The self-perpetuating cycle of really bad teams

[PatsFanSince74]

The Seahawks were never really in this cycle. Only 2 really bad years in the last 15 or so.

2008 was a strange year. Panthers and Titans come from out of nowhere to have great seasons, flop in the playoffs, and disappear again.

Yeah, Seattle's been to the Playoffs nine times since 2001 (seems like a fair comparison range) and had an overall record of 126-98 with only two bad seasons. Hasselbeck was an average+ QB who got them to the Playoffs six times and was one and done only twice; in other words, your odds of getting past the first round were better with Matt than Peyton.

 

[primetime]

I'm a big stats guy and geek, so I know what you mean. But there's a real blind spot that can develop amongst those that love the science and math behind the game. We tend to think if there's no way to measure it, it doesn't count. It's how some of the ridiculously wonky stuff from sites like Pro Football Focus is done.

Yeah, PFF is basically taking qualitative judgments by amateur scouts and then turning that qualitative judgement into a grade. It's the equivalent of getting a 92 on an essay in high school; that 92 is essentially a stand-in for a bunch of qualitative factors - in addition to being a somewhat arbitrary measure of quality, a 92 is different teacher to teacher, it could depend on whether the teacher likes you, whether they're having a bad day, whether they agree with your thesis, and so on. Compare this to a test with 50 multiple choice questions, where each question is worth 2 points. In this case, the grade is arrived at quantitatively. A 92 means you answered 46 questions correctly a 4 incorrectly, full stop. This 92 is essentially different than the essay 92, but the grade assigned is the same.

In PFF's case (and I'm probably more positive about PFF than most posters here, though I take everything there with heavy dose of salt), the use of numbers for qualitative judgments is a deliberate attempt to appeal to the mathematical mystique while really doing nothing different than the plethora of amateur internet scouts who break down film and grade player performances. To PFF's credit, they watch and grade every individual play, even kickoff coverage. It just means you can't definitively say that one player is better than another based on their grades, because a +9 versus a +4 isn't meaningful, but if you convert them back to the qualitative measurements that they really are, they do give you some indication that the player was "up" or "down" in that game or that segment of the game.