Don't hold back, Ivan...tell us how you REALLY feel...
I feel like real analysis of football by people who watch the games in terms of winning and losing is being overrun by make believe metrics analysis modeled after sabermetrics that treat football like baseball, a series of one on one match-ups and related statistics that quantify the game in some meaningful way, when in truth they actually ignore the contribution of everyone else on every play and eliminate all meaningful context and substitute time and temperature for it. There is so much wrong with this approach to looking at the game and the players that the examples of why it doesn't work are literally endless, but to throw just a couple out and make this as concise as possible i would cite Kevin Faulk, whose numbers are pedestrian in the big picture, but who was as integral a part of their Super Bowl Championships and all of their other successes as they come. He didn't have the numbers, what he had was the key plays that rarely showed up in the box score. 3rd and 12 and he gets 13, need a key block to keep Brady clean and he delivers it, need 4 yards on a trap or 6 on a screen and he gets it. He made big play after big play after big play and all in big situations and yet the metrics show none of it, he's not even average. Example II, Vince Wilfork, absolutely dominant for years, as good as they get at his position, and yet he has almost no shot at the HOF and is radically undervalued by even the fans of his own team, who watched him throughout his career and saw him get double teamed on pretty much every play of his career. He gave everyone around him an advantage in their match ups because he commanded so much attention but when they mash up the numbers he's just another DT. Complete crap imo, as are the faux metrics and warped statistically based analytics of garbage sites like PFF, who actually rated Brady as the 32nd best player in football when he was the unanimous MVP.
The people who started PFF saw a financial opportunity to use a sabermetric style model and infatuate the millions of fantasy football players out there and draw them into their approach because they can actually use some of the metrics for fantasy analysis, and it will work in that regard, but fantasy football is a shallow reflection of the real thing and confusing the two leads to exactly the kinds of arguments you see breaking out on this and many other football sites, as some want to talk football, and some want to talk metrics, and imo metrics don't measure play they just measure numbers.
So congratulations to the folks at PFF for making a bunch of money for their make believe metrics, they give credence to the credo that there is a sucker born every day.
I guess that is how i really feel.
