KC, you are indeed 100% correct about the use of and the sources of the stats. ESPN use a system developed by a UK company called Opta Sports and they have ana.lysing software for all kinds of sports and some of the biggest sports institutions use their systems.
http://www.optasports.com/ I posted a lengthy story about them, and how I made contact with them, probably about 2 or three years ago. Fast is that the "stats" published by ESPN is a drop in the ocean. Some of their clients include the likes of:
Football: Arsenal, Chelsea, Barcelona, Bayrn Munich, Hull City, Italy, Roma FC, etc
Rugby: Blues, Crusaders, Highlanders, Harlequins, All Blacks, etc.
They had the Super Rugby stats open to the public at one stage and I used to download all the spreadsheets and videoclips from their site until they closed it for the public. I phoned them to find out if there was a way for me to access the spreadsheets only and for my own use. They told me that the only way was to buy an annual license at £12,000, at that stage.
Likely for our friend, who believes in his little strings of ESPN stats as if it was the Gospel, those stats are not available any longer because that would have nailed his perceptions of certain players time and time again. He would have nowhere to hide with all his silly deductions and assumptions and more importantly most, if not all, of his biased opinions have been blown out of the water. Those are indeed real statistics and not minute pieces of nonsensical data. Watch the videoclip
here. That gives you an idea what the pros work with and then we have a bunch of clowns on here who think they can do the trick using a few figures from ESPNscrum. It is sometimes more dangerous to know/have a little than to know/have nothing.
