Heating Up and Cooling Down

A few weeks ago, it seemed like we knew everything there was to know at the top of the NFL. While teams like the Steelers, Vikings, Bears, and Texans fought their way through tight battles towards the playoffs, a clear top tier of teams had established itself above them. In the NFC the explosive offenses of the Rams and the Saints had run away from all competition, while in the AFC the mainstay Patriots and the rising Chiefs looked like the sure picks to meet in the Championship round.

Things have taken a bit of a turn since then. Each of these four teams has struggled in recent weeks, culminating in this weekend that saw three of the four suffer surprising losses, while the Saints barely held on for a 12-9 victory over Carolina. The Rams and the Patriots have both lost two straight, and New England has played their way out of a first round bye, now looking up at a Texans team that has an easy road to the second seed.

This seems like an inopportune time for these teams to suddenly start struggling. In the NFL’s single elimination playoff system, common wisdom is that it’s not always the best team that wins but the team that gets hot at the right moment. A team that gets hot down the stretch can ride that momentum into a deep playoff run, and it’s better to hit the postseason running than to back in with a rough finish to the season.

But is that actually the case? As I covered last week, over the past five years it pretty much always has been the case that the best team has won. Each of the past five Super Bowl winners was the top seed in their conference, and only the lowly second seeded Falcons in 2016 managed to make the Super Bowl without home field advantage (and even then they didn’t actually have to go on the road, as the top seeded Cowboys lost in the Divisional Round). Being a good team is more important than being hot at the right time.

Another way to look at this is to see how the teams in each round perform during different parts of the season. If playing well late in the year is important, the participants in the later rounds would perform noticeably better during the final few weeks of the season, while we would expect teams that performed better early in the year to fall out in the Wild Card or Divisional Rounds.

To look at this, I pulled together the schedules of every playoff team for the past ten years. I divided each season into four quarters, looking at how many games each of these playoff teams won in their first four games, games 5-8, games 9-12, and the final four games of the season. I then averaged across each round of the playoffs over those ten years, showing how many games out of four the average Wild Card, Divisional, Championship, or Super Bowl participant, plus the Super Bowl winner, won during each segment of the year.

There is a pretty clear pattern here, but in case that wasn’t obvious enough, here is how these teams performed in each quarter relative to their average win total across the season.

The results are a little bit shocking. Not only do teams that perform better late in the season not make it deeper in the playoffs, you actually see the opposite effect. Teams that make it to the Championship and Super Bowl round actually perform notably worse over the final four weeks of the season than they do over the first three quarters.

The obvious counter to this is that the best teams take their foot off the gas down the stretch once they no longer need to fight for playoff positioning. I looked at this as well, taking games 11-14 that exclude the final two weeks where teams will be most likely to rest players. The results don’t tell a significantly different story than just the pure final four games.

There is no evidence in these numbers that getting hot over the final four games gives teams momentum to carry into the postseason. In fact, there is a pretty compelling argument to be made that the opposite is the case. The teams that finish the season strong are heavily represented in the Wild Card Round, but they rarely make it farther into the postseason. And the teams that struggle down the stretch make up the majority of the participants in the Championship and Super Bowl Rounds, and they perform even better when it comes to winning the Super Bowl.

The top four teams in the league are struggling now, but evidence suggests they have the ability to flip the switch and turn it on. So for each of the teams I found myself wondering, why have they struggled so much lately, and what do they have to do to pull it together and rediscover their early season form?

New Orleans Saints

The Saints are the only one of these teams coming off a win, and they are in the best shape of any of them. But they still have to be concerned about their offense which, after eclipsing thirty points in nine of their first eleven games, failed to hit that mark in each of the past three weeks. They pulled together enough on both sides of the ball to win crucial division matchups against the Buccaneers and the Panthers, and they look more well rounded than they did at any point earlier this year. But the way this league is flowing it seems like a dominant offense is more valuable than balance on both sides of the ball, and the Saints have to wonder what it will take to get their mojo back.

In this case, it may be as simple as coming home. Even before their three game slide, both of New Orleans’s failures to hit thirty points came on the road. All three of these offensive struggles have been away from home, and they are now averaging nearly ten points fewer on the road than in the Superdome. Fortunately, their final two games are back in New Orleans, and if they can win both of those they won’t have to travel again until the Super Bowl in the still familiar territory of Atlanta.

Right now the Saints have the best record in the league, the easiest road to the Super Bowl, and the most reason to believe they will bounce back. At this point I would say they are the clear Super Bowl favorites, and I think these past three weeks will be mostly a footnote on their season in a couple of weeks.

Los Angeles Rams

It’s hard to be quite as optimistic about the other team at the top of the NFC. We can excuse their loss to the Bears in a tight game on Sunday night in Chicago, always a difficult circumstance for a team to find themselves in. But losing to a mediocre Eagles team at home is another story, and right now Los Angeles is in desperate need of answers.

