Despite not being much of a numbers person myself, I love sports statistics; they’re a great tool in analyzing pretty much every sport from football to cricket.
For example, when I make an opinion about how good a quarterback was in a given season, I’ll look at simple stats such as their touchdown-to-interception ratio. The more touchdowns, the better, and vice versa. It’s a useful tool to gauge how successful a player or team is.
Numbers and statistics don’t lie. They lay out the cold, hard facts, especially in sports, whether the numbers are about player, coach or overall team performance.
My only problem with statistics is how fellow sports nuts like myself use them, either misleadingly or blatantly incorrectly. For what they’re worth, statistics can’t measure intangibles about a player or players, such as leadership, locker room chemistry and so on.
Numbers are meaningless without context. Throwing up numbers and making uninformed judgement calls is one of the worst issues among sports fanbases.
Using the quarterback example again, you could tell me that four touchdowns happened while said QB was under center and his team ultimately won the game. People will likely think that the QB had a really good game and wrongfully attribute the win to him, when in reality the QB could’ve been carried by elite receivers making huge plays out of nothing or a freight-train running back finding the end zone consistently.
Players and coaches can have their numbers boosted by other personnel. Some players have really good statistics, but most if it comes from “garbage time,” a term used to describe a point in a game that is ultimately meaningless because one team is getting blown-out.
One statistic useful for debunking wrongful use of other statistics is the +/- ratio in the sport of ice hockey, which simply measures how many goals for/against a given player was on the ice for. If a player is +5, he’s on the ice for more goals for his own team than against his team, and vice versa.
A hockey player may be averaging out-of-this-world offensive statistics, like averaging 2 goals and 3 assists across a random stretch of games. People tend to look at these basic statistics alone and judge that that player is doing amazing, when in reality his +/- ratio is -10 and he’s a defensive liability and the team is suffering.
Goalies in soccer and hockey get the worst of this issue, as their numbers can suffer from poor overall team performance more than any other position in those respective sports.
This issue feeds into the narrative that most sports fans are irrational. There’s a reason why most sports fans wouldn’t make good team general managers despite thinking that they probably could be.
When you analyze sports, you have to look at tangible factors, such as stats and wins, as well as intangible factors, such as player personality and leadership. Chemistry among the players and coaches is probably even more important than stats.
It doesn’t matter if you have a team full of incredible athletes who excel at their sports if they don’t mesh well together, which is the reason why teams don’t just sign the best statistical players (or if they do, they typically fall short).
Players play a certain way and interact with others in certain ways. Coaches mesh better with some players and not so well with others. When analyzing sports, you have to consider all of this while being aided by numbers, because numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.
The quarterback position is one of the most important in football. While it requires skill, QB stats can be boosted by the skill of others instead of the QB himself. Like many other positions in sports, statistics alone don’t give an accurate analysis and don’t include intangible factors. Photo Credit / Wikimedia Commons
