• Evidence that you should be listening carefully to what I say (and betting the opposite):
  
  

  Carolina at Arizona - "Like Tom Brady, Jake Delhomme frequently puts up "video game" numbers. As scored by someone who doesn't know how to play the video game, against someone who does."
  
  Cleveland at Chicago - "Too many points for a mediocre Bears team to cover anywhere against anyone."




• For the week:
  Winners: 8-5
  ATS: 5-8-0



• For the season:
  Winners: 74-42
  ATS: 60-56-0

Super Bowl XLII prediction

Football players are people, who have good days and bad days. Nothing is certain before it happens. The Giants absolutely could win the Super Bowl on Sunday night. As I've been documenting this week, it would be the biggest upset in the history of the SuperBowl, possibly the biggest upset in the history of the NFL playoffs. But it could happen.

I'd be absolutely shocked. Here are some of the historical reasons why it would be a shocking upset.

• Teams which have a better regular season winning percentage are 204-79 (.721). The Patriots had a better record than the Giants.



• Teams which have a better regular season Pythagorean winning percentage are 230-110 (.676). The Patriots had a better Pythagorean winning percentage.



• In NFL playoff games, the team with the better offense (measured as points scored vs. league average) is 209-128 (.620). The Patriots had a better offense than the Giants.



• The team with the better defense (points allowed vs. league average) is 198-139 (.588). The Patriots had a better defense than the Giants.



• Teams which are better on both offense and defense are 109-40 (.732). The Patriots were better at both offense and defense than the Giants.



• Teams with the advantage in all five of those statistics are 90-27 (.769). The Patriots are better in all five of those categories.



• The cumulative disparity of 79.8% (offense and defense) between the Patriots and Giants is far and away the largest in Super Bowl history.



• The point differential ratio between these two teams is 14.32, far and away the largest in Super Bowl history.



• There has never been a Super Bowl with a 5 game difference in wins between the two teams. New England won six (6) more games than the Giants.



• The New England Patriots Pythagorean winning percentage (.860) was 60.4% better than the Giants' (.536), far and away the biggest difference in Super Bowl history.

There are people picking the Giants. When I see those picks, they are invariably based on the perception that you've got a physical defensive team versus a finesse offensive team. The problem with that is this - the Patriots, despite the high-flying offense, despite all of the points scored, are still a tough, physical defensive team. And they're a tough, physical, wear-you-down offensive team. Perceptions are skewed by the number of points that they've scored, but this isn't a case where the prolific offensive team will get pushed around - the Patriots don't work that way.

People point to the 1990 Giants beating the high-flying Bills. Those two teams were each 13-3, and the point differential difference between them was very small. The Bills had a better offense, the Giants had a better defense.

People point to the 2001 Patriots beating the high-flying Rams. That was a major upset, but the Patriots had a better defense than the Rams, and their record, Pythagorean and offense were all closer to St. Louis' than the Giants' are to this year's Patriots'. In that case, you did have a finesse team against a physical team. As I've said, that's not the case this year.

And both of those underdogs had Bill Belichick, who is without a doubt one of the great game planners in the history of the game. The 2007 Giants will be facing him. Upsets happen when you get an underdog that's able to outmuscle or outcoach an overconfident or overrated favorite. None of that is likely to happen this week. This looks a lot more like Chicago-New England in 1985 than New England-St. Louis in 2001.


So, the Giants could win this game. But I can't see any reason to actually predict that. I don't see anything other than wishful thinking masquerading as analysis that would lead to someone actually predicting that result. The Patriots are on the short list of the all time best teams in NFL history. The Giants are, in many respects, one of the worst teams to ever reach the Super Bowl. They could win, but they'd have to play a perfect game AND have the Patriots play worse than I think there's any reason to expect them to. This is far more likely to end in a Patriots blowout than a Giants win. I don't see any scenario under which it results in a Giants blowout. I don't see any plausibly predictable scenario which leads to a Giants victory. "Tom Brady gets hurt on the first play," is not "plausibly predictable." It could happen, but you can't predict it.

And if you aren't going to predict that, how are you going to predict that the Giants either a) seriously slow down the Patriots offense or b) keep up with it?

The Patriots are a better offensive team. The Patriots are a better defensive team. The Patriots have advantages in special teams. I like Tom Coughlin, but the Patriots have a better coaching staff. In the end, the conditions will be perfect on Sunday, and the Patriots will score over 35, and the Giants won't be able to keep up.

