[h=3]Home Truths From Abroad[/h]Let's start with the broadest fact: The Saints were much better at home than they were on the road this year. In New Orleans, the Saints went undefeated for the second time in three seasons. They scored 34 points per game and won their average contest by more than 18 points, producing nearly two takeaways for every giveaway. Once they flew out of Louisiana, the Saints were a mere 3-5. They were outscored by an average of 4.6 points per game on the road, and that unstoppable offense could only muster 17.8 points per contest. Their lowest-scoring game at home was 23 points, a figure they only topped twice on the road all season.
There are reasons to be skeptical that the difference is quite as severe as that paragraph makes it out to be. For one, a lot of this is driven by the difference in their records in the two locales as opposed to their actual level of play, and I don't know that their performance gap matches up with their win-loss figures. Consider that the Saints were probably lucky to win their game against the 49ers at home after that phantom penalty on Ahmad Brooks and likewise lost in the last moments of key road games against the Panthers and Patriots, two of the best teams in football. Those were all games where the outcome, win or loss, massively overstates the difference in play between the two teams. So flip the wins and losses in those games for a second. If the Saints are 7-1 at home (having credited them with a loss for the 49ers game) and 5-3 on the road (having now won the Patriots and Panthers games), are we even having this discussion about their performance on the road? Probably not. And if the discussion comes down to what happened in three or four plays across a number of weeks, it's probably not as meaningful as it suggests itself to be.
Oh, and about the Panthers and Patriots? They're really good football teams, and the Saints played a lot of those on the road this year. The Saints also lost on the road to the Seahawks and beat the Bears, neither of which is a fun place to tread. The disconcerting losses on the road were to the Rams and Jets, games in which they faced uncommon circumstances. In the Rams game, Brees threw interceptions on his first two possessions, with one deep in his own territory and the other in the Rams end zone, with both subsequent Rams drives producing touchdowns. St. Louis then delivered an unexpected onside kick to set up a field goal and go up 17-0 at the beginning of the second quarter. I don't know any team that does well after going down 17-0 on the road after a quarter. I will admit that I can't explain the Jets game. I think we should wait for its 'B' sample to get tested before we jump to any conclusions.
DVOA is very useful[SUP]
3[/SUP] for analyzing things like home and road splits because it puts performance into context; just about every team is worse on a play-by-play basis on the road than it is at home, so the question should really be about whether they're abnormally worse on the road. (It also adjusts for quality of opposition, so no arguments from that perspective, either.) And if we all go take a look at the Saints' rank in DVOA on offense and defense split by their presence at home and on the road, it clears this all up as, um …
<aside class="mod-inline content-box border-full full">[TABLE="class: alt-rows"]
<thead>[TR]
[TH]Year[/TH]
[TH]Off-Home[/TH]
[TH]Off-Away[/TH]
[TH]Diff[/TH]
[TH]Def-Home[/TH]
[TH]Def-Away[/TH]
[TH]Diff[/TH]
[/TR]
</thead><tbody>[TR="class: last"]
[TD]2013[/TD]
[TD]1[/TD]
[TD]16[/TD]
[TD]-15[/TD]
[TD]7[/TD]
[TD]21[/TD]
[TD]-14[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]
</aside>… a really meaningful, tangible thing! Well, that's more complicated than I imagined. The Saints go from being the league's best offense to being the league's average offense when they leave the Superdome, while the defense goes from very good to mediocre. That seems to fit the popular perception. And, of course, that matches up with how the Saints performed during their 2009-11 run of playoff teams with Sean Payton and Brees at their mercurial best, right?
<aside class="mod-inline content-box border-full full">[TABLE="class: alt-rows"]
<thead>[TR]
[TH]Year[/TH]
[TH]Off-Home[/TH]
[TH]Off-Away[/TH]
[TH]Diff[/TH]
[TH]Def-Home[/TH]
[TH]Def-Away[/TH]
[TH]Diff[/TH]
[/TR]
</thead><tbody>[TR="class: last"]
[TD]2013[/TD]
[TD]1[/TD]
[TD]16[/TD]
[TD]-15[/TD]
[TD]7[/TD]
[TD]21[/TD]
[TD]-14[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]2011[/TD]
[TD]1[/TD]
[TD]4[/TD]
[TD]-3[/TD]
[TD]28[/TD]
[TD]24[/TD]
[TD]4[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]2010[/TD]
[TD]16[/TD]
[TD]6[/TD]
[TD]10[/TD]
[TD]23[/TD]
[TD]6[/TD]
[TD]17[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]2009[/TD]
[TD]2[/TD]
[TD]4[/TD]
[TD]-2[/TD]
[TD]10[/TD]
[TD]22[/TD]
[TD]-12[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]
</aside>Oh, great. That doesn't help things at all. In 2010, the Saints — with the same philosophy and a fair number of the same players — were much better on the road than they were at home.[SUP]
4[/SUP] In 2011, they were basically the same team at home and on the road, relative to the rest of the league. In 2009, they weren't much different on offense. This suggests that there's no real indication the Saints are significantly better at home than they are on the road.
