Belichick’s Statistical Secret Sauce: Can It Ever Be Replicated?
As the legendary coach awaits his next opportunity, we identify five major factors that were more correlated with his dynastic run in New England.
Contrary to the NFL rumor mill over the past few weeks, former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick will not be coaching the Atlanta Falcons next season. If Belichick is going to work on building a winner outside of Foxboro for the first time since 1999, he’s running out of destinations for the 2024 season.
But wherever Belichick ends up — assuming he does coach again somewhere — he’ll also probably need to replicate a specific winning formula that helped drive the NFL’s best-ever dynasty in New England. We dug into the numbers and found five factors that were most correlated with Belichick’s success at the height of the Patriots’ dynasty, which also happened to disappear when things went sour in New England.
Whenever it happens, the fate of Belichick’s comeback tour may well depend on how his new team does in most (or all) of the following categories:
1. Quarterback Play
O.K., so this is a fairly obvious one — like pretty much every team in the NFL, the Patriots rose and fell over the past two-plus decades largely on the basis of how well they passed the ball. But for Belichick, the relationship between QB performance and team success was especially tight. While the Pats won Super Bowls with the ninth- and 10th-best aerial attacks by Expected Points Added (EPA) in 2001 and 2003, respectively, Tom Brady led a top-5 passing offense in each of his next 14 seasons as New England’s starting quarterback (excluding 2008, when he tore his ACL in the season opener), a span during which the Patriots went 199–59, appeared in seven Super Bowls and won four. Starting in 2019, however, New England ranked better than 19th in passing EPA just once (finishing ninth in 2021 with then-rookie Mac Jones), and the Pats were never the same; they went 41–44 from then on.
The problem Belichick likely faces while hunting for his next job is that, like New England once it was apparent Jones wasn’t the answer, teams who fire their coaches tend not to have a well-defined Quarterback of the Future. (The exception to this rule might have been the L.A. Chargers who have Justin Herbert to build around, but they already have a new coach in Jim Harbaugh.) Some QB situations can be papered over by good protection, another longstanding hallmark for Belichick’s Pats teams. But getting the QB situation fixed to at least an approximation of what it was during his dynasty era may make or break Belichick’s next coaching stint.
2. Yards Per Point
As I’ve written before, this little-discussed statistic might have been the single most important measure for the Patriots’ entire dynastic run. Yards per point (YPP) is exactly what it sounds like: It measures how efficiently you turn yards into points on offense, or prevent the opponent from doing the same on defense. If you have a lower YPP than the other team, you will have a better scoring margin (and win more often) because you’re trading field position for points at a more favorable rate than they are.
For most teams, this category is not particularly repeatable, because it depends on so many other factors that are themselves noisy. Belichick’s Pats, however, routinely dominated the YPP rankings. From 2001 to ’21, New England led the league in YPP differential eight different times, finishing top-6 or better 17 times in 21 years. The stat was a downstream product of the many “situational football” things Belichick likes to preach — from solid special teams to winning the field-position battle, making the most of red zone chances, converting on late downs, having more takeaways than giveaways (more on that later) and bending-not-breaking on defense.
Somehow the Patriots fell to 31st in YPP differential last season, an incredibly uncharacteristic finish for a Belichick team, but that was the exception to the overall rule. It’s fair to expect Belichick to make at least some inroads toward having his next team use their field position more efficiently, getting more scoring bang for their yardage buck.
3. Home Cooking
How do you make nine Super Bowls in an 18-season stretch? One important factor is doing well enough during the regular season to play a bunch of postseason games at home — 23 of New England’s 31 in-conference playoff contests over that span were in Foxboro — and then making the most of those chances in front of the friendly crowd.
To that latter point, Belichick’s Pats went an incredible 20–3 in those home playoff games, part of a run during which they had a 141–26 home record overall between the regular season and postseason. Now, we might expect any perennial contender like New England to have a good home record, regardless of a special ability to win there. But if we compare the Patriots’ actual record to the one we’d expect from their pregame Elo ratings, in which they were usually heavy favorites, New England still won 15.2 more games than expected at home, including 3.5 more than expected in the playoffs.
Whether due to the Patriots being more prepared for the wintry conditions in the Northeast, or something else, you could always count on New England’s nearly unbeatable quality at home… until you couldn’t. Over the past three seasons, the Pats won 5.5 fewer games than expected at home, a shortfall that ranked second only to Arizona (-6.5). For his next gig, perhaps Belichick might prioritize a place that gives environmental advantages for the tough, cold-weather teams he favors, helping him revive this factor at least somewhat.
4. The Turnover Battle
Much like YPP, running up big turnover margins is not supposed to be a sustainable long-term winning strategy. (The two factors are related, in fact, as turnovers can flip field position in a way that creates easy points without having to gain a lot of yards.) Quarterbacks have limited control over their interception rates from year to year, fumble recoveries are notoriously random and opposing offenses can deliberately direct passes away from ball-hawking cornerbacks. And yet, the Patriots led the league in turnover differential multiple times during Belichick’s tenure as coach, compiling a total turnover margin of +206 during their dynasty period of 2001-18. (The next-best team, the Seattle Seahawks, were +95; the difference between New England and No. 2 Seattle was nearly as large as between Seattle and No. 17 Jacksonville.)
A lot of that came down to Brady being one of the least interception-prone QBs in NFL history, eliminating much of the turnover risk inherent to passing while maintaining its upside. It’s unlikely that Belichick’s next QB — whoever it may be — can pull off that same balancing act. (For instance, Kirk Cousins, who mentioned a desire to play for Belichick, is fairly average at avoiding interceptions over the course of his career.) But that doesn’t mean other Belichick obsessions, like teaching defenders to punch the ball out or quickly benching offensive players with fumblitis, can’t help bolster a team’s overall ranking in turnover margin.
5. Running Back Production
While the NFL has steadily de-emphasized the running back throughout the period of the Patriots’ dynasty and beyond, Belichick’s most successful teams in New England tended to get good production out of their ball carriers — both as rushers and receivers. Early on, Antowain Smith, Corey Dillon and Laurence Maroney were more traditional No. 1 backs, with Kevin Faulk serving as a reliable receiving option to complement them. Then, Belichick evolved to embrace more of a backfield by committee, splitting responsibilities between what seemed like a different combination of BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Danny Woodhead, Stevan Ridley, LeGarrette Blount, Shane Vereen, Dion Lewis, Brandon Bolden, James White, Damien Harris and Sony Michel every season (or every week).
Yet, despite the revolving-door cast of characters, the Patriots got more total Approximate Value (AV) out of their running backs from 2001 through ’21 than any other team in the league. Between players who could run and catch (and block) or just those who specialized in some skill or the other, Belichick consistently made the RB position a valuable weapon until recent years. History says that, even without a marquee talent in the backfield at his next destination, Belichick should be able to unearth contributors in the tradition of his most successful RBs from over the years.
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