Punishing Teams Let's face it, some teams are much more physical than others, and it's likely that the most aggressive sides inflict some serious pain on their opponents. This would suggest that the won-lost record of a team's opponents in the week after playing them would tell you which teams are indeed the bruisers.

Physical teams leave their opponents so banged up that the next week they are ineffective and more likely to lose. At least, that's the theory. This whole handicapping notion owes its existence to the old "Silver and Black Punishment Effect" article which came about from an incredible streak put together by those original kings of the "black and blue" treatment, the Oakland Raiders. Back in their heyday the Raiders were certainly a little nasty to play against (if not downright dirty) and teams did in fact fare very poorly in the game after playing the Oaktown boys, particularly when the next game was at home.

The players today are faster, stronger, and while not as nasty, armed with better "techniques" for sticking it to their adversaries. That would lead you to believe that the "punishing team" theory is credible and perhaps even a viable way to predict future outcomes, but frankly in past attempts to concoct a "damaging team" number we've had little predictive success.

The truth of the matter is that the schedule of the opponents a team may face has more than a little to do with the records. If you played a team that then faced Philadelphia in the following week, chances are pretty good that your opponent got stuck with a loss regardless of how you played against them. At the same time if your opponent took on the Bengals the next week, they would most likely come away with a win. One way to diffuse the variances in schedules between teams is to go not by straight won/lost records, but rather by the record against the point spread of an opponent the next week, since the line on a game represents to some degree the expected performance. Taking this view of things, this is the order of the teams from the 2002 NFL season:

Using the spread record measure, Oakland checks in at #4 in the league, but some teams with punishing reputations like Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are middle of the pack. Heck, even the Bengals apparently did some damage if you believe these numbers!

A fair test is to rank the teams at the midway point of the season and see how predictive the standings were from there in the second half of the season. The answer: not very, as the bottom five teams (least damaging) saw their opponents struggle against the line the next week (i.e. reversing the pattern) and the most damaging teams after week nine were not significantly hurting their opponents chances in the following week, save for the top of the charts San Diego Chargers.

Another way to see if there's any merit to these ratings is by examinging continuity from season to season. The following table shows the five "most damaging" teams of the 2001 season and the results in 2002:

So a complete reversal of form! Trying to establish which teams are damaging by the follow-on records seems therefore to be a waste of time...with one shining exception. The nefarious Oakland Raiders, the bad boys of the NFL, who for years did indeed leave their foes damaged goods for the next team -- well, teams were just 5-9 against the line the week after playing Oakland in 2001, and 4-8 the week after a game with the Raiders in 2002. Conclusion: the Silver and Black Punishment effect is real and still at work in today's National Football League!