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Conference Championship Picks, Part One

January 20th, 2005

The picks are taking much longer than usual to write this week, so I’m gonna go ahead and post them one at a time. Here’s the tough one.

New England (-3) at Pittsburgh
The more you look at the raw numbers, the harder it is to get any kind of handle on this game. Or so it would seem. But maybe there’s something hidden in these teams stats that will reveal where this game is headed. Let’s find out.

First, though, the question of whether you throw out what happened last week. Really, there’s no telling whether Pittsburgh’s poor play against the New York Jets revealed a team unready for the playoffs or was simply a slight misstep for a powerhouse team. We won’t know until sometime around 9:30 Sunday night. So, let’s see if we can find answers in the regular season stats and then come back to what the Divisional Round games might mean.

It goes almost without saying that in the regular season, New England had the better offense, Pittsburgh the better defense. The differences are fairly slight, though, particularly on defense, which makes it hard to look at the whole and come up with answers. So let’s look at the parts.

Offense: The Pats were ranked fourth in the league in scoring, putting up 27.3 points per game. The Steelers were ranked 11th, with 23.3. The Pats offense was seventh in total yards with an average of 357.6 per game, while the Steelers O was 16th with 324. The Pats passing offense was 13th in the league, averaging 234 yards per game, scoring 29 touchdowns and giving up 14 interceptions. The Steelers passing O was 28th with 185.6, 20 and 13. Only in the running game did the Steelers offense outdo the Pats. The Steelers rushing offense was ranked second, averaging 154 yards per game and 4 yards per carry, with 16 touchdowns and 14 fumbles. New England had the seventh-ranked rushing offense, with 133.4 yards per game, 4.1 yards per carry, 15 touchdowns and 17 fumbles.

Defense: The Steelers were ranked first in the league in overall D, allowing only 258.4 yards per game, while the Pats were ranked ninth, allowing 310.8. Both teams were outstanding against the run, but the Steelers were a bit better. First-ranked Pittsburgh allowed an average of only 81.2 yards per game (3.6 per carry) on the ground, giving up eight rushing touchdowns and forcing 22 fumbles. Sixth-ranked New England allowed 98.3 yards per game (3.9 per carry), allowing nine touchdowns and causing 23 fumbles. The Steelers, meanwhile, were a good deal more effective than the Patriots against the pass. Pittsburgh’s pass D was ranked fourth. It allowed 191.3 yards per game and 14 touchdowns, while logging 19 picks. New England’s pass D was ranked 19th. It allowed 231.9 yards per game, giving up 18 touchdowns while intercepting 20 balls. In what might be the most important defensive stat, however, there’s virtually no difference between the teams. Pittsburgh’s D was ranked first in points allowed, giving up an average of 15.7 per game. New England’s was tied for second, giving up 16.3 on average.

Pretty damned mind-numbing, isn’t it? Bear with me for a second here, though, because I wanna try to make sense of those numbers (to the extent that’s possible) and see if they mean anything. Let’s look at the points scored/points allowed differential first. Add the Pats average points scored to the Steelers average allowed and divide by two and you get 21.5. Do the same thing the other way around and you get 19.8. I’m no statistician or anything, but I’m gonna go ahead and assume that a 1.7-point differential (that’s about eight percent, no matter how you look at it) sits close enough to the margin of error that it’s not worth considering.

OK, then, how about looking at how strengths match up against strengths. The Steelers run the ball well, and don’t pass particularly well (or particularly often, actually). The Pats defend against the run better than they defend against the pass. So if all holds even, that should play to the Patriots advantage. If they can shut down the run (either by playing up to their standards on defense, or by getting a lead and making the Steelers throw), the Pats should be able to keep the Steelers out of the end zone. The Pats are much more balanced offensively, throwing and running with a lot of success. But the Steelers are more balanced on D, stopping both the pass and the run very well. So there’s little advantage to be found there either way. If the Pats can find a way to be effective in the air (where the Steelers are a bit more vulnerable than they are against the run) they can maybe force Pittsburgh’s DBs to play back a bit and maybe loosen things up for running back Corey Dillon (who had a great day against the Colts last week, but the Colts defense sucks). But there’s no telling whether they’ll be able to do that. Not just by looking at the numbers, anyhow.

So, you’re thinking, we just waded through all those numbers to get next to nowhere? Kinda, yeah. Welcome to my sick little OCD world.

But wait, wait, wait. I just thought of something else. Since defense wins championships, and since the two teams were not so far apart in some key defensive areas during the season, let’s take a look at how they came about their defensive stats.

