Tale of the Tape - Patriots vs. Broncos

Working from home and being relatively bored on a Friday, I dug through stats of the last five matchups against the Broncos.  I picked out numbers that appeared to be germaine to the outcome of the game and some fairly obvious things came to light.  You can open my spreadsheet as a PDF and keep it in a separate window while we trudge headlong into an analysis:

• The winner had the highest NET yards
• Highest completions did not guarantee a win
• The winner had the highest AVG yards per pass play
• In 3 out of 5 games, the highest net yards passing wins
• In 3 out of 5 games, the highest 3rd down eff. won
• In 3 out of 5 games, the highest red zone eff. won

The 2 critical stats for winning a game were highest net yards and highest average yards per completion.  Translation?  Hit your receivers often for big gains.