By Evan Scarlett
Editor’s Note: This article was written before the Patriots-Broncos most recent contest that took place on Sunday, November 2nd.
In sports, teams are constantly evaluated through two opposing lenses. One lens is broad, all encompassing, evaluating the totality that builds up within a complete body of work such as a full season or an entire career. The other is narrow, short-sighted, concerned with the present, or, for that matter, the most recent past – in other words, one game.
For a clearer picture of these contrasting modes of judgment, let’s examine the way Bill Belichick evaluates his team versus how the media does. Bill Belichick is a boring, grumpy old man with below average social skills and an annoyingly humble kind of arrogance. But this same man is also a football genius, a reliable motivator, and a proven champion. Ever listened to one of Bill’s press conferences? If the answer is no, you haven’t necessarily missed out. Belichick is blunt, rude, and matter-of-fact – he’s basically the greatest all-time when it comes to answering the media’s questions in the least preferred manner possible. But this habit of simple, obvious, and uninspiring responses is also calculated, intentional, and, quite arguably, beneficial. You see, Bill Belichick and his team talk very little and say even less to the media because he views the media as a distraction that is always hungry enough to feed its own essence. In other words, according to Bill Belichick, there isn’t a lot to gain from being totally honest, upfront, and personable with the media, so the less you say and the more boring you make it, the better. In his mid-week press conference, Belichick responded to any and all questions related to the hype of this Sunday’s Pats-Broncos match-up by commending Peyton, recognizing the Broncos numerous strengths (and lack of weaknesses), and ultimately stating, as always, that it’s just one game and that winning this game is the ONLY thing he is focused on. If you ask Bill how important this game is in the context of the regular season and even playoff seeding, he’ll tell you that every game is important, and that every team in this league is hard to beat. Not necessarily the answer anyone is looking for, but that’s what you get with this guy.
Anyways, back to my initial point. There is a strange dichotomy in sports between the identity of a team now vs. their identity over the course of a season or even over the course of several seasons. Particularly in the NFL, the media tends to be extremely reactionary on a week-to-week basis. A week ago the Cowboys were the best team in the league. Now, thanks to one mediocre performance and one Tony Romo injury, they suddenly have a lot of question marks. Give it another couple of weeks and sports nation may flip flop back to its initial intuition. Remember that abysmal performance by the Patriots in week four against the Chiefs? I blocked most of it out of my memory, although I do recall Trent Dilfer’s post-game comments. “They’re not good anymore,” he stated, as if it was a universal truth that the New England Patriots simply don’t have what it takes to contend right now and won’t have what it takes to contend this season or even next season and Tom Brady’s career is over and Bill Belichick has mismanaged his team over the past ten years and hasn’t given Brady enough support and got arrogant in his scouting. Most people agreed with Trent at the time. But now he looks pretty foolish. You see, even though it’s important for players and coaches to take it one game at a time, it’s also important for fans and the media to recognize that there’s a f**cking reason why it’s a 17 week season and how you play in week four has close to no significance in terms of how you will be playing in week 16! This honestly grinds my gears, because every time the Patriots remind fans and the media why patience pays off, people forget about it and fall back into their overly presumptuous and impatient ways.
As fans, our attention is constantly split between the now, the was, and the what could be. This is in large part due to our human nature. Humans seek to recognize patterns. It’s how we cope with the world around us. The same applies to spectating sports. As fans we want to feel more aware than we actually are, so we seek out patterns and tendencies in order to ‘gain insight’ and predict the future. Watch as I find patterns in the Brady-Manning rivalry and try to use them to predict the verdict of Sunday’s game. Pay attention to how, by throwing in a bunch of stats at you, it sounds like I know what I’m talking about, even though in reality I think it’s going to be close to impossible to accurately predict what happens in the game, with the possibility of an accurate guess being heavily influenced by luck or chance.