The Pats played the first- and second-ranked offensive teams in the league in both overall yardage and points scored (Indianapolis, 404.7 yards per game, 32.6 points per game; and Kansas City 418 yards per game, 30.2 points per game). They played four of the league’s ten most prolific scoring offenses (with sixth-ranked St. Louis and eighth-ranked Seattle on their schedule), and four of the league’s top 10 offenses in terms of total yards (adding seventh-ranked Buffalo and tenth-ranked Cincinnati). The highest-ranked offense Pittsburgh faced in terms of overall yards per game was the Patriots (7). They faced only one other team in the top ten in that category, ninth-ranked Philadelphia. And the dropoff from Kansas City’s 418.4 and Indy’s 404.7 to New England’s 357.6 and Philly’s 351.1 is pretty significant. Pittsburgh’s highest-ranked opponent in terms of average points per game was New England, ranked fourth. They also played Buffalo (7), Philadelphia (8) and Cincinnati (10). (By the way, the Pats also faced the 11th- and 12th-ranked scoring offenses in Pittsburgh and Seattle, while the next highest uncommon opponent Pittsburgh faced was 18th-ranked Oakland — Both teams played the 17th-ranked Jets). Here again, the dropoff is meaningful. The Pats’ opponents from the top 10 in scoring averaged 32.6, 30.2, 24.7 and 23.4 points per game. The Steelers’ opponents from that same category averaged 27.3, 24.7, 24.1 and 23.4. The dropoff there, too, is pretty significant.

The Pats’ run D faced the second-, third-, fifth-, eighth- and ninth-ranked rushing offenses in the league. The Steelers’ run D faced the third-, seventh- and ninth-ranked rushing offenses. The difference there is noticeable and important. The difference in the quality of passing offense each team faced, however, is rather huge. The Pats faced the second-, third- and fourth-ranked passing offenses in the league, teams (Indianapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis) that averaged 295.8, 289.6 and 288.4 yards per game in the air. Pittsburgh faced the sixth- and eighth-ranked passing offenses, teams (Philadelphia and Oakland) that managed an average of 263 and 251.2 yards per game in the air. When you look at that, the statistical differences between the Patriots and Steelers passing defenses start to look a lot less important.

When you look at it that way, things start to seem clearer, and to look a bit better for the Patriots, who appear to have a slight edge in the matchup.

So now seems like the right time to take a look at what happened in the Divisional Playoff round last week, shall we? No need to crunch numbers there. What happened was that the Pats dominated the Indianapolis Colts on both sides of the ball, while the Steelers struggled against the New York Jets, coming out with a win in overtime that had far more to do with bad coaching choices and horrible kicking by the Jets than it did with anything the Steelers did on offense or defense. The Pats took the ball away from the Colts three times (two fumbles and an interception). The Steelers gave the ball away to the Jets three times (two interceptions, one fumble). The Pats looked like the seasoned playoff team they are and the Steelers looked like just another team struggling to get one more game out of its postseason. The Steelers haven’t struggled like that much, so the outcome of their game may have been a fluke. Again, we won’t know until Sunday. But the Pats have come up big in enough big games that we can say for sure that the result in Foxborough last weekend was anything but surprising. There, again, advantage, whether it’s slight or great, Patriots.

Add to that the fact that home-field advantage is almost meaningless in the Conference Championship round (home teams win slightly more than 50 percent of the time), the fact that the Pats offense is led by a quarterback, Tom Brady, who’s success in the playoffs to date has been astounding, while the Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, is in his rookie season (and that no team with a rookie quarterback has ever advanced to the Super Bowl), and the fact that the Pats are better coached than the Steelers (and that Patriots coach Bill Belichick is 2-0 in conference championship games while Steelers coach Bill Cowher is 1-3), and you get a pretty clear picture of where this game is likely to go.

It remains possible, of course, that the Steelers will win. They are, without question, a great football team, probably one of the two best in the league (that is, I don’t think either remaining NFC team can beat either remaining AFC team). They’re playing at home. And when they play well, they’re all but unstoppable. Plus, the media like the Pats a bit too much this week for my taste.

That said, it looks to me like the Pats are headed back to the Super Bowl. I think the Pats come out strong on offense, throwing the ball effectively and avoiding the kinds of mistakes that hurt them in their last game with Pittsburgh, giving Corey Dillon the opportunity to gain some yards (though I don’t think he’ll have the huge game some Pats fans seem to be expecting), and putting young Mr. Roethlisberger in the difficult position of having to win the game in the air, which will lead him to make the same kind of mistakes he made last week against the Jets. I think the Pats will find ways to score against Pittsburgh and will find ways to shut down the Steelers’ running game. That spells victory. So I’m taking New England and giving the points.

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