In the 20 years since Bill Belichick took over as coach of the New England Patriots, the team has gone on an incredible run. From 2000-2019 they did not have a losing record against any team in the NFL. In fact outside of the Panthers (3-3), they have a winning record against every other team.

Now, one of the main arguments for this has been that the Patriots have benefited from playing in a weak division/conference. Being able to beat up on the lowly Bills, Dolphins and Jets has "padded" their record. Or "they wouldn't be as good if they were in the NFC." As someone who (obviously) loves the Patriots and (obviously) has too much time on their hands, I realized I was in the perfect position to research these claims. So I did. And I'm about to show you why the "Easy AFC East" narrative is a myth.

Patriots Win Percentage

The Patriots are a staggering 267 - 94 against the NFL since 2000, which equates to a 0.740 win percentage. So as a whole, the NFL has not done particularly well against the Pats. In fact, if the NFL vs the Patriots was an actual team, their win percentage (0.260) would be worse than the Cleveland Browns over the same time period (0.309 since 2000). Yes, the same Browns that won a combined 4 games over 3 entire seasons.

If we break it down by conference, it looks like this:

Conference	Win - Loss	Win Percentage
AFC	200 - 72	0.735
NFC	67 - 22	0.753

Even with a smaller sample size in the NFC the conference breakdowns are surprisingly close. So it's not like familiarity (or the lack thereof) creates any sort of advantage either way. Let's break it down even further, and look at the Patriots win percentage against each individual division.

Division	W - L - T	Win Percentage
AFC South	41 - 12	0.774
NFC South	17 - 5	0.773
NFC East	18 - 6	0.750
AFC East	91 - 31	0.746
AFC North	35 - 12	0.745
NFC North	17 - 6	0.739
NFC West	15 - 5	0.750
AFC West	33 - 17	0.660

A few things stand out.

1. The AFC South has performed dismally against the Patriots, which even includes the Peyton Manning era Colts.
2. The Patriots difficulty with the Broncos (10-9) is the main reason the AFC West is at the bottom of this list.
3. The AFC East is smack dab in the middle of this list. Not nearly the cakewalk that the AFC South provides.
4. The Patriots have more losses against AFC East teams than the entire NFC.

AFC East vs Everybody

This really only proves that the AFC East is just as bad as everyone else against the Patriots. But let's take it one step further. How has the rest of the AFC East performed vs other divisions since 2000?

Division	W - L - T	Win Percentage
NFC Central *	85 - 75 - 0	0.531
AFC East	689 - 627 - 0	0.524
AFC Central *	97 - 95 - 0	0.505
NFC East	658 - 652 - 2	0.502
AFC North	575 - 571 - 6	0.499
NFC South	606 - 608 - 2	0.498
AFC West	650 - 662 - 0	0.495
NFC North	567 - 580 - 5	0.492
AFC South	566 - 586 - 0	0.491
NFC West	603 - 640 - 5	0.483

Ok, this isn't really fair since we're including the Patriots in this and they've been otherworldly as we've already established. On the other hand, if we remove the Patriots from the results the AFC will plummet:

Division	W - L - T	Win Percentage
NFC Central *	85 - 75 - 0	0.531
AFC Central *	97 - 95 - 0	0.505
NFC East	658 - 652 - 2	0.502
AFC North	575 - 571 - 6	0.499
NFC South	606 - 608 - 2	0.498
AFC West	650 - 662 - 0	0.495
NFC North	567 - 580 - 5	0.492
AFC South	566 - 586 - 0	0.491
NFC West	603 - 640 - 5	0.483
AFC East	450 - 542 - 0	0.454

But again, this isn't fair to the AFC East. Of course you're going to look bad if you take away the best record from your division every year. And it just so happens that the Patriots have finished the season with the best record in the AFC East every year -- even when they don't win the division. So what happens when we remove every season's division winner from the equation?

Division	W - L - T	Win Percentage
NFC Central *	61 - 67 - 0	0.477
AFC East	450 - 542 - 0	0.454
AFC Central *	71 - 89 - 0	0.444
NFC East	436 - 554 - 2	0.440
NFC South	396 - 531 - 1	0.427
AFC North	368 - 491 - 5	0.426
AFC West	419 - 573 - 0	0.422
AFC South	362 - 502 - 0	0.419
NFC North	360 - 500 - 4	0.417
NFC West	381 - 544 - 3	0.411

Huh. The AFC East is back on top when you remove the best team from each division, which leads me to believe that the rest of the AFC East hasn't been "easy" by any stretch. What this shows is that in the 2nd - 4th spot in any division, the AFC East has the best record, regardless of who was in that spot.

But some claim that it's unfair to remove the division winner for each season, since that punishes teams that have a good year and win the division occasionally. They argue that the comparison should be removing the best teams from each division since 2000. So let's put that argument to the test and compare divisions when removing the best performing team.

Division	W - L - T	Win Percentage	Best Team
NFC South	423 - 471 - 2	0.472	New Orleans Saints (183 - 137 - 0)
NFC East	468 - 523 - 1	0.472	Philadelphia Eagles (190 - 129 - 1)
AFC West	468 - 524 - 0	0.472	Denver Broncos (182 - 138 - 0)
NFC West	421 - 503 - 4	0.454	Seattle Seahawks (182 - 137 - 1)
AFC East	450 - 542 - 0	0.454	New England Patriots (239 - 85 - 0)
NFC North	370 - 459 - 3	0.445	Green Bay Packers (197 - 121 - 2)
AFC North	370 - 458 - 4	0.445	Pittsburgh Steelers (205 - 113 - 2)
AFC South	369 - 463 - 0	0.444	Indianapolis Colts (197 - 123 - 0)

So the AFC East isn't at the top anymore, but neither are they far and away the worst division in football in the Brady/Belichick era. Regardless how you run the numbers the AFC East is still not the easiest division, by a long shot.

