And here’s your advanced stats guide, updated every week by Bill C., to show you how.
Most analysts tend to look at stats one way: to answer questions and make declarative statements. But that sells the numbers short. Instead, stats (and their cousin, advanced stats) can — at their best — tell you the right questions to ask. For example, “Team A was last in the league in yards per game” is so much less interesting than diving into why Team A was so offensively challenged.
The fact that we often don’t use stats to their full potential is at the heart of why coaches have been saying “stats are for losers” for so long. Their stats are not our stats. They don’t care that they’re allowing X passing yards per game, for example — or to the extent that they do, it doesn’t really help them do their jobs.
Lucky for them, we’ve found a way of using numbers that coaches can relate to; stats that break down an NFL team’s relative strengths and weaknesses, and very quickly determine which narratives have basis in fact, and which are a bunch of hooey.