I like to view this weekend’s Peyton vs. Brady match-up as one quarter of a sixteen quarter game (yeah, I get it, one sixteenth of a sixteen period game – quarter just sounds better…). Actually, scratch that. We don’t know how many football quarters will be in this match up. Peyton and Brady could very well compete head-to-head another five times before both of them retire (this season’s AFC championship, next season’s, the season after…). These guys are like the most entertaining and athletic fine wine – they literally have gotten better with age. And I get it that oftentimes age hits athletes in a blink of an eye rather than in a sustained, linear regression. That could very well happen to both Brady and Manning, but do I expect it to in the next three seasons? Honestly, I don’t. Counting this season as apart of that cluster, I legitimately see no reason why Peyton and Brady shouldn’t face off in the next three AFC championships (which would make it four years in a row dating back to last year). Sure, the Colts have been impressive of late and Andrew Luck continues to get better. But will they really have a better roster and coaching staff than the Pats or Broncos anytime soon? Sure, the Bengals are talented on both offense and defense. But is there any reason to trust Marvin Lewis and Andy “The Red Rifle” Dalton in games that mean something?? Sure, San Diego is having it’s best season in a while and Phillip Rivers seems to have caught a second wind in his career. But I view this year as more of an outlier in what is sure to in hindsight be a slightly above average ten to fifteen year span for the Chargers with Phillip Rivers under center. There is no logical reason to favor any other teams over the Patriots and the Broncos for this season, next season, and the season after. Plain and simple. Even if Peyton and Brady aren’t as good next year and the following year, they’ll still be better than the other QBs in the AFC and will still have stronger rosters and coaching staffs.
So, back to the point that I almost started to make (Sorry, I’ve done that twice now. My apologies to anyone with a short attention span…that’s probably all of you). This Sunday’s match-up between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, between Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, or, rather, between Bill Belichick and Peyton Manning, is but a blip in the all-time showdown. Because of that, this game shouldn’t be emphasized over any others. If we actually try and listen to the point that Belichick drills home in every press conference instead of getting annoyed with him and chalking it up as nonsense, the truth is quite transparent: it’s just one game. Nothing that’s happened before it will be an ultimate factor. Nothing that might happen in the future should matter either. What kind of game will it be? Will it look like last year’s windy, frigid showdown that was bizarre and compelling all the way through overtime? Or will it be more of a grind-it-out wrestling match where the stronger, more talented, and more motivated team will get an early lead and put its opponent in an aggravatingly gradual chokehold from the second quarter on (see last season’s AFC champion game)? The answer, of course, is neither. This game will be it’s own game. Players will treat it as such. The outcome will be unique. It may or may not resemble past match-ups in terms of the scoring margin, but each play call, each execution, each move within the chess match will be of its own genera and of its own complexities.
But that relative truth isn’t nearly as fun to explore. This is why, from a fan’s perspective, the history does mean something. This is why this isn’t just one isolated game. From a fan’s perspective, it must be taken into context. Let’s look at Brady and Manning’s history against one another. In the first six match-ups, Brady won all of them. Manning then went on to win the next three. Brady then went on to win two of the next three. At this point it was Patriots 8, Colts 4 as far as the team match-up was concerned. Peyton went on to the play three seasons with the Broncos. So far, the head to head is Brady 2, Manning 1 in Pats-Broncos scenarios. Let’s take a look at some more figures:
Total Wins When Both QBs face off: Brady 10, Manning 5
Regular Season Match-ups: Brady 8, Manning 3
Post Season Match-ups: Brady 2, Manning 2
Super Bowl Rings: Brady 3, Manning 1
Super Bowl Appearances: Brady 5, Manning 2
At Gillette: Brady 7, Manning 2
In Indy/Denver: Brady 3, Manning 3
What does this tell us? On the road it’s a toss up, with the slight advantage to Manning in the post-season. At home Brady has been dominant, including vs. Manning in the post-season. If we’re going with our gut, which tells us to look for patterns that could somehow predict something that shouldn’t in actuality be predictable using numbers alone, history says the Patriots will win this game. But just as I don’t think this should really be factored in to who wins on Sunday, I also don’t think what we’ve seen thus far this season should have too much baring.
Think about this. The Patriots come in to this game averaging 29.9 PPG and the Broncos come in averaging 32.0. The Patriots have given up an average of 22.1 Points Allowed, whereas the Broncos have only given up 20.3. Okay, so edge Broncos…if we think that every game each team has played should be factored in equally. In their last four games, the Pats have scored 39.5 PPG and given up 21.5 PPG, whereas in the same span the Broncos have scored 37.3 PPG and given up 18.8 PPG. Much closer differentials this time. The Broncos have been consistently good all season, but the Pats have turned things up of late. The biggest difference, apart from a few unfortunate injuries? Their newcomers finally had enough time to learn the system. Let’s try and examine the key Pats players who weren’t on their roster last year. Revis, Browner, Tim Wright, Brandon Lafell, etc. Notice a pattern? They’ve all emerged in the last four games. It’s been the same thing with some of the Pats’ rookies. Plain and simple, Bill Belichick’s system is complex. Players need time to understand it and excel in it. The longer they have to get used to it, the better they perform. Thus, this Sunday should theoretically be the Patriots’ best game of the season. And I, as an extreme New England homer, believe that it will be.
