Brian Burke, a former Navy pilot who has taken up the less dangerous hobby of N.F.L. statistical analysis, operates Advanced NFL Stats, a blog about football, math and human behavior.

When Jets defenders square off against Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers’ offense Sunday, they are likely to see a different style of attack than they faced against Tom Brady and the Patriots. Brady’s offense depended on stringing together short plays with high probabilities of success. This style minimizes risks like sacks and turnovers. The Steelers’ offense is the opposite. It relies on big plays to stretch the field and to open up space underneath to convert first downs when necessary.

Both Brady and Roethlisberger are big producers for their teams. Brady, in his second-best season, produced 0.24 Expected Points Added (EPA) per play. Roethlisberger also had his second-best season, producing 0.23 EPA per play.

The Patriots’ offense was characterized by a league-leading 49.4 percent Success Rate (SR), a statistic that simply counts the proportion of plays that improve an offense’s scoring potential. Tom Brady threw only 14 percent of his pass attempts deep (defined as greater than 15 yards beyond the line of scrimmage), putting him second only to the rookie Sam Bradford in how rarely he threw downfield.

The Steeler offense’s SR was a slightly-below-average 43.1 percent but was still a top-10 offense in terms of EPA and passing efficiency. They were able to be so successful thanks to their big-play strategy. Roethlisberger threw deep on over 26 percent of his attempts this season, more frequently than any other quarterback with 10 or more starts.

The way to stop the Steelers’ offense is to take away the deep pass. In fact, the more the Jets’ defense can force them away from passing at any depth and toward running on first and second downs, the better. Despite their reputation as a “run-first” team, the Steelers are actually a mediocre running team with a 38 percent SR, ranking 27th in the league.

Battling the fierce Steelers defense will be tough. They appear to be good across the board, but they do have a blemish. Deep pass attempts against them are successful at a 45 percent rate. The Steelers rank 21st in the league in terms of SR, and 12th in terms of EPA. The trick is protecting Mark Sanchez long enough to allow deep routes to open up. And one added benefit of deep pass attempts is that interceptions aren’t necessarily very damaging.

The stats suggest the Jets’ game plan should focus on deep passes — denying them on defense, and making them on offense. Full statistical breakdowns of this Sunday’s games are available here: NYJ-PIT and GB-CHI.

And here are the game probabilities for the conference championship games.

Win Chance GAME Win Chance 0.64 Green Bay at Chicago 0.36 0.26 Jets at Pittsburgh 0.74

Brian explained how his predictions work in this post.