Looking at the Patriots - 2021


I hate to say this but I like post retirement Peyton. He doesn't seem to take himself as serious as he did when he was playing.

I'm gonna go take a bath to wash that off now.
 
I hate to say this but I like post retirement Peyton. He doesn't seem to take himself as serious as he did when he was playing.

I'm gonna go take a bath to wash that off now.
I don't watch the ManningCast last night because I was focused on the game, but when MNF doesn't involver the Pats I prefer that to the standard announcers.
 
I hate to say this but I like post retirement Peyton. He doesn't seem to take himself as serious as he did when he was playing.

I'm gonna go take a bath to wash that off now.
Manning always has high praise for Belichick and the Pats and he makes really funny commercials. I always respected Peyton, he's a great QB one of the best to ever do it.
 
Manning was one of the greats no question. He might not have hit the heights Brady managed, but he was still an outstanding QB. Bill always said how hard it was to defend against him. Interesting from Manning yesterday, he said it was just exhausting having to plan for Bills defenses.

With the Patriots going forward, I do think the Colts and Miami will be two tricky games. The Finns have got it going a bit and Flores will have a very good defensive plan for the Pats when they meet.
 
Like to see #95 DT D. Ekuale stay on the 53, look like he popped, hate to lose him.
 
NFL Week 13 - The Tampa Bay Buccaneers drop in our overall DVOA ratings this week but they hold on to the top spot over New England and Buffalo. The big story, however, may be in our weighted DVOA ratings that have a slightly higher correlation with future performance.


As you may know, weighted DVOA lowers the weight of early-season games to get a better idea of how well teams are playing now. It doesn't lower the weight of those games as much as you might expect. A lot of fans have a very short-term view on which teams are good and bad, and only think about the last month or so. Weighted DVOA is still considering every game this season and won't stop considering Week 1 for another couple of weeks. Right now, Week 1 games still count at 40% strength in weighted DVOA. Every other game counts at least 50% strength or more.


Right now, the New England Patriots are the leaders in weighted DVOA by nearly 10 percentage points over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The gap between the Patriots and the Buccaneers is larger than the gap between the Buccaneers and the No. 8 Los Angeles Rams. This advantage in weighted DVOA is then translated to our playoff odds simulation, which uses weighted DVOA (in conjunction, for one more week, with a tiny bit of the preseason projections). As a result, we have the Patriots right now as a favorite way out of step with the market. Over half our simulations now end up with the Patriots in the Super Bowl, and one-third of our simulations end up with the Patriots winning the whole thing.


It certainly does seem to be too high. Perhaps there needs to be a variable that considers the quarterback's resume for each team, giving a boost to the teams with the best veteran quarterbacks who have the most consistent records of high performance. Perhaps there needs to be a "rookie quarterback" variable that docks the Patriots for the fact that no rookie quarterback has ever started a Super Bowl. (Kurt Warner wasn't a rookie in 1999, since he had been bouncing around football for five years beforehand.) However, any metric based on 2021 performance alone is going to have the Patriots very high, and any metric that gives a stronger weight to how the Patriots are playing over the last couple months should have them on top of the league.


It's hard to overstate how good the Patriots have been over the last two months. (It's not impossible -- Patriots fans are very good at overstating things.) Let's go all the way back to Week 4, the week of the big reunion game against Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. Opponent adjustments give the Patriots a positive DVOA in that game, even though they lost to the Bucs in the end. Since that game, the Patriots are 8-2. That's a good-sized sample, 10 games going back to the start of October including two losses. The New England Patriots have put up a positive DVOA in nine of those 10 games; the exception was Week 5's narrow victory over Houston. They also put up DVOA over 70% in three straight games from Week 10 to Week 12. Only the Bills and Rams have more games over 50% over the course of the entire season than the Patriots have in just the last month.






The Patriots' recent dominance stands out if we look at DVOA ratings from Week 4 onwards. Packers fans want to pretend Week 1 never happened? Instead, let's pretend that the entire month of September never happened. Of course, it did happen and it can still teach us something, which is why we still include it in the weighted DVOA formula. But let's see what the top of the DVOA ratings would look like if we only looked at the last 10 weeks:



