Sometimes, statistics don’t tell the whole truth. Other times, they are just plain misleading.
Pro Football Focus recently released its ranking of all 32 NFL defenses after the sixth week of the season, based on everyone’s favorite new marker – analytics. In its own words, the rankings “aggregate the play-by-play grading for every player on defense by facet of play (run defense, pass-rush, coverage, etc.), weights them by how much each area correlates to wins and losses through our research, and then adjusts for strength of opponent to create the final numbers.” Understood?
Whatever else these rankings are, they bear no rational relationship to the real world.