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Remedial Football Math

Sports talk radio guys gotta eat, and they can only cadge one meal a day through plugs, so I probably shouldn't have been too surprised nor upset when Mark Bertrand and Scott Zolak, who know better, began their show this morning by wondering if the subpar performance of the Patriots' offense against Kansas City and his own utterly forgettable evening meant that Tom Brady was in danger of getting benched in the 2017 season.

No, the sad thing is that this obvious effort to drive listeners to the phones in sputtering rage as a way to fill up four hours of air time was based on the program's knowledge that most fans are 1. always overly focused on offense, especially the quarterback; and 2. completely innumerate when it comes to the NFL.

Did Brady play his best or even within shouting distance of it? Oh, God no. Did the offense sputter or worse at vital moments. Sure. But let's take a look at the scoreboard. At game's end last Thursday night it read Chiefs 42-Patriots 27.

Let's multiply 27 by 16, the number of games in an NFL regular season. This gives us a total of 432. Now let's look at the NFL scoring stats for last season. What do we find?

First, we find that scoring 432 points would have made a team the third highest-scoring offense in the league. In fact the Packers, rightly known as one of the league's top offenses, scored exactly that. The Patriots, during a season where nobody called for Brady to be benched, scored 441, all of nine points more.

Delving a bit more, let's note that the average NFL team, winners and losers alike, scored a smidge less than 23 points a game, 22.8 to be more precise than smidge. Of course, this means that the average team also allowed that figure.

This is well within the parameters of NFL scoring since pass blocking was deregulated in the late '70s. Over the decades, scoring has climbed from a little less than 21 points a game per team to 22.8. For all the changes pro football has seen in that time, one thing has remained constant. Score 27 points, you are way more likely to win a game than not.

Of course, there's one other constant, too, one that's of the most relevance to the Pats' 0-1 record than is Tom Brady. Give up 42 points, and you have an over 99 percent of losing, and over a 90 percent chance of losing very badly indeed.

I guess devoting an entire four hours of broadcast time to the proposition "a defense that made Alex Smith look like Brett Favre gunslinging on one of his best days had better improve" just wouldn't drive the ratings meter. But I'll bet Bill Belichick has spent hours a day considering it, and about five minutes worrying about Brady.

posted by Michael Gee @ 11:56 AM