new england patriots

If you’ve never checked out Football Outsiders I suggest you bust out your stats hat from college and take a look. What they provide are football-smart statistics that measure how good teams really are. Not with fantasy football-like qualifications, but real ‘we needed a yard and we got a yard’ insight.

For our purposes we’re starting out looking at the 2008 and 2009 Patriots defenses to see how the re-building progress since the last Super Bowl loss is going, and the numbers uncover some interesting trends.

Our 2 primary findings, which will be explained further below, are:

• The Patriots defense actually did improve from 2008 to 2009, despite losing multiple starters and leaders.
• The Patriots defenses’ biggest flaw was it’s inconsistency, a common characteristic of a team with many young, new starters.

I’ve stated before that looking back on 2009 now it’s surprising to me that the Patriots won the AFC East. Not many teams replace as many starters and leaders as the Pats did in 2009 and win the division. Somehow they did it, and managed to improve their pass defense (though you wouldn’t probably never would guess that).

FO (Football Outsiders) had the Pats with the 16th overall defense in 2009. Their rankings in pass D (16th) and run D (12th) are middle of the road. However where things get interesting is when you see the Variance statistic. This measures how up and down the defense was from week to week.  In this category the Pats ranked 30th.

Worth mentioning that the Jets had the number one defense according to FO, but ranked 32nd is variance. This was greatly embodied in their two games against the Pats and a common theme for an attacking defense that is susceptible to being burned by big plays.

For a team that replaced 75% of their defensive backfield and still went from the 26th ranked pass D (against inferior competition) to the 16th ranked pass D certainly shows promise for the future. With the majority of last year’s contributors returning there’s no doubt this defense should be much improved.

While some can only talk about lack of pass rush as the characteristic of the Patriots defense, Football Outsiders shows that this is a team that was not that far off. As younger players garner experience, and become more consistent, the Pats should have bright days ahead on defense.