FAKE RONJAN!!Playing to the level of the competition, follow-up
Last week, we took a look back at the New York Giants to see if math agreed with the common wisdom that the Giants play better against good teams than they do against bad teams.
The metric we used was the correlation between a team's expected margin of victory (based on the relative strength of two teams) and the actual margin of victory across their 16 matchups. High numbers mean that teams pummeled bad teams and lost to good ones. Low numbers meant that teams played down to the level of their competition, rising to the occasion against contenders while getting scared or picked off by weaker opponents.
Our conclusion was that the hypothesis about the Giants was true -- at least for the first 11 games of the season.
I wanted to follow-up on the analysis, so I decided to look back at every team since 2002 (the year the NFL expanded to 32 teams) to see what else is out there. Here's what I found:
#1. The New York Giants have been this way for the past two seasons, but it doesn't hold up if you go back further than that
This one was a surprise, since the underlying hypothesis was the reason for the research in the first place.
Over the 2011-2012 seasons, math tells us that the Giants were the most "play to the level of the competition" team in the league. This makes sense, of course. They won the Super Bowl in 2011 despite losing twice to the 5-11 Redskins and being outscored on the season, and they followed that up in 2012 by missing the playoffs despite handily defeating both the 49ers and Packers.
But if you look back over the rest of the Eli Manning era, the Giants are actually right around the league average. The 2007 Super Bowl champion team lost 6 games, all against .500+ teams (including an 0-4 record against the four teams that they'd beat in the playoffs). And the story is similar for most other seasons since 2004.
Bottom line: the Giants have 2 clear-cut seasons where they hit another level and beat all of the top teams when it mattered, but the real "playing better against good teams" phenomenon is much more recent, at least in the regular season.
#2: This metric does not seem to carry over season to season, in general
The Giants example keyed me into this, since they were the most enigmatic team across 2011-2012 but were just around the league average the rest of the time.
The Atlanta Falcons are another great example. In 2012, they were the least predictable team in the league based on this metric. In both 2010 and 2011, they were the most predictable team. This is with the same coaching staff and QB, and they made the playoffs in all three seasons.
Using math, this time to look at whether this "play-to-the-level-of-the-competition" metric (wow, we need a better name for this), we find that there is no statistical carry-over from season to season.
#3: That said, there is one notable exception
While the season-to-season story doesn't seem to be consistent in general, there is one team who seems to consistently play to the level of the competition: the New England Patriots.
This shouldn't be a surprise. When the Pats were winning Super Bowls, their regular seasons were full of last-second wins -- against both good teams and bad teams -- that detractors (omgz haterz) dismissed as lucky. And fans noted that the Patriots make the plays when they need them, with Tom Brady and company elevating their play to a new level in the last two minutes.
In both 2001 and 2003, the Patriots won championships with average point margins less than 7. In fact, the 2003 Patriots set a mark for the worst points margin in league history for a team with at least 14 wins. (The 2009 Colts eventually broke this "record".) In 2004, when the team turned into a juggernaut and put up one of the best title defenses in history, they seemed to win by around two scores no matter who they faced, patsy or contender.
Even in 2007 when the team added Randy Moss, had the highest scoring offense in history, and was known for running up the score, the Patriots crushed some good teams (Chargers, Cowboys, Steelers) while struggling and nearly losing to the mediocre Eagles and Ravens.
Net -- the Patriots are the team most likely to play to the level of their competition in the league, and have been since 2002. And the Giants have a long way to go before they can own this narrative.
-rj