2013 NFL Mid-Season Review: Winning Stats Edition

Now that we've hit the midpoint of the NFL season, I thought it would be cool to take a look at what some of the best and worst performances have been throughout the 2013 season. Most of you, I assume, are like me and catch snippets and highlights of pretty much every game, but have not watched every one of the 266 games played so far this season and make judgements on all of them based on just what you see. Because of that limitation, we'll let the Winning Stats show us the way.

I've put together several tables that show the highlights, and the lowlights, of the 2013 NFL season. We have the top 10 Overall best games, Offensive and Defensive best games, and we'll show you the bottom 10 games in each, just so you can see how bad the Jaguars have been (and it's bad). Then I have games where a team won that had no business winning, and games where teams played really well only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Finally we'll look at the best and worst game in each stat, where we can see who had the best passing day of the season (hint: seven TD passes), and who started drives, on average, inside their own 15 yard line

Overall:

We see the Colts show up twice in this list, playing the 3rd best overall game this season, against the 49ers, and backing it up the following week with the 9th best game overall against the Jaguars. That was a special kind of beat-down to still rank that high despite how bad the Jaguars have been. Impressive stuff. We also see the Monday night debacle in San Diego gives the Chargers the 8th best game overall.

This is how bad Jacksonville has been: five of their eight games are in the 10 worst showings of the season so far, including the worst game overall when they played the Colts. We also see the Giants show up twice here.

Offense:

The most interesting thing here is you see the 49ers with the second best Offensive game of the season, as well as the second worst Offensive game of the season. You wouldn't expect that to happen very often, but for anyone who watched those two games, I think you'd agree with it. No surprise the best Offensive game this season was led by Peyton Manning. He's good.

Defense:

Like the 49ers on Offense, the Colts make an appearance on both sides of the table here. They make it twice on the good side, including the win against Manning and the Broncos. This is why looking strictly at points can sometimes mask how well a team plays. I know you all watched that game, and you all know how awesome the Defense played that night. If you only looked at the final score, you wouldn't have known that.

Interestingly enough it isn't the Chargers game that shows up on the bad side for the Colts, but the Raiders game. Remember how they couldn't get the Raiders off the field? Over subsequent weeks we've seen the Raiders rank 28th Offensively on the season, so it looks really bad on the Colts. The Chargers, meanwhile, are the best Offense in the league, so it is expected that they would struggle.

Best Games Not To Win:

Worst Games Won:

We just saw the worst overall game, yet still win, just this past Sunday when the Cowboys beat the Vikings. Both the Offense and Defense games here fell into the bottom 10 overall for their category, a remarkable feat. The top chart tells me the Seahawks have won multiple games they had no business winning, and it might come back to haunt them later. Just something to think about going forward...

Best Games By Statistic:

Worst Games By Statistic:

These were all numbers teams would have gotten if they had played a "league-average" opponent. It's why you see negatives in some stats where it is impossible to have negatives (like Turnovers), and have percentages over 100%. It means they played really well (or really poorly) against a very good team (or a very bad one).

We see the Colts show up a couple times in these tables. The Dolphins had the best penalty-less game in the NFL against the Colts in Week 2 (big shock, even at the time), the Colts forced the most Three and Outs in a game when they played Denver, forcing between 8 and 9 of them (!), and the Jaguars had the worst Orange Zone showing all season when they played the Colts, where they would have gotten a measly 3.3% of the total points possible. That means if they had gotten inside the 35 yard line 14 times against a league-average opponent, they'd have gotten a single field goal. It was pretty bad for them that day.

Anything else you want to see? Just let me know.