Football Outsiders: 2010 Defeats

Football Outsiders has started posting some of their advanced stats from last season and I’ve been enjoying every post. The first and biggest one was that of “defeats”, defined as:

Defeats are defined as any play (tackle, assist, pass defensed, interception, or forced fumble) that does one of three things:

• 1) causes a turnover
• 2) causes a loss of yardage
• 3) stops conversion on third or fourth down

When I first looked at the top 25 players I immediately looked for any Patriots and was disappointed to find none. The ideas for a blog post ran through my head, with things like “this is why our defense struggles” and “we need playmakers” going through my head.

But upon closer inspection I noticed something interesting: 17 of the 25 guys on the list played on teams that didn’t make the playoffs. I’m not really sure how to explain it, perhaps when your the only good player on a shitty defense you have to make plays because no one else will. Perhaps on a good team the stops are more spread around. That would seem to make sense for the Patriots defense that values balance.

But still, it can’t be all that surprising to not see a Patriots on there given their troubels on 3rd down in 2010.

For what it’s worth (and it’s not all that surprising) the Patriots ranked dead last in the NFL in pass defeats in 2010. And unfortunately FO also points out:

Unlike with Run Defeats, Pass Defeats do seem to correlate pretty well with total pass defense performance.

The Patriots had no player in top 25 or bottom 25 in Run Defeats. Average. Boring.