Numbers are a very big part of football analysis. Being a fan of a sport that has a huge fantasy football following, has made most NFL fans obsessed with using statistics to evaluate every individual player’s performance on the field. Too often fans are completely reliant on statistics for their football knowledge. Statistics are a good reference and an excellent way to better understand the game as you are developing an interest or learning about teams and individuals, but understanding the context of those statistics and how they come about is much more important.
You see, statistics are definitive, but football is not. There isn’t always a definitive right or wrong on every single play that can be tracked by a statistic.
Even new age statistics like those at Pro Football Focus can’t be considered definitive, because those statistics are found on the back of a set criteria established by the people who run that website. That’s not a knock on statistics or the people who do such fine work with them, because every analyst, draftnik or scout sees things in a completely different way to everyone else. Some are better at evaluations than others, but no one is completely right on everything that they say.
“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.” --- Bill Shankly