My prediction: New England 42 - New York 17

Super Bowl mismatch note of the day

I mentioned point differential the other day. I used ratio rather than raw differential (where the Patriots/Giants mismatch is also the greatest in Super Bowl history) because league context makes a difference. It's easier to outscore an opponent by 100 in a league where the league averages 400 points per team than in one where the league averages 200 points per team.

But there are other things that you can do with point differential. Or, at least, with points scored and allowed. Bill James did some work with baseball, and discovered that most teams winning percentage ends up being very close to what he dubbed the "Pythagorean" winning percentage. That is, the winning percentage will be very close, in most cases, to the ratio of the square of the points scored to the sum of the squares of points scored and points allowed. P^2 / (P^2 + PA^2). Work with other sports shows that the relationship holds pretty well. In football, people have found that the best exponent is 2.37.

So we look at Super Bowl teams. In nine of the previous games, one team had a Pythagorean winning percentage that was 24% or more better than the other. Those nine teams are 9-0. There have been 13 games where one team had a 20% or more advantage, and the team with the advantage is 10-3. The two biggest upsets (1980, where Philadelphia's Pythagorean winning percentage was 23.5% better than Oakland's and 2006, where Chicago's was 22.4% better than Indiapolis') occurred when the team with the lower Pythagorean came from a dominant conference. In 1980, the AFC was 33-19 (.634) vs. the NFC. In 2006, the AFC was 40-24 (.625) vs. the NFC. The third best Pythagorean advantage team to lose was the 1968 Baltimore Colts.

The biggest Pythagorean advantage in the first 41 Super Bowls came in 1979, when the Steelers Pythagorean winning percentage (.749) was 42.4% better than Los Angeles' (.526).

The New England Patriots Pythagorean winning percentage (.860) was 60.4% better than the Giants' (.536).

Super Bowl mismatch note of the day

There have been 18 teams in the first 41 Super Bowls which, when compared to league average, had both a better offense and a better defense (by points scored/allowed) than their opponents. Those teams are 14-4. Two of the four losses were the Colts and Vikings, the last two years that the leagues were separate, so the competition levels were distinct. The last one to lose was Washington in 1983.

In all of the cases, one side or the other was fairly close. In 1968, Baltimore's defense was 44% better than the Jets, compared to the leagues in which they played, but their offense was only 3.6% better. The biggest cumulative disparity so far was the 1975 Steelers, whose offense was 6.6% better than Dallas', and whose defense was 39.6% better, a total of 46.2%.

The Patriots offense was 57.9% better than the Giants. The Patriots defense was 21.9% than the Giants.

The cumulative disparity of 79.8% is far and away the largest in Super Bowl history.

Super Bowl mismatch note of the day

One of the good indicators of team strength is point differential. It has been determined many times that good teams tend to win games in which the final result is lopsided, while close games are more "random" in who wins. No one was going to blow this year's Patriots team out, for example. So point differential is indicative of team strength.

In the previous 41 Super Bowls, the biggest point differential ratio belonged to the 1979 Pittsburgh Steelers. They outscored their opposition by 154 points, 11 times greater than the 14 point differential of the 9-7 Rams*. That was the only game in Super Bowl history where the point differential ratio between the two teams was greater than 6.

That statement won't be true on Monday.

The New England Patriots outscored their opposition by an NFL record 315 points**.
The New York Giants outscored their opposition by 22 points.

The point differential ratio between these two teams is 14.32.




* - That Rams team was probably the worst team ever to make the Super Bowl, just ahead of this year's Giants. They were one of only two teams (the 2003 Panthers being the other) with a smaller point differential than the Giants' 22, and the only team with a worse record than 10-6 (the 1988 49ers were the only other 10-6 team to reach the Super Bowl).

** - In the Super Bowl era, the previous best was the 1999 St. Louis Rams ("greatest show on turf") at 284.

Super Bowl note

I said yesterday that I think this is the biggest mismatch in Super Bowl history. I'll share some tidbits this week to support that.

1) The biggest difference in records between teams facing each other in the first 41 Super Bowls is 4. In 1967, the 13-1 Oakland Raiders lost to the 9-4-1 Green Bay Packers*. In 1985, the 11-5 New England Patriots (probably the best analogue to this year's Giants) got crushed by the 15-1 Chicago Bears.

There has never been a Super Bowl with a 5 game difference in wins between the two teams.

New England won six (6) more games than the Giants.


* - The Raiders, of course, were playing in the pre-merger AFL. It's debatable whether the competition was comparable at that point.

