The New England Patriots are a really good franchise. There are a lot of good teams in the NFL, but the Patriots seem to consistently make it to the late rounds of the playoffs, and the Super Bowl year after year.

There are many things that make the Patriots good, all star players like Tom Brady, and Rob Gronkowski being among the most obvious. But there may be another surprising reason as well.

It might be because they consistently are among the league leaders in a statistic that is usually reserved for the worst teams in the NFL: number of players who started a game.

Generally, the more players that start in a given year for a team, the worse that team is. Intuitively, this makes sense. For example: the division champion Dallas Cowboys( 13–3 ) had exactly one starting QB, Dak Prescott, for all of 2016. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns rotated through four starting quarterbacks and went 1–15.

It turns out, this pattern holds true for other positions as well. Below, you can see a chart showing where each point represents an NFL season for a particular team. Notice the strong correlation between number of starting players, and winning percentage.

As a specific example, in 2016, the average team had about 40 players who started a game ( out of the 52 player roster). During the course of the season, the playoff bound Cowboys had 36 players who started at least one game — which is four less than the league average. The terrible Cleveland Browns had 43, three more than average.

So, bad teams have lots of starters, and good teams don’t. Bad teams have to swap out poor performers and players who get injured. Good teams start good players at the beginning of the season and keep them healthy, and make the playoffs. The difference between bad teams and good teams seems straightforward enough.

But, now we can look at the Patriots again, because the Patriots are different than all the other good teams. What makes them different?

Well, here is a hint. Since 2005, One team has the highest average number of starters per year and the highest win percentage. It’s also the same team with the most Super Bowl appearances during that time period. That’s right, the New England Patriots.

If you take each franchise and average their winning percentage and number of starters over the last ten years, a pattern emerges. Most teams follow the correlation shown above, where bad teams tend to start more players.

In the chart below, the Browns, Cowboys and Patriots are highlighted. The Since 2005, the Browns have been consistently bad, the Cowboys have been consistently above average, and the Patriots have been consistently amazing. Here is how that plot looks. Notice the remarkable New England Patriots ( nwe ) in the top right, especially compared to the other good teams.

y-axis: the average number of starting players for a franchise, over the last ten years. x-axis: win percentage

The Patriots, on average, start more players than the god-awful Browns. For that matter, they start more players than every other team in the league. They also have an average winning percentage that is way better than every other team!

Holy halfbacks!

Why is this?

There is clearly something going on, but it’s hard to pin down exactly what is happening here, and there is more room for research. They are a leader in a few other categories as well, for example in 2016, they had the fewest number of players start for their team (59), and they were second in percentage of roster that started a game( 69% ).

It could be that Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick is more willing to swap players out of the starting line up if they are underperforming. It could also be that he is more likely to make changes in order to have a favorable match up. Or the Patriots have could simply have a deeper roster than most other teams. Or it could be a combination of all these things.

Whatever it is, it seems to correlate with success. And while not every team can have Tom Brady, more teams could try to mimic what the Patriots are doing and get more players out on the field to start games.

Notes

Data is sourced from pro-football-reference.com.

2. Here is the per season plot, with seasons since 2005 highlighted for the Patriots, Browns and Cowboys.

Seasons since 2005 are highlighted for the Browns, Cowboys and Patriots.

3. The number of starting players is normalized per season because the number of starting players per team has gone up over time.

4. Hard to say what this means exactly, but in 2016, the Patriots had the fewest number of players on the team during the season (59), and the second highest percentage of players who started a game (55%).