I apologize that there hasn't been much activity at our blog over the past couple months, but we've finished our latest book, Pro Football Prospectus 2007, and we're ready to take more questions from the FO mailbag. In fact, this question goes way, way back to October, but I always kept it around to answer later because I knew it would make a fun blog post.

Daniel Shack: My question relates to the "Guts and Stomps" article that was in PFP 2006, and previously appeared on FOXSports.com. (You can find a copy of that article here.) I was wondering if you also found trends by analyzing each team's losses instead of its wins. For example, " Good teams wouldnt allow themselves to get blown out" or "good teams wouldn't lose close games" seem to be two of the most popular expressions I hear. Of course, we all remember Buffalo's shutout of New England in 2003.

Aaron Schatz: Good teams, it turns out, wouldn't allow themselves to get blown out, at least by bad teams. If you think of a reverse STOMP as losing by 14+ points to a team under .500, only one of the last 12 Super Bowl champions was STOMPED at any time during the regular season: the team you mentioned in your question, the 2003 Patriots. Nine out of 12 Super Bowl losers went the whole season without being STOMPED either. The exceptions are the 2006 Bears, 2002 Raiders, and 1995 Steelers, and the Bears loss of course took place in the last week of the season with some of the Chicago starters playing limited roles.

Out of 165 teams with winning records since 1995, only five were STOMPED by a losing team more than once: the 2004 Falcons, 2004 Jaguars, 2003 Cowboys, 1998 Jets, and 1996 Cowboys. Teams with more STOMP losses are 5-11-20 in the last dozen years of conference championships and Super Bowls. That "20" indicates that the majority of the time, teams meet with the same number of STOMP losses, either one or zero, because it is so rare for playoff teams to lose in this fashion during the regular season.

On the other hand, it isn't rare for a winning team or even Super Bowl champion to lose at some point during the season by at least two touchdowns. Only four of the last dozen Super Bowl champions did not have such a loss: the 2002 Bucs, 2000 Ravens, 1999 Rams, and 1998
Broncos. However, none of the other eight Super Bowl champions had more than one loss by 14+ points. Six of the 12 Super Bowl losers had two losses by 14+ points.

Teams with more blowout losses during the season won as many conference championship games as teams with fewer blowout losses (6-6-12) although the teams with fewer blowout losses do have an advantage in the Super Bowl (8-3-1).

In all, only 21 percent of winning teams have made it through the whole season without a loss by 14+ points. Plenty of those teams never even made it to the conference championship game. In fact, there were even three teams in the past dozen years with LOSING RECORDS that never lost by more than 14 points: the 2004 Chiefs, 2003 Jets, and 2001 Chargers.

Trying to measure close losses doesn't really work, because teams that make it to the conference championship games usually only have 1-4 losses and those losses are almost all close

Post by Aaron Schatz