Maybe I’m in the minority on this, but I like this take on “who you gonna believe, the stats or your lying eyes?”
The work that guys like Brian and Bill Connelly do may not be definitive — not that either of them have come anywhere near making a claim like that — but it is often illuminating and so is the process they go through to fine tune their formulas. Which is a big part of the reason I’ll keep citing them here at the blog.
Get The Picture 
I give stats and Mike Leach a hard time sometimes, but the world would be a darker place without them.
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I like them, and I’m glad you cite them. I guess the only thing that I don’t like is that it does, to an extent, employ transitive properties. But, there’s only so much you can do to try to make statistics as impartial and unbiased as possible, so I get it.
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What transitive properties?
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To my knowledge, and someone please correct me if I’m wrong, there’s an element of essentially ranking how a team does (say, rushing yards yielded) against a team versus the field against that team.
So, if that’s correct, then to an extent, you’re saying a team has a good rushing defense because they have done better against a particular team than the majority of other teams that team has played.
Again, I could be wrong, but I think there are at least some elements of this.
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That’s a close cousin of Bama ain’t gotta play Bama, so of course their schedule is easy, PAWWLLLL !
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Come on, dog. You think Fremeau and Connelly know more about football than Jeff Long?!?
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Admittedly, that’s a tough call. 😉
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Stats are just not for me.
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Connelly is a master. I stopped buying Phil Steele…he’s been way off the mark last 3 years due largely in part by the roster turnover late spring post print that he cannot keep up with nor will he re-release upon kickoff.
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