Very, very good.

I know, you don’t understand that link. Even I barely understand it. Okay, I don’t understand it at all.

But, I do understand this: in lots and lots of normal team sports (not cricket; I totally don’t understand the scoring system(s)), net points is an excellent proxy for team performance. That is, almost every team’s position in the standings is closely related to its standing in (points scored – points allowed).

There are exceptions, but very few. Sometimes you’ll hear that a particular team is really good in close games; that is, they win a lot more 1-goal games (to jump to hockey as an example) than they lose. This is usually a statistical anomaly, and the longer you watch such teams, the more likely statistical gravity (aka the law of large numbers) will reassert itself.

Well, that was a long runup, right? I just wanted to point out why I’m fascinated by the net points scored by the New England Patriots.

Note that they have more than double the points of the Steelers, second-best in that stat. (254 net pts. vs 124)

Note also the total distribution of this stat: The Steelers have 124, followed by teams with 119, 106, and 100. Then there’s a big drop to 57 net points. The three worst teams in the league have -110, -108, and -91 points respectively. Everybody else groups somewhere in the middle, and this is of course a net zero-sum stat, since every point scored by a team is a point scored against some other team (their opponent of the day, of course).

So every team in the NFL has between -110 and 124 net points, except the Pats, who have 254 net points.

Yes, I know they’re running up the scores. But no other team has demonstrated this kind of ability to score at will and in such volume. As in, maybe no other team ever.

Only the Colts seem to have given the Pats any serious challenge this year (actually, they darned near beat them!), and I think it’s fair to guess that the only plausible challengers left on their pre-playoff schedule are Pittsburgh on December 9th, and themselves on December 29th, that being their last regular-season game, and having an extremely high chance of being completely meaningless except for the Perfect Season.