This is from Mike Reiss' notes Sunday morning on ESPBoston.com I was a little surprised This stat, passed along by director of the Patriots Hall of Fame Bryan Morry, surprised me: Of the eight divisions in the NFL, the AFC East had the third-best record in 2013 against out of division teams and tied for second best against non-division playoff teams. This is the way it broke down: NFC West: 30-10 AFC West: 25-15 AFC East: 22-18 AFC North: 19-21 NFC South: 19-21 NFC North: 17-23 NFC East: 16-24 AFC South: 12-28 This obviously isn’t a foolproof way to measure the strength of divisions, but for those who label the AFC East as weak – and one of the main reasons for the Patriots’ domination – this is food for thought.
This probably has to do with the conferences that were played. The NFC South (taking into account that the Saints were 2-2) and AFC North were pretty mediocre this season. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk 2
Miami, Buffalo, Jets. That's all that needs to be said really, it is an incredibly weak division outside the Pats. _
This absolutely makes a difference. For example, the AFC South had the worst out-of-division record. They also played the NFC West and the AFC West, clearly the two best divisions in the league. Since the schedules are so unbalanced, overall record out of division is not very useful to evaluate quality across divisions. The other point is that when people talk about the advantage the Patriots have had, they're talking about for the last 10 years, not just for this year. Over that time Buffalo has been over .500 once, and Miami has been over .500 twice. The Jets have been over .500 five times out of ten, and that makes them the class of the competition. And we all know that for most of that time the Jets weren't really all that good. It's not an insult to New England to acknowledge that they have been lucky enough to be in a weak division for the past 10 years.
