Yeah, it sure is silly of him not to play his best all the time, though, isn’t it?
Another week the entire NFC East won. I’m glad the **Giants **pulled it off. This was a good test this week. Besides I know how much **Airman Doors **had to be disappointed by this and that puts a small smile on my face. 
I thought you didn’t believe in clutch? Are you now conceeding that he does play better in the clutch?
Better late in close games? Hold on, time out.
No, I’m saying that clutch doesn’t exist.
hehheh, that really was truly pathetic. That was the third quarter, though. (IIRC)
I’m curious why you don’t think clutch exists. Could you elaborate?
If he’s saying what I think he’s saying, then there’s no particular logic to the idea of “clutch play”. If you’re a quarterback, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you direct five successful scoring drives spread evenly throughout the game or five successful scoring drives all in the fourth quarter; if you score more points than the other guys, you win.
“Clutch” is always indicated descriptively; i.e. a certain player’s (or team’s, I suppose) numbers are shown to demonstrate his or its clutch ability based on some narrowed performance metric (close and late QB rating, points per game in the 4th quarter, OPS in the 7th inning or later, postseason batting average, and so on) or even worse, based on anecdotal evidence, like that one pass he threw or that one turnover he made. That’s all well and good - there’s no harm in saying that this player has or hasn’t performed well in these situations that I’ve chosen to highlight - but the next step is prediction, and there’s the rub. People tend to want to say “based on this attribute of clutchness for which I’ve defined the parameters, I believe that I can predict that this player will perform better in important situations in the future.”
The problems with this analysis are, I think, manifest. First of all, it’s almost never statistically significant - you have sample size problems, most obviously, but you also have selection bias; after all, there’s no shortage of statistics from which we can pick and choose our definition of clutch, to say nothing of how problematic anecdotal confirmation is. I am not convinced that “close and late” performance indicates the existence or absence of some definable mental attribute regulating playing ability. That’s just not compelling, given the evidence available. The leaps in logic - from the belief that this particular statistic encompasses “clutch” to the belief that all such situations are directly comparable, from the belief that one player’s success in those situations can only be attributable to his “clutchness” to the belief that that player will continue to perform in that manner due to his “clutchness,” from the belief that this particular drive or at-bat or shot or kick is a clutch one to the conclusion that a player’s success on that particular drive, at-bat, shot or kick can only be evidence of how clutch he is, and not, you know, just a guy playing a sport - just seem, frankly, to be based more on a desire to create some engrossing narrative than on anything that makes rational sense.
This is already getting lengthier than I really intended, so I’ll end with the traditional clutch challenge: pick a sport, any sport, and any player who fits your definition of “clutch” or “choker.” Define clutch in statistically meaningful terms and show how that player has performed better or worse in the clutch than in the non-clutch. Over a statistically meaningful stretch in the future, I’ll bet you that that player’s performance is closer to his career norm than his abnormal “clutch” sample. And I think that is demonstrable proof that you can’t identify clutch.
Clutch, in other words, exists in the sense that a statistical streak exists: you can point to it after it happens and say, see, that happened. But you can’t say with any confidence that it’s going to happen in the future.
There’s another aspect to this, which is the all the credit/all the blame thing that QBs get. During Brady’s Superbowl-winning drives, you never saw him throw a pick, but yiou never saw his recievers drop passes either. Brady gets all the credit, though.
Oh, sure. There’s a million confounding variables in a single play in football, let alone an entire career. That’s part of the reason that I think Football Outsiders has such a long road ahead of it.
Wouldn’t the Cowboys be better if they got Kitna to replace Johnson? They got 122 yards in the air this week.
Yeah, but he didn’t turn it over. Anyway, you can’t trade a player when he’s on IR.
Let’s not get carried away here. The reason the Steelers didn’t put the Giants down by two scores is because they didn’t have a long snapper, painfully demonstrated by Harrison’s safety. A two score lead puts the Giants away yesterday.
Also, the defense gave up 6 (count 'em, 6) points on 3 first and goal possessions inside the 5. They couldn’t hold forever. Too bad the offense didn’t show up quite as well, but them’s the breaks.
It had nothing to do with “clutch” and everything to do with the fact that the Giants had the damn ball a majority of the game in spectacular field position. That’s too much to ask of any defense. They were bound to break, and they did.
Indeed. The defense showed why it is regularly one of the best, if not the best, in the NFL.
I realize that the replay refs don’t have access to the overhead camera, so I’m fine with them maintaining that there was no TD. However, we’re under no such restriction – does anyone who viewed that angle seriously deny that Jacobs got the ball over the plane on 4th down?
His knee was down before the ball crossed the plane. That might wash on the 40, but it doesn’t at the goal line.
It looked like the ball was probably across the plane based on his helmet position, but I certainly wouldn’t have overruled the call on the field. Plus, the image they showed from the overhead camera was directly over the ball, but a few feet behind the play, so the ball appeared farther forward than it actually was.
Not the 3rd down play (in which he had an elbow down when the ball was at the one or two-inch line), the 4th down play. I know you’re not trying to say a knee touched the ground when there was no way for him to even leave his feet in that mass of bodies.
Oh, I fully agree that it couldn’t have been overturned – there is certainly nothing a ref could call “conclusive”. However, even taking the camera angle into account, that ball was still clearly in.
The long snapper had absolutely nothing to do with it. The play immediately after the safety was a free kick (which is a punt) from further upfield than the punt attempt was from, meaning you can say the free kick was the punt that never happened. The ensuing drive would have started at the same place on the field, and the Giants TD would have put them up by 5 instead of 7. The hapless Steelers offense wouldn’t have scored a TD down by 5 anymore than they were able to score when down by 7.
I picked Eli yesterday during the third quarter. As that trainwreck of a quarter was winding down, I said to myself: “No worries, Eli is a clutch 4th quarter QB and will pull out the win in the fourth.” Prediction correct.
I will also nominate Eli to continue performing above his career average in QB rating in the yahoo late & close stat category, as well as the fourth quarter and overtime in general.
He has been consistent over his entire career in these clutch situations, and I fully expect him to continue to be. My last doubts about this vanished after the Bengals game a few weeks ago.