Guts and Stomps and the Ravens-Bills Blowout

Yesterday, I wrote about the Bills’ blowout loss to the Ravens ending their record streak of not losing by more than a touchdown. I also wrote about how the Chiefs keep winning games close. What does this mean for the long-standing debate about just how much regular-season performance matters in January?

The conventional wisdom says it doesn’t matter if you’re beating teams by 10 points or 50; what’s important is being able to win tight contests against good teams versus blowing out bad ones. It’s been nearly 20 years since Aaron Schatz first published Guts and Stomps. This was pushing back on the idea that there is some kind of super-secret winner’s sauce; that the ability to squeeze out tight wins over top opponents revealed some sort of late-game fortitude or clutch gene that would lead to more success in the postseason. To quote the original article:

People want to believe that the teams that can win the close ones are championship teams. But as counter-intuitive as it sounds, championship teams are generally defined by their ability to easily win games over inferior teams.

Football games are often decided by just one or two plays — a missed field goal, a fumble that bounces one way instead of the other, a fourth down where officials spot the ball two inches from the first down marker. One dropped pass short-circuits a last-minute comeback. A cornerback smothers his receiver all day, only to get beat once and give up the winning touchdown.

The team that comes out with the victory in a tight game is one step closer to the postseason. But has that team really proven that it is better than its opponent? There are many times where two teams are evenly matched, and if they played again the next week the result might just as well go the other way.

When a team blows out its opponent, however, one unlucky bounce or missed kick isn’t going to change the result. A lopsided win provides pretty good proof that the winner is a better team than the loser. That’s why the teams that meet on Super Bowl Sunday are usually the teams that won a lot of games by big margins during the regular season.

This was true in 2005. But is it true in 2024? We have this argument every year now with the Chiefs. Kansas City gets off to a slow start; they play down to the level of some inferior opponents in September and October, and we get breathless thinkpieces asking what’s wrong with the Chiefs? And yet, even as the Chiefs squeak past people while the Bills (or 49ers, or Cowboys) are destroying quality opponents left right and center, the Chiefs are always the ones laughing at the end of the year.

I went back to 2021, the beginning of the Bills’ and Chiefs’ streaks, and counted five types of wins over the past three seasons:

• A Stomp is a win by at least 14 points over a team that will finish the year below .500.
• A Gut is a win by 1-8 points over a team that will finish the year above .500.
• A Domination is a win by at least 14 points over a team that will finish the year above .500.
• A Skate is a win by 1-8 points over a team that will finish the year below .500.
• Everything else is classified as Other – wins by 9-13 points, or against the rare .500 teams.

The Chiefs have a few stomps to their names, for sure, but they’re nowhere near the top of the leaderboard. Instead, they are far more likely to just skate past their weak opponents, doing just enough to get the victory without putting anyone anyway in the first halves of games. The fact that the Patriots – entirely in the post-Tom Brady era, mind you – have been more likely to blow out bad teams than the Chiefs have been is mind-boggling.

But if the Chiefs are winning titles without stomps, does that mean stomps no longer matter in the postseason? In this brave new world of reduced offense, are the internet trolls of 2005 finally right; that with less scoring, a Kansas City-like team that finds way to gut out wins is more likely to succeed in January than a Dallas-like team which crushes their divisional weaklings?

Well … no. Not overall, at least. I went back through the last three postseasons – ever since the league expanded to 14 playoff teams – and calculated the record for the team with more guts, more stomps, more skates, and so forth. The results:

• Home Field Advantage: 25-11 (.694)
• A higher regular-season DVOA: 27-12 (.692)
• More regular season wins: 23-12 (.657)
• More Stomps: 21-13 (.618)
• More Dominations: 18-14 (.563)
• More Skates: 15-15 (.500)
• More Guts: 14-18 (.437)

The same pattern holds true if we look at the past 10 years, or past 25 years. The exact win-loss numbers fluctuate up and down throughout different eras of history, but the underlying conclusions remain the same – there are still more positive results for teams that blowout bad opponents than there is for ones who win tough games against good opponents. The Chiefs are very significant outliers here – if you look just the last two rounds of the playoffs, the gap basically evaporates, because Kansas City has had so much success despite not having the stomps to back it up. Maybe they are different, and can get away with lollygagging in the regular season. Maybe, over 40 years, we should expect to find a team that doesn’t fit the pattern merely by random chance. Maybe it’s just a small sample size, and the Chiefs will either start blowing out bad teams or start losing playoff games.

But back to the Bills for a moment. We don’t know guts and stomps for 2024 yet because we don’t know how teams will finish the year, but I feel safe in saying that the big wins over Miami and Jacksonville will likely qualify as stomps. That would put the Bills in first place in the 17-game era, with a healthy number of dominations to their credit as well. It’s the resume of a champion, without the bling to back it up. It has been a frustrating few years in Buffalo, but they continue to be on the right path. It’s just that Kansas City has made everyone feel miserable at the end of the year.

A few more thoughts on the big table:

• Of course the Steelers lead the league in guts and are tied for the league-lead in skates. If there’s anyone out there who knows how to manufacture a one-score victory, it’s Mike Tomlin. How else are you going to finish 9-8 every year if you don’t play 20-17 games every week? It’s just math, folks.
• The Raiders are the only team without a domination over the past three years. The Panthers somehow have three (over the Saints and Cardinals in 2021, and the Lions in 2022) despite having 10 fewer wins overall!
• The Dolphins, with just one domination compared to 10 stomps, live up to their reputation as a flashy offense that beats up on bad teams but can’t hang with the other top teams in the league. So far, 2024 does not seem to be the year they throw off that reptuation.
• The Ravens numbers set off some familiar alarm bells for Baltimore fans who believe that the Ravens tend to play to the level of their opponent. Nine dominations over winning teams and 10 skates past losing teams is a weird split for sure, especially coupled with only three stomps. It gets worse if you do this analysis by losses, as well.

Let’s run that table, real quick, and redefine our terms:

• Gutted is a loss by 1-8 points against a team that will finish the year above .500
• Stomped is a loss by 14+ points against a team that will finish the year above .500
• Stung is a loss by 1-8 points against a team that will finish the year below .500
• Embarrassed is a loss by 14+ points against a team that will finish the year below .500

They don’t get blown out, and they’re never embarrassed, but not team finds ways to lose close games against good teams more often than the Baltimore Ravens. That’s what makes their big win over Buffalo all the more meaningful for them – this is a game they’d usually fritter away in the fourth quarter, hanging on to a one score-win or losing entirely. You know, like they did against Dallas last week, or Kansas City in the playoffs. Some more bell-to-bell dominance would go a long way to quieting the (inexplicable) calls for John Harbaugh’s job that popped up after the 0-2 start. The Ravens are a great team; it’s nice to occasionally see them finish like one.