2021 DVOA, Weeks 4-13​
TEAM
TOTAL
DVOA
TOTAL
RANK
W-L​
OFF.
DVOA
OFF.
RANK
DEF.
DVOA
DEF.
RANK
S.T.
DVOA
S.T.
RANK
NE41.5%18-216.2%3-20.7%14.7%4
TB29.1%27-224.3%1-6.9%7-2.1%24
BUF26.0%35-46.2%8-18.4%21.4%10
IND24.6%47-314.8%5-7.1%62.7%8
DAL22.3%56-35.8%10-12.7%43.8%5
SF19.9%64-513.9%6-8.9%5-2.9%25
ARI18.7%77-25.3%13-13.2%30.2%19
GB16.1%87-215.5%4-6.1%9-5.6%31
KC16.0%97-25.9%9-3.9%136.2%1
LAC13.0%105-418.6%20.8%19-4.8%30
LAR12.4%115-45.7%11-5.7%101.0%11
MIN11.6%124-55.4%12-2.6%143.5%6

Wow. That is a lead. Unfortunately, it's not easy for me to go back and look at every 10-game stretch dating all the way back to 1983. But I can look at the first 10 games of each season. Since 1983, only 16 teams have put up DVOA over 40% over their first 10 games of the season. That's what the Patriots have done over their most recent 10 games. You probably already knew how good the Patriots have been on defense and special teams over the past two months. But notice that the Patriots come out third on offense behind the Buccaneers and Chargers. That includes ranking sixth rushing the ball since Week 4 and -- I swear I am not making this up out of some sense of homer obligation -- first passing the ball since Week 4. With a rookie quarterback! The Patriots have 37.9% passing DVOA since Week 4. Tampa Bay is at 37.6% passing DVOA since Week 4. This will stun you, but the two leaders in net yards per pass since Week 4 are the San Francisco 49ers at 7.7 yards and the Patriots at 7.6 yards. Dallas is third at 7.2 yards.


(Aside: obviously, those passing numbers include only three plays from last night's game. For those who are curious: there are not at this time specific weather adjustments in DVOA for high-wind or high-precipitation games. Offensive and defensive DVOA simply have an indoors/outdoors adjustment. Special teams has general weather adjustments but they're based on the week of the season and the usual temperatures in that city, not the specifics of each game.)


I hope this table helps explain why the Patriots are so far ahead of everyone else in our Super Bowl simulations. They really have been that good over the last 10 games.


Below the Patriots, the top 10 mostly stays the same as last week. The Dallas Cowboys jump Arizona into the No. 4 slot and the Green Bay Packers jump Minnesota into the No. 10 spot. (I'll write more on the Vikings before Thursday's game.) The big mover is the Los Angeles Chargers, who went from 16th to 12th after beating up on the Cincinnati Bengals. The Chargers were also the team with the biggest improvement in playoff odds this week, going from 52.4% to 80.6% odds of making the postseason.

There's also this as alluded to above:

1638932780621.png

I've perused Football Outsiders off and on since 2009, and I have Never seen the Patriots have that high of Super Bowl odds during the regular season. Not that I can recall anyway. To go from 2-4, and somewhere between 15th and 22nd in DVOA, to this, is just remarkable. I'm glad Belichick is getting credit for the masterpiece he's been building, he ALWAYS deserves CotY but I really don't see how they can fail to give it to him this year.
 
Wow! At the start of the year, the Pats were 40:1 to win the SB. Now they are the clear favorite. I should have thrown down a Benny.
 
Wow! At the start of the year, the Pats were 40:1 to win the SB. Now they are the clear favorite. I should have thrown down a Benny.

There's something weird in the air. It really is becoming a distinct possibility that the Patriots will face the Buccs in the SB.

If that happens....good god, the media will be insufferable in the lead up to the game.
 


There's also this as alluded to above:

View attachment 8316

I've perused Football Outsiders off and on since 2009, and I have Never seen the Patriots have that high of Super Bowl odds during the regular season. Not that I can recall anyway. To go from 2-4, and somewhere between 15th and 22nd in DVOA, to this, is just remarkable. I'm glad Belichick is getting credit for the masterpiece he's been building, he ALWAYS deserves CotY but I really don't see how they can fail to give it to him this year.

It's happening, isn't it?

Everything fans hoped for - BB reloading this team in 1 off season, quicker than it's ever been done, to compete and actually win against the best the NFL has to offer.
I am in awe. Everyone should be in awe, fan or not. What he's done has never been done. His plan, his coaching, his GM abilities, his cap handling...every little thing he's done to rebuild his team into a legit contender in 1 offseason has been a masterclass in team building that should be required reading by every NFL owner and GM.

As great as his first 20 years were with 6 Lombardi trophies & 9 appearances, it boggles the mind to think the historically successful 2021 rebuild may actually become his greatest single achievement and the one studied most by his peers.
 
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