<figure class="full">
<figcaption><cite>Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images</cite></figcaption></figure>[h=3]'Cross the Brees[/h]OK. Let's drill down a little further. When people talk about the Saints and their struggles away from home, they're not suggesting that there's something about Junior Galette's pass-rush essence in the Superdome that loses its aura once he hops on a plane.[SUP]
5[/SUP] When they say the Saints need to play in the Superdome to win, they're talking about New Orleans's pass-happy scheme and their star quarterback. They want you to believe that Brees isn't anywhere near as good when he's freezing his ass off as he is when he's inside the Superdome. Well, is he?
These sorts of questions are only posed toward quarterbacks who play their home games in warm weather,[SUP]
6[/SUP] and it's a question that's always unfairly biased because of one simple factor: When it gets cold, they're always playing on the road, and just about every quarterback's statistics at home are better than they are on the road, regardless of whether they play their home games in Miami or Minnesota.
So, keeping that in mind, here are Brees's numbers as a Saints quarterback split by the temperature given by the NFL at kickoff, with games played inside split off into their own category:
<aside class="mod-inline content-box border-full full">[TABLE="class: alt-rows"]
<thead>[TR]
[TH]Situation[/TH]
[TH]Games[/TH]
[TH]Cmp[/TH]
[TH]Att[/TH]
[TH]Cmp%[/TH]
[TH]Yds[/TH]
[TH]Yds/Att[/TH]
[TH]TD[/TH]
[TH]INT[/TH]
[/TR]
</thead><tbody>[TR="class: last"]
[TD]Indoors[/TD]
[TD]80[/TD]
[TD]2,106[/TD]
[TD]3,078[/TD]
[TD]68.4%[/TD]
[TD]24,588[/TD]
[TD]8.0[/TD]
[TD]190[/TD]
[TD]81[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]Cold (21-40 F)[/TD]
[TD]6[/TD]
[TD]178[/TD]
[TD]274[/TD]
[TD]65.0%[/TD]
[TD]1,949[/TD]
[TD]7.1[/TD]
[TD]13[/TD]
[TD]7[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]Mild (41-60 F)[/TD]
[TD]13[/TD]
[TD]328[/TD]
[TD]518[/TD]
[TD]63.3%[/TD]
[TD]3,591[/TD]
[TD]6.9[/TD]
[TD]27[/TD]
[TD]9[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]Warm (61-80 F)[/TD]
[TD]20[/TD]
[TD]546[/TD]
[TD]812[/TD]
[TD]67.2%[/TD]
[TD]6,200[/TD]
[TD]7.6[/TD]
[TD]41[/TD]
[TD]15[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: last"]
[TD]Hot (> 80 F)[/TD]
[TD]9[/TD]
[TD]225[/TD]
[TD]344[/TD]
[TD]65.4%[/TD]
[TD]2,642[/TD]
[TD]7.7[/TD]
[TD]13[/TD]
[TD]12[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]
</aside>Brees is better indoors than he is in any weather pattern. Once he gets outside, it doesn't seem to really matter all that much what the temperature's like. He's a little better in warmer weather than he is when it's colder, but is it materially different? It's a small sample at the extremes, but we're already purporting to know that Brees is worse in that extremely cold weather. Really, he's about the same in miserably cold weather as he is in scorching temperatures. When was the last time you read an article suggesting that Brees and the Saints offense couldn't handle the heat?[SUP]
7[/SUP]
I don't see that the numbers suggest anything specific about Brees and his team that would make me think they can't play well on the road in cold weather. Well, except for one. Chase Stuart, as he often does, came up with
the best stat of all: In the playoffs, dome-dwelling teams playing in temperatures below 35 degrees on the road are 3-22. The last time a team like that won was in 2004, when the Vikings beat the Packers in Green Bay. That was the year Chip Kelly turned things around for his employer after years of misery and losing records. He was in his sixth year as offensive coordinator for the University of New Hampshire. 2004 was a long time ago, man.