Lack of Top Tier Quarterbacks

Yet another argument is that the best proof of a weak AFC East is that there haven't been any top tier Quarterbacks other than Brady in the division. This one is more subjective than some of the others, but I was still curious as to what the QB landscape has been since 2000, so I put together a basic comparison.

To make things as fair as possible I grabbed a list of the top 50 Quarterbacks ordered by Passer Rating, filtering by players who had played at least 16 games (to normalize the list a little bit for QBs who have played at least one full season of games). I realize that Passer Rating isn't a perfect system, but it gives us a baseline with which to judge each player, and there still hasn't been a clear successor to this rating yet. The results were... surprising, to say the least.

Here's the list grouped by division for the NFC. The number before each player is their overall rank in the top 50.

NFC
North (8)		South (4)		East (8)		West (8)
2	Aaron Rodgers	6	Drew Brees	8	Tony Romo	4	Russell Wilson
28	Matthew Stafford	12	Matt Ryan	9	Dak Prescott	13	Jared Goff
31	Daunte Culpepper	32	Jameis Winston	11	Kirk Cousins	17	Kurt Warner
33	Mitchell Trubisky	38	Cam Newton	16	Carson Wentz	23	Colin Kaepernick
39	Teddy Bridgewater			27	Nick Foles	26	Jeff Garcia
41	Jay Cutler			29	Robert Griffin	34	Alex Smith
42	Brett Favre			37	Donovan McNabb	45	Sam Bradford
44	Shaun Hill			50	Eli Manning	47	Marc Bulger
32.5	Average Position	22	Average Position	23.375	Average Position	26.125	Average Position

And here's the list grouped by division for the AFC. Again, the number before each player is their overall rank in the top 50.

AFC
North (5)		South (8)		East (4)		West (5)
14	Ben Roethlisberger	3	Deshaun Watson	7	Tom Brady	1	Patrick Mahomes
15	Rich Gannon	5	Peyton Manning	18	Chad Pennington	10	Philip Rivers
25	Andy Dalton	20	Andrew Luck	19	Tyrod Taylor	24	Derek Carr
30	Carson Palmer	21	Marcus Mariota	35	Ryan Tannehill	36	Trent Green
49	Joe Flacco	22	Matt Schaub	48	Brian Griese
		40	David Garrard
		43	Steve McNair
		46	Case Keenum
26.6	Average Position	25	Average Position	19.75	Average Position	23.8	Average Position

Some takeaways:

1. Divisions with future Hall of Fame class QBs (Brady, Roethlisberger, Brees) tend to have less representation in the list.
2. For as bad as their numbers have been so far in this blog, the AFC South is well represented for some reason.
3. The NFC East has had quite a few quality QBs.
4. According to the numbers, out of the top 50 QBs the AFC East has the highest average QBs since 2000.

While I agree that this might not be the most comprehensive comparison, it still shows that the AFC East has had somewhat similar production from their top QBs than other divisions in the same situation. If you have any other research ideas for this, let me know.

Lack of Serious Challengers

The last argument (so far) about the myth is that the Patriots haven't had to worry about any serious challengers over the course of the dynasty years. The criticism boils down to the fact that because the other teams in the AFC East have been consistently mediocre, allowing the Patriots to coast to a first-round bye whenever they make the playoffs.

For this we'll have to make some baseline assumptions to be able to compare each division over the years. There seems to be some data supporting the idea that the cutoff for making the playoffs is a 10 win season. We can compare each division by how many times they've had multiple 10+ game winners in the division. This should give us a good idea of how many times the division winner has had "serious" competition from a division rival.

Division	Count	Seasons
AFC East	10	2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2019
NFC West	9	2000, 2001, 2003, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019
NFC East	9	2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2016
AFC West	8	2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018
AFC North	8	2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015
NFC North	7	2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019
AFC South	7	2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2018
NFC South	6	2005, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2017
NFC Central *	2	2000, 2001
AFC Central *	2	2000, 2001

A few things stand out with this one:

1. There isn't a whole lot of separation between the divisions in this comparison.
2. The AFC East is once again not at the bottom of this list, showing that they're (still) not as bad as critics make them out to be.

Measuring Others' Success

Strangely, we don't hear any of these arguments being levied against any of the other successful teams, but let's take a look at what some of the other successful QBs in the league have had to deal with in their divisions.

To put it in order of conference success, it looks like this:

• Rodgers (.457)
• AFC East (.454)
• Montana (.448)
• Manning (.431)

Seeing that the AFC East fared similarly to divisions of other successful teams/QBs brings up an interesting question: if the Patriots hadn't been the dominant force over the past 20ish years, would the rest of the AFC East teams look as mediocre? This is a bigger topic than this article can tackle, so I've written about that here: What Does the AFC East Look Like if the Patriots Weren't a Dynasty?

While I plan on continuing to update this post as more arguments arise, hopefully this puts to rest the myth of the "easy" AFC East.