As I have said in other threads, and many times, I am not one for stats..... these stats do not reflect what will happen, or may happen, in the NEXT GAME, the one that hasn't been played yet.
Of course stats don't reflect what will happen. They reflect what has happened, which, as any rational person would tell you, is not just the best predictor of what's going to happen available to us, but the only one.
Each game has it's own identity, and things that may have happened in a previous one, or in several previous ones, have absolutely no bearing on what may , or may not, happen in the NEXT one.
The same could be said about each flipping of a coin. Each coin flip has absolutely no effect on the outcome of the next -- but the fact that if you flip a coin enough times, it will come up heads pretty much half the time, that's a pretty good indication of your chances of getting heads the next time you flip the coin.
The game will be won, or lost, by what these players do for three hours, this coming Sunday afternoon.
This is just platitude. Stating the obvious like this is cheap rhetoric -- of course the game will be won or lost by what the players do, nobody is saying otherwise, least of all the people who want to discuss stats. To borrow from the example above, someone who predicts that a coin will come up heads as often as it does tails is not suggesting that the next flip won't be decided by how the laws of physics act upon that coin in that specific instance.
I believe that, in the end, the Patriots will winout, but not because Tom Brady had better stats than Phillip Rivers for the last eight weeks...They will win out because The Patriots, AS A TEAM, will have a better performance than the Chargers, as A TEAM, this coming Sunday.
Well, sure, in that there are more people playing in this game than just Brady and Rivers. But you're confusing the cause and effects involved in the claims being made by people with stats. Nobody is saying stats cause anything; we're saying that many of the same factors that caused the stats will be at work during the game. Absent any external reason (like the return of a talented receiver, or recovery from injury) a quarterback who hasn't been playing well is less likely to start playing well than a QB who's already playing well. To say otherwise is folly.
Good stuff.
