Seahawks - Patriots in Arizona
The Patriots easily handled the Colts and now face the Seahawks, lucky winners over
the Packers in the Big Game on neutral Arizona turf.
Our predict program calculates this as an Even contest. In fact, head-to-head matchups between any of four teams
played at a neutral site: NE, SEA, GB and DEN would come out dead even. That's league parity -- at least at the top.
In essence, it's impossible to pick a winner. It could all come down to the way a pointy ball bounces.
Looking for a stats angle to talk about, I've done a matchup report which pits each offense against each defense.
This Matchup report is in text format and is presented as a .pdf file. You can see it here:
SB2014-matchup.pdf.
Advantages in stat matchups show up on the far right (colums 13 and 14) as +++++ or ----- lines, where the number of symbols represents
the size of the points advantage.
The first matchup on page 1 is the New England offense vs the Seattle defense. While SEA has more advantages, NE has some important
ones like Giveaways -- Patriots take care of the football. In the percentile ranks (colums 9 and 10), you can see NE leads the
league with fewest giveaways (percentile 100). SEA leads in several defensive categories, like points allowed and yards allowed
per play. Scan their column for the 100 entries. Note that stats are listed by offensive name so that Points Scored is the stat
for the offense team and it's counter-measure would be Points Allowed for the defensive team. Just by eyeball, this matchup,
NE offense vs SEA defense, looks fairly even with maybe slightly more minus signs for the Seahawks.
Turn to page 2 and the story is a little different. Most of the advantages go to the Seahawks. SEA is league leader on
most rushing stats. They earn a 96 on giveaways so they also take care of the football. On paper, at least, Seattle has
an edge and it is their running game. Seahawks Rushing Yards per game is shown in the graph below.
Yards Rushing (Net)
Seattle Seahawks
2014 through Week 17
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