NFL playoff thread

I guess if people think football is like baseball and a given player can only affect one-ninth of his team's offensive plays, looking at a singular stat line can be comforting. But it doesn't work in football.

In 2010 against the Jets, Manning completed 70 percent of his passes for 225 yards and a touchdown. Rating of 108.7. Yet the Colts scored only 16 points. And Manning, the entire night, found exactly one occasion to throw the ball to Reggie Wayne (a 2-yard catch).

On the stat sheet, Peyton had a hell of a game.

 

Peyton Manning's lifetime passer rating: regular season 95.7
Peyton Manning's lifetime passer rating: playoffs: 88.4
Not exactly falling off a cliff here. I have no idea what you mean when you say his "offenses unable to measure up" unless by that you mean that they aren't winning.

 

You keep trying to make the argument that people are connecting this to baseball sabermetrics, and you're just wrong. Nobody's making that kind of argument.

I have no problem with looking beyond stat lines for a quarterback's performance evaluation. You just did a good job of it with the whole "he didn't throw to Reggie Wayne and the safe throws cost his team points but made his stat line look good" argument.

Simply citing his team's win-loss record isn't thinking beyond the stat line. It's just using a really bad stat line.

 

See my above post for what I think about those ratings.

By offenses not measuring up, I mean a team that scored 27.5 points a game (2005 Indianapolis) having three points through three quarters against Pittsburgh. Or his Denver team giving away almost as many points on turnovers (17) as they scored (21). That's what that means.

 

"Through three quarters."

And now we're back to the terrible kind of cherrypicking. The fourth quarter counts, too. Some have argued it counts more than the others.

 

That isn't the worst cherry-pick. You fully expect that a potent Colts team could do more than a FG through 45 minutes regardless of the 4th quarter.

 

It's not "simply" citing it. It's in conjunction with many other factors, the most prominent being the actual game. If he were losing 31-28 solely because his defense let him down, no, W-L wouldn't have a lot to do with it. That's why there aren't many people saying "man, Russell Wilson really blew it."

The Grantland column that kicked off this latest tangent is very much an embrace of sabermetric principles. So are Football Outsiders and much other analysis out there.

 

Three through three quarters set the pattern for the game. But, fine, 18 for the game in full-on scramble mode. Well, well below par, especially considering they had beaten this team 26-7 in the regular season.

If Peyton Manning's 290-yard stat line satisfies you that he didn't play poorly in that game, we'll just have to agree with me being right and you being wrong.

 

Sabermatricians didn't invent the concept of statistical analysis. They especially didn't invent the proper understanding of statistics as a branch of mathematics.

I haven't been impressed with much of what I've seen of it in football. Football Outsiders and the like are fun diversions, but they don't seem to me to carry a ton of weight.

 

You don't seem to understand that when I point out a bad argument, it doesn't mean I disagree with the conclusion.

 

You may be above it, but it's broadly accepted as advanced football analysis. I see that Barnwell thing posted here or elsewhere at least three times a week.