I’m not sure I understand what your argument is. You say that we should be open to what the numbers have to say, yet you seem to be bending over backwards to discredit the numbers.
Which is it? Listen to the numbers, or handwave the numbers away with supposition?
Numbers are not good or evil. They all tell a specific bit of information. The amount of yards a team gets tells you something. What it doesn’t do is tell you how good an offense was. For a variety of reasons, the correlation between amount of yards and quality of offense isn’t that high. Likewise using points scored or yards per play would also be flawed. It isn’t about using numbers, it is about using the right numbers.
Football Outsiders uses a method to rank offenses that isn’t flawless, but is better than these. It is based on the concept of judging how successful a play is for its given situation. So 8 yards on first and ten is good, but 8 yards on third and ten isn’t. They have the top 5 offenses ranked as NO, NYG, SD, Ind, and Den. Ari and Hou are 10th/11th
It is if you were 5 yards away from FG range, or were inside your own 5 and now you have room to punt.
Right. Like I said it isn’t perfect, though they do have adjustments for some of those things. It is much better than considering all yarda equal.
Can we please steer this thread back to hatin’ on the Cowboys? kthxbye.
To steal a line: You’re killing me here. Don’t you watch football?
Are you seriously telling me that you think that those 4 teams had a better offense than the Giants this year? That if you could, you’d go back in time and do a 40-player trade, giving up all of the Giants players for all of the Texans or the Cardinals?
The Steelers rank 24th in yards per play, behind Buffalo, Kansas City and San Fran. You’re telling me that you’re going to assert that those are actually better offenses – that they did more to help their teams win games than the Steeler’s offense did for theirs? You can’t possibly think that.
FTR, I did not say those 4 teams stunk: they are good-to-mediocre offenses, who rose to the very top of the total yards and yards-per-play statistics by virtue of the fact that they passed a lot (ranking 16th, 26th, 28th and 32nd in rushing attempts), and they passed a lot because 1) they were not infrequently losing, and 2) because three of the four were not all that good at running the ball when they did do it.
Teams that pass a lot will always do comparatively better in total and per-play stats, because passing always produces more yards per attempt. (2008 NFL best yards per carry: 5.0. Worst yards per pass: 5.2. Most years it isn’t even that close) But for reasons I pray to sweet feathery Jesus are obvious, it does not therefore follow that good teams pass on every down all year. It does mean that really getting a handle on the objective reality requires more than looking up the counting stats and concluding that the Steelers must never have a good offense because they never put up lots of yards.
As a Giants fan, I’d LOVE to pretend that my team has all the answers. Many Giants fans already do (“The Cowboys lack discipline, they don’t play as a TEAM! They have too many prima donnas- Coughlin would never stand for T.O.'s crap, he’d give T.O. the boot, like he did Shockey!”).
Thing is, it was only about 12 months ago that Tom Coughlin was on thin ice, that the New York media regarded him as a failure, a guy who just barely had his team above .500, and invariably made early exits from the playoffs. It’s only because the Giants got hot and went on a roll at the right time that THEY seem like a team doing things “the right way.”
In the same way, a lucky break or two in last year’s playoff round, and the Cowboys would have been in the Super Bowl. And IF the Cowboys had managed to win it all, everyone would be saying “Wade Phillips was exactly what the Cowboys needed. Bill Parcells had the team wrapped too tight. He let them relax, and THAT’s how they went 13-3.”
If you win, you look like a genius, and if you lose, you look like an idiot. If a tyrant wins, he’s hailed for being an “old school guy” and a tough disciplinarian. If he loses, he’s obviously a cancer. If a nice coach wins, he’s an admirable “players’ coach” who lets his guys have fun. If a nice coach loses, well, he’s a wimp who needed to crack the whip, but who let the team walk all over him.
Point being, I agree with much of the criticism levelled against Jerry Jones… but if just a FEW things had gone differently last year, Jones would have a Super Bowl trophy and Tom Coughlin would be unemployed.
I offered a fuller explanation of it in post #6: it’s not so much that they had an abnormally bad injury situation this year, but rather that they had unusually *good *injury situations the past few years, making them appear better than they actually were.
Actual numbers are available (in great depth) in Pro Football Prospectus 2008 (which everyone really should own, anyway). I can dig up some specific numbers later if you’d like, but I don’t have the book with me at the moment.