While surfing the Internet for something, anything, to convince me there will be a Tom Brady-free Super Bowl this year, a statistic I read makes me think otherwise. At first glance the stat seems to point to a Kansas City victory over New England in Sunday’s AFC championship game. That doesn’t make it any less amazing. Credit for the stat goes to an article by sportswriter Barry Wilner, who, for the record, picked the Patriots to win in an upset.
By any measure, during the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era the Patriots have been a dynasty rarely seen in professional sports. Since 2002, Brady’s first full season, New England has played in 8 Super Bowls while winning 5 and has made 8 straight appearances in the AFC championship game, including this year. But it’s the sheer number of playoff games (postseason games leading up to the Super Bowl) they’ve been in and their record in those games that made me take notice:
Home games: 20 wins and 3 losses
Road games: 3 wins and 4 losses
That’s a total of 30 games, almost two full regular seasons! In those games, the Patriots played at home 77 percent of the time. Think about that. Home field advantage is based on seeding, which is determined by regular season records. In the playoffs, where every team is good, 77 percent of the time the seeding had the Patriots as the better team. Clearly the seeding was justified as New England won 87 percent of those home games.
Okay, New England is almost invincible at home. How does that make things look ominous for Kansas City, the higher seeded team? Haven’t they earned some respect? The Chiefs will be at home, where they were 7 and 1 during the regular season and blew out Indianapolis 31-13 in last weekend’s divisional playoff game. True, New England won their head-to-head up matchup in October, but that was in Foxboro.
I guess I’m impressed by New England’s overall playoff record (23 and 7) and not bothered that, at 3 and 4, their road record is only so-so, worse than a toss-up. The dynasty has been around forever it seems, and I don’t think it’s about to end until one of the two—Brady or Belichick—retires. There’s too much momentum and experience to say otherwise.
New England’s playoff record with Brady at quarterback is an amazing stat. It’s likely to affect Sunday’s outcome.
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