I don't use any stats but wins and losses. Stats obscure the fact this is not a very good team.
Man, I'd argue just the opposite. If there's one stat that
hides the truth about this team, it's W-L. Even though it has finished 8-8 the last three years, we all should know that it's been a bad team with a lot of below-average players and just a few very good players, almost all of them on the passing offense.
The stats in this thread show how bad the defense has been, and the defense is half the team. You could throw in more stats (and I've done that) showing how bad the running game has been, and that's basically 3/4 of the team. If your opinion is that this has been a bad team, than you should realize that these stats (that you don't use) are telling you that your opinion is correct.
The whole point of research is to inform people's opinions. Teams themselves have access to more information, and go much, much more in depth in their own research to isolate how specific elements of the team performed in specific situations. You'd hate that, I'm sure. Lot's of math there. But this is what informs teams where their strengths and weaknesses are with regard to personnel, play calling, and any other aspect of the team you can think of, plus many you can't.
Some stats can indeed hide some of these aspects, but then someone would point out the specific flaw. Things like yards per game, when possessions per game aren't equal league-wide, so teams with more possessions naturally will have more yards, even though they don't necessarily have better offenses. These days, you can take pretty much everything into account. Play calling, execution, occasional malaise (great 70's word, btw) etc. The challenge is to go as in depth as possible, and look at as many elements as possible, while keeping it as easy as possible for everyone to understand.
Analyzing different elements of a team is not saying there is only one "cause" when the team loses. You don't believe that yourself, so there's no reason for you to think I do either. And you can't put an umbrella around all stats as if they were equal, so that finding one bad stat somehow discredits all others. Do some research, and you'll see that there are some very good stats that correlate highly to winning. I can only lead the horse to water here. Unless you've looked into a subject and have enough of a grasp that you can intelligently discuss it, you don't really have much of a case in criticizing it.
But in the final analysis, a loss is a loss and trying to work numbers to move blame, or clear players of responsibility along with coaches...
That's an accusation made from safely within the refuge of a generality. You've accused me of "trying to work numbers to move blame," without any specifics as to which numbers I've supposedly "worked." That's understandable, because the more you stay away from specifics, the less likely you'll have to deal with the mess of actually trying to defend your position.
And that is where you usually check out.
