IS THE AFC EAST BAD?

(updated 1/4/2018) As a Patriots fan who actually pays attention to the details, I get frustrated listening the the haters and professionals who whine about things like deflategate and the supposed weak AFC East without doing any research.  For the fans out there who are like me, here are some stats to throw back at some of these blowhards.  Feel free to use any graphics you want, while I won't chase you down, I would appreciate some credit.

For those who don't know how the NFL schedule is made, it works like this: 

• 2 games against each team in your division (one home, one away)
• 4 games against the teams from another division in your conference (rotates)
• 4 games against one division in the opposing conference (rotates)
  
• 2 games against conference opponents who finished in the same position the prior season (as in the first place Patriots always get to play two teams who won their division)

So, you looked at the AFC East's results against each other, the rest of the conference and the NFC and are ready to point out the few places where the teams have a losing record.  Before you do that, you might check out the next graphic to see how they have fared against everybody over the past 11 seasons. 

For those who are a little slow to the draw, those yellow boxes are the few places where the AFC has managed a losing record against a different division.  So, in 12 years the AFC East has had only 2 losing records against non-division opponents.  In recent years the AFC East has had it's greatest struggles against the AFC West.  While those west teams have been pretty good, they've also had some generous scheduling with playing night games against the east coast teams. 

If you need a little more data to show you that the AFC East is more of a beast than the haters would like you to think, I have one more nugget of information for you.  You know how sometimes a conference will have a team that might have a hard time beating a college team?  Well, the next graphic consists of which divisions had teams which had 4 wins or less.  Yeah, in the past 11 NFL seasons, the AFC East has had the least number of pathetic teams with only 4 teams winning 4 games or less.  Compare this to the AFC South which has had at least one cellar dweller since 2011.  In three of the past five years they have had two teams win 25% or less of their regular season games.   

If you liked this post, you might check out some of these recent ones:
COOL PATRIOTS' STATISTICS AFTER WEEK 15
A LOOK AT THE RECENT REGULAR SEASON PATRIOTS/BRONCOS GAMES
DEFLATEGATE 2: THE NON-SEQUEL
HOW TIME ZONES AFFECT NFL OUTCOMES

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