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Jacksonville's statistical brass knuckles
Cold, Hard Football Facts for October 19, 2007
By Kerry J. Byrne
Cold, Hard Football Facts chill sergeant
The Cold, Hard Football Facts tackle the most chilling issues in the NFL each week with all the detached emotion of a frozen container of fish sticks. This week, we examine Jacksonville's statistical brass knuckles before their big Monday night brawl against Indy, toy with the pigskin yo-yo that passes for the NFC standings and dive into football theology with a study of the vengeful nature of the Gridiron Gods.
Icy Issue: Can the upstart Jaguars take down the mighty Colts?
Icier Response: Yes they can, but only by fighting with the most efficient defense in football.
The Indy-Jacksonville Monday night game hasn’t generated the hype of last week’s New England-Dallas donnybrook du jour. And it won’t get the national play of the New England-Indy gunfight at the RCA corral on Nov. 4.
But Colts-Jags could prove the most pivotal game of the three.
It will impact a tight division race. It pits the defending Super Bowl champs on the road against their closest division rivals in a prime-time, nationally televised game. And it has all the makings of a watershed moment, a night when the 120-pound weakling could finally gouge out the eyes of its tormentor.
The Jaguars certainly have the tools - at least on paper - to pull off the upset: they boast the most efficient defense in football, the one that makes its opponents work the hardest to put points on the board. Against the mighty Colts offense, these statistical brass knuckles could come in quite handy.
The 2007 Jaguars surrender just 11.6 PPG, second in the NFL. But more importantly, the Jaguars are No. 1 in the Cold, Hard Football Facts Bendability Index, a measure of the overall efficiency of a club's team-wide defense.
The Bendability Index chronicles the “bend-but-don’t-break” phenomenon by dividing the numbers of yards a team surrenders by the number of points a team surrenders. This simple equation yields Yards Per Points Allowed. The higher the number, the more efficient a team is at keeping opponents out of the end zone.
Right now, no team in football makes its opponents work harder for points than the Jaguars. Jacksonville forces opponents to march 26.3 yards for every point they score. Or, to put it another way, Jacksonville’s opponents must crank out a daunting 184 yards of offense just to score a single touchdown and extra point.
To put those numbers into context, the Colts rank No. 18 in the Bendability Index, forcing opponents to march just 15.8 yards to score a single point, or 111 yards to score seven. Clearly, the Colts make it a lot easier for opponents to score than do the Jaguars. (The No. 32 team in the Bendability Index, Miami, forces opponents to march just 81 yards to score seven points.)
The Bendability Index is a telling indicator of success because it takes into account a large variety of team-wide factors beyond just the play of the defensive unit, including special-teams proficiency, third-down success, red-zone defense and turnovers. It then polishes these various factors into a single, bright, shiny, easy-to-understand number. This measure of defensive efficiency has proven to be far more important total defense (yards allowed) and, in most cases, more important than scoring defense (points allowed).
To put it in the simplest terms: no team is better than Jacksonville at putting opponents in difficult situations and then making them march a long way to score points.
The Jaguars will need every bit of this efficiency if they hope to take down the mighty Colts on Monday night.
Icy Issue: Should we be shocked, concerned, gleeful, dismayed or surprised by the emergence of 2006 NFC deadbeats like Green Bay, Tampa Bay, Carolina, Detroit and Arizona?
Icier Response: No. It happens all the time in the 21st-century NFL.
The Packers (5-1), Buccaneers (4-2), Panthers (4-2) and Cardinals (3-3) are all at least tied for first in their division, while Detroit (3-2) has more wins than losses for the first time since before the Edsel was launched. Yet not one of these teams had a winning record in 2006. And the Lions (3-13), Buccaneers (4-12) and Cardinals (5-11) were downright awful.
But in the NFL, and especially in the down-and-out NFC, it’s become routine for last year’s losers to become this year’s winners.
Since the NFL went to a divisional format in 1967, 29 teams have gone from worst-to-first in a division one year to the next. Twelve of those 29 turnarounds have come since 2000 alone, including three worst-to-first teams in 2006: the Ravens, Saints and Eagles.
If you’re looking for a clue that would indicate parity in the NFL, and believe that the Ravens, Saints and Eagles are the equivalent of Mr. Mustard in the library with a candlestick, you’re wrong.
The worst-to-first turnarounds of recent years merely prove that the NFC did it on the field with mediocrity. Eight of the 12 turnarounds this millenium have come from the NFL’s senior circuit, a conference that hasn’t fielded a consistent power since the Cowboys and 49ers of the early to mid 1990s.
No team bounces off the bumpers of the pigskin pinball machine more drastically than the Eagles. For the first few seasons of the 21st-century, the Eagles were the most consistent and most powerful team in the NFC, as evidenced by their four straight appearances in the conference title game.
Lately, they can’t find their compass:
- The 2004 Eagles went 13-3 and finished first in the NFC East.
- The 2005 Eagles went 6-10 and finished last in the NFC East.
- The 2006 Eagles went 10-6 and finished first in the NFC East.
- The 2007 Eagles are 2-3 and sitting at last in the NFC East.
Those radical swings might spell parity to some. But it spells conference-wide ineptitude to the Cold, Hard Football Facts.
Icy Issue: What kind of humiliating smack-down is undefeated New England going to put on winless Miami?
Icier Response: We don’t know. But if the Gridiron Gods have any sense of irony, it won’t be pretty.
Thirty-five years ago, as the 1972 Dolphins marched through their famous undefeated season, one team suffered the full wrath of their power: the stumbling and bumbling Patriots, who won just 3 of 14 games that year.
The long-time division rivals met twice in four weeks in 1972. The Dolphins won the first game in Miami, 52-0, the biggest blowout in the history of the series. In the follow-up game at New England three weeks later, the Dolphins perhaps felt a tender twinge of mercy. They merely pounded the Patriots by 16 points (37-21).
This year, the chatter around the pigskin water-cooler is that New England could become the first team since the 1972 Dolphins to march through a season undefeated. As fate would have it, the division’s bottom feeder this year is winless Miami. If the Gridiron Gods want to exact cosmic vengeance upon the 1972 Dolphins (or at least upon their fans), this season would be the time to do it.
But it won’t be easy: the Patriots historically struggle against the Dolphins, especially in Miami. They are 1-13 there all-time in the months of September and October. And no team has played better against Tom Brady's Patriots than the Dolphins.
Even when Miami has been bad, they’ve managed to bring the high-flying Brady Bunch back to earth:
- In New England’s 2004 Super Bowl season, Brady tossed 4 INTs as the 12-1 Patriots lost on Monday night at 2-11 Miami. It was the first time in NFL history that a team with 10 more wins than an opponent lost.
- Brady’s Patriots have gone a mind-blowing 86-22 (.796) everywhere else (including playoffs). They are just 2-4 in Miami.
- And last year, late in the season, the lowly Dolphins shut out the mighty Patriots in Miami, 21-0.
It was just the second shutout of New England in the Brady Era and the second shutout for Miami in the entire history of the series. The first, of course, came back in that 52-0 shellacking in 1972.
We may learn Sunday if Miami will continue to haunt New England, or if the Gridiron Gods have decided to exact revenge upon the Dolphins for the indignities of 1972.
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