NFL Statistics: Why Advanced Math Doesn’t Apply To Our Perception of Football

April 6, 2011   ·   Caleb Garling   ·   Jump to comments

I love football, and I loved the years I played. I also love nerding out (my degree is in molecular biology), and I love math, statistics and a good, tidy summary of the world around us just as much.
And yet, I have followed the NFL since the birth of neon and I still have no idea how QB rating is calculated.
I know it involves yards per pass attempt, touchdowns, interceptions, some arbitrary range for a couple other metrics and that’s about it. Not that the math seems hard, I’ve just known that if a quarterback isn’t consistently putting up a rating above 85, I probably won’t be sad to see him go.
And quarterback rating is a caveman compared to the growing number of advanced metrics. Over the last decade, football’s aficionados and statisticians have looked to baseball and seen all the innovative metrics Bill James and company have developed. These metrics are cool; but more crucially, they mean something. "Percentage of swings ou...

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