But the same could be said about the Broncos. The Denver Broncos have not slowed down. They continue to demolish their opponents by an average margin of almost two touchdowns. They are relatively healthy, and you could make the argument that they are the most talented roster top to bottom in the NFL. The Pats have been up and down against good teams this season (although to be honest they haven’t played that many), whereas the Broncos have been consistently strong. There’s no reason why this couldn’t also be the Broncos’ best game of the season thus far.
So, what’s my point? My point is that I don’t really have one when it comes to predicting this Sunday’s match-up. But my other point is that while it’s fun to analyze trends, they don’t decide what happens over the course of the next 60 minutes that these two teams play football. The players and coaches decide what happens. They will game plan and scout based on the past, but everything will be taken with a grain of salt. It doesn’t make much of a difference that the Patriots beat the Broncos last season and the season before when both teams faced off in Foxboro. It doesn’t really matter that the Broncos beat the Patriots in their most recent post-season match-up either. These things can be motivation. So can first place in the AFC, which will be awarded to the winner of Sunday’s game. But in order to win, players will need to forget about the past and ignore the future. A week of diligent preparation will certainly help, but the only thing that gives your team the W is sixty minutes of solid, hard-fought, team-oriented football.
Here’s another fun pattern I picked up on, this time relating to baseball. The World Series just ended, and boy was it a compelling one. In case you live under a rock, the Series went to an all-or-nothing Game 7, where the Giants took care of business on the road by a score of 3-2. Apart from a nail-biter in Game 3, no other individual game within the series was remotely close. Series-wise, super even. Game 7-wise, super close. But let’s take a look at the final scores of the other games. Game 1: Giants 7, Royals 1; Game 2: Royals 7, Giants 2; Game 3 (which I pointed out was the only other close match-up): Royals 3, Giants 2; Game 4: Giants 11, Royals 4; Game 5: Giants 5, Royals 0; Game 6: Royals 10, Giants 0. Again, series-wise, super close. Individual game-wise, not so much. But here’s the most interesting part – going in to Game 7, both teams had put up virtually the same total numbers. If the first six games of the World Series weren’t viewed as separate games but rather were seen as one very long 63-inning marathon match, the score at the end of 63 innings would be Giants 27, Royals 25. Remarkably close, eh? So, if we’re going by the numbers and assuming that the World Series will turn out much like any game of NFL Blitz 2000, we should have seen the law of averages come in to play yet again in Game 7. But we didn’t because in reality the only trend we needed to monitor was what happens when Madison Bumgarner takes the mound. If we had been aware of this all along, then the outcome of Game 7 would have seemed rather obvious (and, to some people’s credit, it was). The Royals didn’t win by a few runs in Game 7 in order to even the total scoring margin. Instead, they got beaten by Bumgarner for the third time in what is sure to be deemed as one of the most prolific and dominant post season performances in MLB history.
Part of the beauty of professional sports, from a fan’s perspective, lies in the urge to analyze longterm trends and individual games at the same time, while also being open to throwing both measurements out the window. As predictable as outcomes can seem beforehand or even in hindsight, what happens in professional sports usually is not something you could accurately foresee. That’s what makes every game so compelling. But it’s also what makes sustained success so impressive. Statistically speaking, a player like Madison Bumgarner wasn’t supposed to deliver the dominant performance time after time. But he did. A team like the Patriots aren’t supposed to average 11 wins or better for a decade and a half. But they did. A player like Peyton Manning isn’t supposed to have his two best statistical seasons ever, coming off several surgeries at ages 37 and 38. But he is. Sports are a game of defying the odds. Most teams and players that stumble upon success do, eventually, regress. Just look at what the law of averages has done to Peyton’s brother, Eli. Eli Manning has twice as many super bowl rings as his brother. But in pretty much all of the seasons where Eli’s Giants didn’t make a super bowl run, they were mediocre at best. In this day and age, it’s really, really, really difficult to have sustained success in any professional sport. That’s why you gotta tip your cap to the teams and players that pull it off. So here’s to you, Madison Bumgarner. Here’s to you, Peyton Manning. Here’s to you, Bill Belichick. Some people say that the greatest thing about professional sports is the reliable parody that exists. I say it’s the emergence of players, teams, and coaches who defy such a thing.
Diamond Bags 