LTrain23 wrote:
Basically any stat that refutes what NNN is saying is meaningless...
No, but then again, I'm more curious to see what exactly the common theme of successful versus unsuccessful teams look like.
The one commonly bandied about is that "a QB who leads the league in passing hasn't won the Super Bowl since whatever year". Basically it's used by a bunch of anti-intellectual pseudo-jocks to "prove" some point about how stats are meaningless and that games are won and lost by blind rage, spit, and whether or not the ghost of Bronko Nagurski and Norris Weese is by your side.
Of course, it overlooks something that's very basic. "Leading the league in passing" refers to passing yards. And the reason that there's a low correlation between winning and high numbers of passing yards is based on this:
1) Most good teams have a good balance of passing to running, and
2) Most bad teams will get behind early and force the QB to pass the ball all over the place, thus racking up high passing numbers but very little on the scoreboard
With this in mind, I started doing work with YDS:TD ratio, which tends to offer a much clearer insight as to exactly how valuable a QB may be. Those with extremely high ratios (150 yards per TD) tend to play for poor teams, those with extremely low ratios (100 yards or less per TD) tend to play for good teams, and those with extremely weird ratios (above 200 and under 90) tend to be in a unique situations, such as a QB leading an unbalanced offense with a road grader who runs from the 5-yard-line in.
QB ratio is useless because, among other things, it takes completion percentage into account. There is ZERO correlation between completion percentage and any of a number of things...efficiency of an offense, wins and losses, amount of offense generated, and so on. It also heavily skews toward post-Walsh QBs, who were taught to quickly check down to a running back, thus creating an entire generation where the most inept QBs in history have QB ratings that dwarf first-ballot HOFers.
