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New feel for New England: wins AND stats
Cold, Hard Football Facts for September 23, 2007
If you had any doubt about how much the Patriots and Bill Belichick care about stats, consider their actions in Sunday's win over Buffalo.
Quarterback Tom Brady took a seat on the bench - the international sign for "this game is over" - with about 8 minutes to play and New England sporting a 38-7 lead.
But the Patriots kept matriculating themselves up the field, and got all the way to the Buffalo 10. There, on 4th and 7, instead of kicking a field goal, they ran the ball up the middle, refusing to pad their 31-point lead.
Those of you who are fans of sportsmanship and fair play can understand sitting the quarterback and eschewing the field goal against a divisional opponent with the game well in control.
However, the football historians within us wondered what effect it might have on New England's early assault on history
Foregoing the field goal was the difference between an offense that's merely great, and one that's on pace to set some new NFL scoring marks (at a very early point in the season, we realize).
For those of you keeping score at home, Brady has 10 TD passes through three games (four today), which puts him on pace for 53 this season. We don't think it will happen, but that's the pace he's on right now, and that would be a new NFL record (Peyton Manning's 49 from 2004 is the standard).
The New England offense, meanwhile, is averaging a nifty 38.0 PPG, with a clean, easy-to-calculate 38 points in each of the three games this year.
With another field goal, the one the Patriots passed up on the 4th-and-7 dive, they would have 117 points this season, instead of 114, and be averaging 39.0 a game.
That's a magic number for us statistically-obsessed Trolls.
The all-time NFL scoring record is currently held by the 1950 Rams, who averaged 38.83 PPG (466 points in 12 games), behind the performance of two Hall of Fame quarterbacks, Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin. (Contributor Mike Carlson wrote a great piece about those high-flying Rams teams about a year or so ago.)
Of course, that was a different era and the 1950 Rams had an advantage few other teams in history have had: they played four of their 12 games against expansion teams from the old All-America Football Conference, the Baltimore Colts and New York Yanks. The Colts in particular fielded a brutally inept defense and both franchises were so bad that they were out of the league within a year. The Colts returned in 1953, but the Yanks were lost to history.
(You'll see in a future CHFF article that many, many records in NFL history are the result of unusual historic circumstances, such as this scoring record of the 1950 Rams.)
So, comparing an offense of that era to one of today is difficult. Suffice it to say, nobody's ever scored as prolifically as the 1950 Rams.
New England at this point, though, is on pace for the Super Bowl Era scoring mark.
The top five offenses of the Super Bowl Era. Not so coincidentally, the top offense in the modern NFL had something in common with the 2007 Patriots: a wide receiver named Randy Moss.
TOP FIVE OFFENSES of SUPER BOWL ERA:
- 1998 Vikings - 34.75 PPG (556 in 16 games)
- 1983 Redskins - 33.81 PPG (541 in 16 games)
- 2000 Rams - 33.75 PPG (540 in 16 games)
- 1967 Raiders (AFL) - 33.43 (468 in 14 games)
- 1999 Rams - 32.87 (526 in 16 games)
With games over the next two weeks against Cleveland and Cincy - two awful defenses that combined for 96 points against each other last week - there's a very realistic chance that the Patriots will enter Week 6 of the season with a 5-0 record and still on pace with the great offenses of all time.
After that, the schedule gets much tougher for the Patriots, with games against Dallas, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis.
So don't count on the Patriots breaking the all-time scoring record, or Brady breaking the all-time TD pass record, or Moss going for 2,000 yards and 20 scores.
But they may at least make it interesting.
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