NFL Season 2020 Football • Page 352

Let me ask you the inverse question. If I’m looking at tackles for loss as a stat, why wouldn’t I include the sacks? I want to know how many times that player forced the other team into a loss. Total. Not including those would make it seem like DEs are rarely getting in the backfield compared to how often they actually are.

A 20 sack guy who gets 4 run stops behind the line... he got 24 tackles for loss haha. That more accurately describes how much he was pushing the offense back than if you just see 4 tackles for loss.

If you wanted to add a stat that says “run stuffs” specifically, by all means go ahead. Or, you can just subtract sacks from tackles for loss and still easily figure that out haha. I don’t get why the way it’s done now is an issue.

 

Stats aren’t always laid out together like that though. Sometimes you’re sorting tackles for loss by itself on a table or taking a few stats to make a point. In those cases you’d want the full picture of what that stat represents.

This seems like a chicken or the egg thing and TFL actually came first. Sacks was a way to further specify tackles for loss, as stats became more detailed & football analysis evolved. It wasn’t the other way around, where we had sacks and then decided to add a redundant broad stat on top of it. We had tackle for loss stats on Dan Deacon but we’ll never know how many times he sacked the quarterback.

 

Because that would mess up the old stats. It’s not simpler. Would just make them inconsistent with how it used to be recorded.

Then you’re seeing Dan Deacon with 17 tackles for loss and if that only applies to running games now, it confuses you into thinking all those Deacon TFL’s didn’t even include his sacks. When it did. Tackling the QB behind the line was simply recorded as a TFL first before we even had sacks.

We don’t have tape on all Deacon’s games to double check that and rewrite his TFL stat to not include sacks.

It makes more sense to uphold the stats that have been there forever, so that information that’s been archived in football history easily translates across eras, and conveys the same message.

 

You can’t because sacks didn’t exist back then! Subtract what? That was missing information before sacks started being recorded in the 80s.

 

There’s no way to go back and “fix” the TFL stat pre-1980 so we have to honor the way it’s always been recorded

 

No, you are looking at this backwards lmao.

Football wasn’t heavily about passing back then, it wasn’t until passing started to become a primary part of the game that we even needed to record sacks as a stat.

They weren’t “messed up” it was just different context back then. Now we have extra stats to further clarify things that weren’t a big part of the game back then. Why is this hard to understand lol

 

Just because the game got more complex doesn’t mean we can just erase and rewrite the older record books. We have to operate within that precedent and that context.

 

Because it’s a perspective entitled by recency bias, that ignores the very logical reasons why stats are the way they are in the first place.

 

I just said. We don’t have that information pre 1980. It is impossible to subtract sacks from TFL when you don’t know how many sacks there were.

 

9 - x = ?


What’s the answer to this equation Matt? what’s wrong why can’t you subtract it

 

We have to do it the other way because we can separate that in modern stats. We can’t fix the fact that sacks and TFL are fused together in older stats though.

 

Whats the point of keeping any of the old stats at all then, if we are gonna be inconsistent about what they mean? It just hurts the frame of reference that exists if you can’t clearly define that a tackle for loss means the same thing in 2020 as it did in 1960.

 

It’s literally like, when you say it’s important to be precise / clear about word choice. For example, when you get on me for not being consistent about what genres refer to. They are meaningless if you can just arbitrarily say it means something else.

Same thing, but math. Lol.

 

........ no we don’t lol

Every other stat that existed back then is also recorded the same way now. We didn’t change the formula for quarterback rating. We didn’t change what an interception is.

 

I feel like I’m having to explain what a precedent is and why precedents are important in record-keeping and I just don’t want to put that work in anymore.

 

All the rule changes are also, based on precedents haha

 

They’re literally sometimes nicknamed after the controversial play that inspired them

Pass interference was referred to as the Mel Blount rule

There the Tuck Rule etc

 

Well, they can only add new stats for further clarification if they want to honor their record books. They can’t change the meaning of existing ones.

If you literally just want them to have a separate column called “run stuffs” where they literally subtract the sacks from TFL, I legitimately already know how to write the code for that algorithm, because that’s so simple we can do it in our head.

 

In fact, I’m over complicating it. An Excel spreadsheet can do that for you with just one input command. What am I talking about with building the data table from scratch lmao that’s the hard way.

 

Yeah that’s what I said haha. But I don’t see the point cause it’s not something that needs to be calculated or tallied. We can easily do that for ourselves. I can skim a stat table and look for the widest gaps between sacks and TFL if I want to figure out who specifically is a better run defender than pass rusher, in a matter of minutes.

Knowing how the numbers relate to each other has a lot to do with understanding what stats mean and why they can be misleading. I don’t think they need to spell everything out for us.

 

And here’s my most important point on this -

“Run stuffs” would be a misleading stat anyway. Just because you can get lucky on a blitz with your speed doesn’t mean you’re good at diagnosing running plays & splitting blocks. Chaisson having one or two more TFLs *against the run* than Epenesa doesn’t even begin to say he’s as good of a run defender.

 

So why go through all this trouble to create another stat that is, honestly more misleading than things like INTs?

Because honestly most INTs are the QB fault so it’s still an effective metric. Run stuffs wouldn’t be. Because bad run defenders get lucky and blow up plays in the backfield almost as often as good run defenders who actually did the work to get there from a regular play call.

 

You’re better off analyzing other teams’ YPC when they run to that defender’s gap.

 

You’re better at stats usually but that’s because you double check and memorize them more than i do haha

When I actually USE stats I’m very good with them

 

Well no, it’s the fact you fight me on this when the whole thing is a moot point, because the stat you want is a misleading / weak stat that doesn’t actually make the point you want to make about run defense.