NFL Conference Championship Games

The matchup is now set for Super Bowl XLII, as the New England Patriots will face the New York Giants in Glendale, Arizona. The game is a rematch of the largest rated game of the regular season, as the Patriots went into New York and beat the Giants to finish the first 16-0 regular season in NFL history. Some "experts" thought that the Giants foolishly expended themselves and were doomed to playoff failure*, while others thought that it was the performance that pushed them into the playoffs with great momentum. Whether that game made a difference in the Giants season or not is unknowable - what is knowable is that in less then two weeks, we'll see these two teams again, in what will almost certainly be the highest rated television event of the year.

• There's been a lot of talk about how bad Tom Brady was yesterday. And he was - by his standards, it was an awful game. Here's one thing that's worth considering, though. When he threw his third interception of the day, to Antonio Cromartie in the end zone, he was 14-25 for 133 yards, with 1 TD and 3 picks (passer rating of 44.67) and the lead was 14-12. From that point to the end of the game, the Patriots had two more drives. One of them covered 67 yards on 8 plays and ended in a touchdown. The other covered 65 yards on 15 plays and consumed the last 9:13 of the game, finishing with the Patriots taking a knee. Over those two drives, Brady was 8-8 for 76 yards with a touchdown pass and no interceptions (passer rating of 145.83). That doesn't excuse the first 2 4/5 quarters, but when the team needed the quarterback to perform - well, he performed.



• The Patriots game was not a blowout. Obviously. But it's worth noting that New England took the lead for good with less than 2 minutes gone in the second quarter. The game looked close, for a long while, but the Patriots led for the last 43 minutes.



• And the Packers' season ends as a result of a Favre interception. Gosh, who saw that coming?



• In the four games before the New England game, Eli Manning was 58 for 125 (46.4%) for 709 yards with 3 TD and 4 INT (passer rating 59.1). In the next four, New England and three playoff road games, he's 75 for 117 (64.1%) for 853 yards, 8 TD and 1 INT (passer rating 105.1). I don't know what happened, but those are two very different quarterbacks. Is it real? Is it sustainable? Only time will tell.



• If I'm the Giants, I don't want a week off at this point. (I also really, really, really don't want to face the New England Patriots in perfect field and weather conditions.)



• My opinion of Philip Rivers went up significantly. He put together a really good performance in tough conditions, on two non-functioning knees.



• Just so the suspense doesn't get out of hand, I'll be picking the Patriots in the Super Bowl, to win and to cover. I think that they'll score 40+.

* - The relevant "expert" in question here is, obviously, me. Apparently, it was yet one more piece of NFL analysis, in a long line, which could not possibly have been more spectacularly incorrect.

Conference Championship Game weekend

I had a heck of a regular season picking the games. The playoffs, on the other hand...

There were four games last weekend. I got one (1) right against the spread. I got two winners. In none of the four games was I right both straight up and against the spread.

The good news is that this week, I've only got two games to get wrong.


San Diego at New England (-14) - Yes, the Chargers have played better over the last half of the season than they did in the first half. Yes, they've been even better than New England over their last 8 games. Before squeaking by Tennessee in the first round, however, that six game winning streak over the last half of the season was against bad teams. Oakland, Kansas City, Denver, Detroit. Overtime against Tennessee in a game where Vince Young got hurt. If you look at games against playoff teams, the Patriots and Chargers are each 3-0 since mid-November, and the Patriots have played better. And that's with everyone playing New England at a playoff level of intensity. We can, I suppose, throw out the first San Diego-New England game from this season. But the Patriots are, and have been, a much better team than San Diego, and when you look at the ancillary stuff (the weather, the injuries, the fact that San Diego will fly further on Saturday than the Patriots have in the last two months combined), there's no reason not to expect this to be a Patriots win. Which I do expect.

Pick: New England 38 - San Diego 17


NY Giants at Green Bay (-7) - Like the Chargers, the Giants have momentum. But let's be honest here - how much of a momentum advantage can either team have when you're in a Conference Championship Game? The Packers weather advantage would be greater against a warm weather team than it is against this one. Here's the deciding factor in this game for me - any quarterback (I'm looking at you, Eli Manning) can play a couple of great games in a row. What separates the greats from the "any quarterbacks" is the ability to do it consistently, over and over again. Could Eli have another great game this week? Yup, he sure could. And the Giants could go in to Green Bay and win. But that's not the way that I'm betting.

Pick: Green Bay 27 - New York 17