Pro1,710 posts
21 Aug 2013, 10:04
#1
21 Aug 2013, 10:04#1
For those that think stats are the be all and end all.... Kiwi Wayne - articulates what many of us already know.
The Stats Do Lie by Wayne Smith
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Wayne Smith
Chiefs Technical Advisor
1 day ago
Media analysts love to roll out the stats. They point to the number of missed tackles by one team or the percentage of territory of the other, but the surface numbers are utterly meaningless. They tell coaches next to nothing about the game. The stats are often numerical fiction.
The tackle area is a good example of why stats do lie, of why they are completely misleading without the detail. Commentators look at the ratio of missed tackles. But one player can make 100% of his tackles in a match and it tells you nothing about their effectiveness. Every tackle could have been a passive tackle, made behind the gain line, allowing the opposition to win quick ball without committing numbers. Another player may make only eight out of ten of his tackles, but the eight he made are dominant tackles. He made his tackles past the gain line, put the runner on his back, shut down the offload, forced the opposition to send in three or four players to clean out. And maybe two of those tackles created turnover ball off which his team scored. And maybe the two that he missed were desperate scrambling efforts. Yet the second player is ranked behind the first player on the media stat sheet. You might as well throw the paper in the bin. It would do less harm there.
At the Chiefs we rate each tackle according to its effectiveness. We collate an average score per tackle made in a game. There is a graph on my wall of the tackle scores made throughout the season. It gives the players a greater understanding of the causal effect of what they are doing. We have a benchmark tackle score that we always try to get above. If we do, we win. If we don’t, we lose. This chart seldom
