Saints Elsewhere

No team wants to start the season 0-2. By now you’ve heard the statistic that since 1990, only 12% of teams to start 0-2 have made the playoffs. While that’s true, that’s just one way — and not the only way — to examine the Saints start. That analysis is based on the following idea:

But there’s another way to consider New Orleans’ early season woes. The Saints lost both games on the road. So while New Orleans is 0-2, the team still has 8 home games remaining. Based on the Saints history under Sean Payton, projecting a a 7-1 home record doesn’t seem unreasonable. And while the team lost both games so far, note that Saints opponents have already kicked three game-winning or game-tying field goals at the end of regulation or overtime already.¹ That’s an amazing feat to have occurred after just two games; from a predictive standpoint, the Saints could just as easily be 2-0. And from a predictive standpoint, a 3-3 finish in road games the rest of the way doesn’t seem unreasonable, either. That would give the team a 10-6 record, and probably a playoff berth.

Now, attack this problem from a different perspective: if you assumed before the season that the Saints would be a playoff team, how likely would you be to revise your prediction if you knew that at some point in the year, the Saints would lose two straight road games? In other words:

As it turns out, 63% of all playoff teams since 1990 have lost at least two road games in a row.² Given the Saints’ unusual home/road proclivities, we might view the Saints as even more likely than most playoff teams to drop a pair of consecutive road games. In fact, New Orleans did just that in 2011 when the team went 13-3,³ and the Saints lost 5 out of 6 road games in one stretch just last season.

To be fair, it’s not as though the Saints have lost just any two road games in a row; they’ve lost the only two road games they’ve had. From a Bayes Theorem standpoint — and if I have time, I plan to revisit this issue later in the week — we would have to downgrade the Saints after this start. Whatever we thought of the Saints, there’s some new information that would cause us to reevaluate them. Yes, there’s a possibility (probability?) that New Orleans is exactly who we thought they were, and if these games were in weeks 7 and 13, nobody would notice. But there’s also the possibility that the Saints are just not a very good team, and these two road losses are the first two signs of that. That’s one of the questions Bayes Theorem is really good at answering.

With Drew Brees and Jimmy Graham, though, I’m betting against that. And I know the Saints have a much higher odds of making the playoffs than 12%. And with upcoming home games against the Vikings and Bucs sandwiched around a road trip to Dallas, a 3-2 start heading into the bye doesn’t seem too far-fetched, either.