Like the Saints, the biggest issues for the Rams have come with their once unstoppable offense. It has only been a few weeks, but it feels like a long time ago we were proclaiming Sean McVay an offensive genius and Jared Goff an MVP contender.

Despite the praise that McVay received, it wasn’t as if the Rams were running some bafflingly innovative offensive scheme. They rarely changed personnel, keeping three receivers along with a single tight end and a single running back in the game on nearly every play. In a league moving towards spread formations and shotgun passing attacks, Goff took more snaps from under center than any other quarterback, running a scheme based heavily on play action and long developing route combinations. They slowed down the pass rush, created conflicts for linebackers, and used their versatile set of weapons to attack the intermediate parts of the field.

The NFL is all about adaptation, and it isn’t a surprise that some teams have figured out how to slow down the Rams. LA’s offensive line is above average, but they aren’t an overwhelming unit in the way Pittsburgh’s or New Orleans’s are. Teams with elite defensive fronts like the Bears and the Eagles can overmatch them physically, freeing their linebackers to ignore the play action and cut down the passing lanes.

McVay had to know this would happen, and it’s surprising that he hasn’t unveiled counters to take advantage of this strategy. I don’t think he’s incompetent, and part of me wonders if he might be keeping this in his back pocket until the playoffs. With the Saints holding the tiebreaker over him, and with very winnable games left against the Cardinals and 49ers, the Rams are likely locked into the second seed. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of their recent struggles are partially strategic, to save their best for the more important games down the road.

Kansas City Chiefs

Kansas City’s loss to the Chargers is the easiest to explain. The Chargers are an extremely good team themselves, and it was a game that more or less came down to a coin flip at the end. Kansas City still has a clear path to home field advantage through the playoffs, and I’m not sure if there is anything they have to worry about.

Anything new to worry about, I should say. Because the defensive woes that have plagued them over the past few weeks are the same ones that have been around all season. Kansas City has an above average pass rush, but aside from that there is really nothing they do well on defense. They don’t stop the run, they don’t track receivers through the secondary, and considering how much time they spend playing with a lead, they aren’t great at taking the ball away either.

The answer for most of the season has been to just outscore opponents, and most of the time that has worked. The difference between this offense and any defense they face is usually better than the difference between the other team’s offense and their mediocre defense. Given enough possessions, they will likely pull it out in the end.

This strategy has failed on three occasions. The first two were against the Patriots and the Rams, two teams that had elite offenses of their own that were able to pull ahead in a shootout. Patrick Mahomes has had a spectacular season, and he will likely end up winning MVP. But when he is really pressed he does have a habit of making some poor decisions, which prove costly in games that demand a score on every possession. The Chargers took a slightly different approach, controlling the ball and limiting the game to as few possessions as possible. This worked as well because they were able to control the ball on the ground, despite the absence of Melvin Gordon.

Should we be concerned that Kansas City’s three biggest failures have come against three of the teams they may end up facing in the postseason? Absolutely. The flaw of this team isn’t anything new, and the opponents capable of exposing it have done so repeatedly. This isn’t anything they can hope to bounce back from, because this is who they have been the entire year, and when the playoffs come around it could very easily spell the end of their magical season.

New England Patriots

This is perhaps the most troubling of these four cases, for a couple of reasons. First of all is what I mentioned above with them falling out of position for a first round bye. Having to play an extra game is always a challenge, and likely having to go on the road to both Houston and Kansas City will be a much different road than they are used to on their way to the Super Bowl.

The other reason is that the Patriots are usually a glaring counterexample of everything I discussed above. They always play their best football over the final month of the season, as evidenced by the fact that their two straight December losses is the first time this has happened since 2002. That suggests that this is not remotely the same Patriots team we are used to seeing, which makes it reasonable to question their status as presumed AFC favorites.

This is clear from watching the way they play as well. The past two games have been riddled with penalties and mental mistakes of the type we’re not used to seeing from the Patriots. They suffered multiple crucial holding penalties against the Steelers, and each of the past two weeks Tom Brady has made a brutal decision that cost his teams points in the red zone. At times he looks like he’s playing scared much in the same way Peyton Manning was as his career wound down. Age catches up to everyone eventually, and Brady has suffered a clear decline in 2018 that has only gotten worse as the year has gone along.

That is the grimmest possible interpretation. The other side of things is that Bill Belichick is the greatest football coach of all time, and if anyone can clean up the mess this team is right now, it’s him. As they push into the playoffs, Brady will become less worried about protecting his body, and the offense will utilize the limited but still occasionally unstoppable talents of Rob Gronkowski more. Their defense has slowly come together as the season has gone along, and the fact that they held Pittsburgh’s talented offense to only 17 points is something to look to with hope.

Of the four teams, none is playing worse right now than New England. But of these four teams, no team has proven themselves more resilient than the Patriots. These late season struggles are a new challenge for them to face, but they haven’t been impossible obstacles for past champions to overcome, and even with a more difficult road ahead we still have to consider the Patriots one of the favorites in the AFC.