- Joined
- Dec 22, 2011
- Messages
- 47,254
Hey genius. The guy said gattis likes to run a lot of plays and offered that he was “near the top of the country” in number plays per game to support that, but the stats clearly don’t support that so I pointed it out. Being average and close to last isn’t near the top. Rankings are relative, just like his “near the top” assertion, and always will be. Then you jumped in and started talking about a bunch of **** that we weren’t, that’s why I’m not addressing all your what if variables. We never even talked about which way was better, but you decided to jump in a day later and go off on a self righteous, “stats are worthless” diatribe. No stat has perfect correlation to performance or record, they are indicators though. If you don’t think plays per game correlates to offensive tempo, you can’t be helped. Notice I didn’t say they are the same, but there is correlation. It’s hilarious how you point out one outlier as proof that what I said is worthless when that’s not even what I said. Either that or you don’t know what correlation means. Outliers still exist even when things correlate, and offensive plays per game correlate better to tempo (what I said) and offensive performance than number of wins (what you decided to argue) since wins would also be affected by defense and special teams. Read a dictionary if necessary, take advil for any headaches, midol for any cramps.
And Michigan was 2-4 when they dropped down to 112th, and scored 7 fewer pts per game compared to this year, but that doesn’t fit your argument so I’m sure that’s a worthless stat and their intention was to run fewer plays and score less even though I was told gattis likes to run tempo. If you feel the need to do some statistical analysis based on who the qb was, defensive substitutions and correlate a few more stats with those to prove your assertions, have fun
You doubled-down on the worthlessness of stats. Impressive.
Again, there is a difference between wanting to "go fast" and the situational need to run plays more quickly or more slowly. And when the entirety of the range is 58 plays (K-State) to 81 plays (Wake Forest), then all of the nonsense about being "near the top of the country" and "average" and "bottom of the country" really doesn't mean a whole helluva lot. And I already pointed out that one-third of all schools in Division I fell between 70-75 offensive plays per game, so the range gets quite narrow once you factor out some super-high-end and super-low-end numbers.
As for the rest of your complaining, I didn't just point out one outlier. I pointed out that numerous teams ranked "ahead" of Alabama in this metric were pretty average teams AND I pointed out that two of the four CFP teams were at the BOTTOM of the list. Those aren't just outliers, those are statistics with negative discrimination index, where some of the best teams are at the bottom and some of the weaker teams are at the top.
You are free to milk your couple of Stats classes into a pontification on the stats, that's up to you. As always, stats are an interesting starting point for discussion, but I'll take the eye test every time. Pace and tempo are not simple factors to be measured on a clock, particularly when certain types of plays stop the clock and others do not. That's why it's important to look at whether the offense gets to the line quickly and without substituting, as it freezes what the defense can do to substitute and rotate players. Whether the QB then looks to the sideline and utilizes long snap counts is what leads to the "number of plays" stat being misleading of what is really going on.
But you keep focused on those stats. I prefer to watch the game and see what is actually going on.