Quote:
Originally Posted by Schneed10
As much as I love data driven analysis and its applications in so many aspects of life, football is one area where doesn't help all that meaningfully. The biggest reason is one of the fundamentals of statistics - sample size. The NFL season contains only 16 games, any statistician will tell you that a sample size that small can't provide meaningful conclusions that would pass a confidence test.
And while the stats will factor in a probability of injuries, a significant injury at a key position or two is all it takes to completely change a team's approach to game-planning, completely tossing almost everything the stat book would tell us.
Last year, if RG3 were healthy, the stats never would have called for a 3-13 season, the roster was stronger than that. But the fact is he wasn't himself, no calculation can plan for that. For the Eagles - if they lose Jason Peters and Jason Kelce this year like they did in 2012, they could be looking at 5-11 because Foles simply SUCKS under pressure.
There's just too many curve-breaking variables at play in football, and over the course of only 16 games, anything can happen. Stats just aren't that telling - there's a reason they say Any Given Sunday.
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The thing about football is that there's so many events in a single game that can be measured that it allows projections on the season level to be based on massive samples: anywhere from 500 to 2,500 events in a season depending on what is being measured. But the trade-off that you touched on is obvious: one week in football is the equivalent of 10 baseball games or five basketball games, and so all analysis in football needs to be inclusive of the idea that a ton can change in one week. Football is just unique in that it packs that many events into a single game.
I think your argument that analytics and data are not going to do a lot to help you predict the outcome of an October matchup between the Redskins and Eagles is pretty accurate, but that's true with most sports. It's always going to be a lot easier to predict the result of 16 games than 1 game.