The increasing popularity and use of performance analytics in the NFL has led to an alphabet soup of acronyms for advanced performance measures that can often be a bit cryptic: PFF, DVOA, EPA, QBR, WAR, CPOE- the list goes on. Sometimes these measures confirm the obvious (i.e. Patrick Mahomes is good), sometimes they reveal a well-known player may not be quite as good as his reputation would suggest (i.e. Adam Thielen in 2022), and still other times they present conflicting assessments of player or team performance (i.e. the Vikings 2022 season).
The one constant among providers of these performance measures is that they seldom delve much into how their measures are calculated, how well they correlate to actual play on the field, or the inconsistencies, limitations, uncertainty, and error that may be contained within their measures.