This one seems long overdue. People make all kinds of assumptions about what does and doesn’t happen in the rain, but I’ve never seen anyone test them — until now. At the end of the article, you’ll find a handy chart which summarizes the findings for easy reference.
I’m a Niners fan. Growing up in New York, despite the buzz around Phil Simms and Joe Morris, I couldn’t turn away from the display of skill, ethic, and extraordinary class of the likes of Steve Young, Joe Montana, and Jerry Rice in a brutal game. I hated Deion Sanders and cheered when recent history’s only respectable Cowboy, George Teague, leveled Terrell Owens during his second obnoxious display at the center of Texas Stadium.
It’s no surprise then that I’m no fan of the loud and inattentive Randy Moss. The easy choice for MVP would be to follow Antonio Pierce and just anoint Tom Brady the Prince of the NFL, but the numbers tell another story: Randy Moss has been the difference between good and outstanding for Tom Brady and the Patriots, and deserves to be named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player of 2007.
If you’re like me, you’ve just watched the annual event in Fantasy Football that I can only describe as Le Grande Suckstravaganza, otherwise known as Week 1. Maybe they’re a bit rusty, maybe they’re still working off that Chunky soup Michael Strahan and Donovan McNabb’s Mom are always pushing, or maybe that little green dot is throwing off a few quarterbacks’ balance – Who knows. Here I’ll show you a few ways the opening week in the NFL is just plain odd to help put some things in perspective, and maybe keep a few of you from a trade, waiver, or lineup move you might regret.
Its draft time, which means the mathemagical voodoo is in high gear. Hopefully just in time for your draft, let’s take a look at the “3rd Year Wide Receiver Breakout Hypothesis” in this second installment of the stat lab. This is the idea that wideouts are generally primed for success after two years of pro experience under their belt due to comfort, rapport, pro-grade performance enhancers, whatever. For fantasy purposes, we’re looking for guys who bust out of the far end of the depth chart into at least fantasy relevance along with breakout time from their rookie season.
This is what you get if you look at the Census data the right way. If you want to average out Americans another way, take what makes about half the country boys, then take what makes about half the country girls, and divide by two. However interesting a mental image this might make, this is not a helpful statistic (if you happen to be one of these kind of “Average Americans” please stop reading this article and call your nearest day time talk show host immediately).
Here in The Lab we’re going to take football data and commonly held ideas in fantasy football, tie them up, strap them down, and wring them into submission. We’ll subject them to experiments until they confess to numerical lies like this one that help you lose, and reveal meaningful secrets that just might help you win. More importantly, we’ll show how to figure out which is which – and this is how we begin!