Belichick vs. AFC East teams

In Tedy Bruschi's weekly interview on ESPN today, he included a rather fascinating statistic:

'Since Belichick came to New England, he is 40-12 against the AFC East, and eight of those losses have come against Miami.'

Okay, that's kind of crazy. And I'm not sure that it is quite right.

Now, let's consider when those were: 2008 (1), 2006 (1), 2005 (1), 2004 (1), 2002 (1), 2001 (1), 2000 (2).

2000 and 2003 we lost to the Bills (2003 in the opener after we cut Malloy and everyone thought Belichick had lost his mind). 2008 and 2009 we lost to the Jets. But we also lost twice to the Jets in 2000, then once in 2001, 2002, and in 2006 (I spit on you, loss to Mangini's Jets!), so that's a total of 7. So I think that total is more like some number of wins - 17 against the AFC East. Which is still pretty good, but not quite 40-12.

However, if we add them up as Belichick + Brady, then we do get a record that is better than 40-12 because that omits 2000 (4); of course, we also need to take out 2008 (2). So now we have 40-10. Which is a damned fine record, I must say (80% win rate). Sure, our division has been kind of lousy at times during the 2000s, but still, not bad --> adopting my Bill tone, there is still a lot of work to do, and of course we could do better.