Add new comment

Baseball sabermetrics and football statistical analysis (we need a different name...SABR is the society for american baseball research...you cannot call the analysis of football sabermetrics) need to be approached COMPLETELY differently.  Foorball statistics are in their absolute blastocyst stage...they aren't even infants yet...and the reason is...in football the situation matters a hell of a lot more than it does in baseball.  In baseball, every play is one hitter, one pitcher, and three defensive units.  In football, every play involves AT LEAST 18 of the 22 guys on the field and you can't really statistically separate the different offensive and defensive units that have to work together to produce a result...and it gets worse than that...because in football there's a CLOCK...that clock dictates policy...efficiency ratings can be totally FUBARed by a team having a 2-possession lead with 10 minutes to play.
To be honest...the only thing I believe that an efficiency rating can tell you is the odds of the Seahawks winning a football game where they NEED to convert on their opportunities on a regular basis...not the odds of them beating a random .500 team.  They'll need higher efficiency if they want to beat another great defensive team or a good offensive team with fair defense.  They don't need to be efficient to win against a lot of other types of teams.  And of course...the other problem with efficiency is that it's forced to be a small sample statistic...in football, you have to...HAVE TO...focus only on the statistics that can be of significant sample size in a 16-game schedule to have any chance of seeing something new.
The analysts in football haven't quite gotten their heads around that problem yet.
Bottom line...there's a reason that I micro-analyze baseball and learn so much from the effort, while I watch football with no further insight than a typical insightful football fan.  Football is a much harder problem...I'm not smart enough to figure it out without years of study...study much more dedicated than even what I've done with baseball.  We need a totally different approach to football...every play must be viewed through a more specific lens than what is commonly stored in the play by play records.  We need to make note of who were the key blockers, the key corners, etc. that made events unfold the way they did.   Not just Hasselback to TE for a 9 yard TD pass...we need specific accounts of what each guy did on any given play.