Prepping for the Patriots

Edition #481

Good morning. ☕

It’s time to put the ghosts of Dallas behind us and focus on a new week, game, and opportunity. Win on Sunday and go 2-0 in the division, and the confidence, belief and optimism will start to return. The Jets players are saying all the right things, but every defeat has an impact.

We’re going to start looking at the Patriots today, with New England sitting at 0-2 to start the season. Are they as bad as that? What can we expect on Sunday? We’ll have a look at what the stats indicate.

First, PFF released some interesting graphs yesterday and I wanted to share a couple with you to kick things off.

The first one looks at how often NFL teams are converting their possessions into a new set of downs and you won’t be surprised to see that it doesn’t look good for the Jets after two weeks of the season

According to this graph, only the Bengals and Steelers are worse than the Jets at extending drives into new downs.

To explain this, it’s a culmination graph.

So after four downs, the Jets convert their possessions into new sets of downs 59% of the time.

They’ll actually pretty good on first down, with only four teams converting at a higher click than their 24%. But that’s where the good ends.

After second downs, the Jets have converted just 35%. That’s just a 9% increase. 29 teams convert more after the second down. The rest of the way it’s a similar picture.

In comparison to the 59% of the Jets, the Patriots convert 71%. They’re not as good on first down, but considerably better than the Jets on all other downs.

Now if we flip to the other side of the ball, this is the same chart, but for defence.