Luckily in America we can turn on the TV device every Sunday morning and hear hours worth of misinformed brain-diarrhea analysis about what’s happening on the football field. Most of this is due to dementia-addled murderbots former players who believe that their former glory gives them special insight beyond what the pencil-necked virgins statistics experts can tell him.
So just as baseball has Joe Morgan and the “Moneyball” haters, football has Tom Jackson and Phil Simms. Let’s look at five of the most common myths that football traditionalists like to shove up our brain holes on a weekly basis.
5. Mike Martz and Norv Turner are idiots.
Yes, I know, both have had various controversial moments as head coaches. Turner has coached more games than any other skipper with a losing record and Martz… well he’s notoriously Martzian stubborn at times. But every single time one of these guys goes to a new team, that team’s offense suddenly improves.
It’s no coincidence that both of them are from the west coast. They’re the modern day apostles of the brilliant Air Coryell offense. The Air Coryell offense is one of the most innovative football strategies ever devised. It uses lots of vertical seam routes to gash open defenses and pick up passing yardage in huge chunks. Screw “three yards and a cloud of dust”-style old school shiz. If the 99 Rams offense doesn”t give you a football boner, nothing will.
4. Good teams win the close games.
Ever seen a team go on a roll where they win lots of close games in a row? Yeah, they almost definitely suck. Ever seen a team that seems to blow out lots of mediocre teams but then loses a close game to a division rival? Yeah, you should watch out for them.
Here’s how FootballOutsiders.com puts it:
People want to believe that the teams that can win the close ones are championship teams. But as counter-intuitive as it sounds, championship teams are generally defined by their ability to easily win games over inferior teams.
Football games are often decided by just one or two plays — a missed field goal, a fumble that bounces one way instead of the other, a fourth down where officials spot the ball two inches from the first down marker. One dropped pass short-circuits a last-minute comeback. A cornerback smothers his receiver all day, only to get beat once and give up the winning touchdown.
The team that comes out with the victory in a tight game is one step closer to the postseason. But has that team really proven that it is better than its opponent? There are many times where two teams are evenly matched, and if they played again the next week the result might just as well go the other way.
When a team blows out its opponent, however, one unlucky bounce or missed kick isn’t going to change the result. A lopsided win provides pretty good proof that the winner is a better team than the loser. That’s why the teams that meet on Super Bowl Sunday are usually the teams that won a lot of games by big margins during the regular season.
3. Good quarterbacks just win games.
Much like in baseball where the sabermetrics geeks have been waging war against using wins to evaluate pitchers, football fans should never confuse team statistics with individual metrics. So don’t judge a quarterback by his win-loss record. Not even when Jesus himself Tim Tebow is your quarterback.
Tebow has led his Denver Broncos to five straight wins as a starter this season, yet FootballOutsiders.com only rates him as the 29th best quarterback in the league. That’s worse than even the bloated corpse of Donovan McNabb and some guy named Rex Grossman.
2. Teams should always punt on fourth down unless it’s fourth and inches.
If you ask your old high coach for his opinion about going for it on fourth down, he’ll think you’re insane for even considering it. Good teams punt on fourth! You play for field position! Everyone knows that.
But in the past few years, statisticians have studied fourth down probabilities and determined that NFL coaches are nearly all too conservative, with the notable exception of Bill Belichick. Are you smarter than Bill Belichick? No.
1. You have to “establish the run” to win games.
This is the ultimate piece of old school bullshit traditionalist conventional football wisdom. Not a Sunday goes by without Merril Hoge, Phil Simms or Tom Jackson blathering about the importance of the running game. (No one should ever listen to Merrill Hoge for any reason.)
The truth is that in 2011, the running game is not going to win you many games. Running the ball again and again is a great way to gain two yards and bring out the punter. Sure, rushing is still an important part of the game (especially on third down and in short-yardage situations) but you simply cannot win games by moving down the field a few yards at a time. League-wide, just 52 percent of all runs in Week 11 went for more than two yards and only 29 percent went for more than four yards.
Teams that run up lots of rushing yards tend to do it in the third and fourth quarter after already building up a lead — which they accomplished by passing downfield.
Stats geek Brian Burke put it nicely in Slate:
Today’s affinity for smashmouth, slobberknocking football is irrational. It’s not 1977 anymore, and running the ball for nostalgia’s sake is counterproductive. Underdogs need high variance plays to win, and downfield passing is all about high variance—big risks with bigger rewards. In contrast, running is low variance. Teams that are strong in all phases of the game have the luxury of running the ball. Fans and commentators see strong teams run the ball often and think it’s the running that causes the winning, when it’s really the other way around.
So next time Uncle Leo has a few too many Busch Lights and starts clubbing your team’s coach for not running the ball enough, politely point out that he’s an idiot and send him here.
