More Fun With Football Prospectus
Sep 4, 2008 2008 Season, Underrated
In the FP 2008 chapter on the Houston Texans, we find the following nugget:
We are cautiously optimistic about the Texans in 2008. The team is certainly on a positive trend, but if the Texans backslide or make only another modest improvement, they are at risk of becoming the NFL’s version of the Tampa Bay Rays: loaded with young talent, improving slowly, but destined for perennial also-ran status behind thei divisional superpowers. With the Colts and Jaguars playing the role of the Yankees and Red Sox, Houston could be better than it was a year ago and still finish last. It’s a devilish quandary.
I think I speak for all of us when I say I HOPE we are like the Tampa Bay Rays this year.
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September 4th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I can’t believe you made a Rays/Texans logo.
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September 4th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Oh, and I proudly present my letter to Don Banks in response to his dumb comments in a dumb article based on a dumb concept: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/don_banks/08/26/backups/index.html?eref=sircrc . Punch me in the face if it sounds familiar:
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“I have to take issue with a comment on your “Ranking each team’s No. 2 quarterback” article.
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Comparing the win-loss records of Matt Schaub and Sage Rosenfels last year is completely intellectually dishonest. I understand that it makes your “point” more interesting, but instead of having a case of journalists-inventing-the-news, let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?
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The Texans had three significant injuries last year: Dunta Robinson’s torn hammy and ACL against OAK; Andre Johnson’s injured knee in Week 2 against CAR; Matt Schaub’s injured shoulder in Week 7 against TEN. The Texans season last year cannot be properly understood without taking these events into consideration. The same principle applies to any other team as well, of course.
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Andre Johnson missed part of the Week 2 game and didn’t come back until after the Week 10 bye. 8 games, or half the season! The Texans went 2-6 during this time. If you ever watched the Texans, you’d realize that this is not a coincidence: the man is far and away the best offensive player the team has, and one of the best in the league at his position.
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Matt Schaub missed most of the Week 7 game, started but didn’t complete the Week 8 game, played and completed the games in week 11 (W) and 12 (L), and then got injured for good in Week 13 (L) and didn’t play again for the rest of the year.
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And I haven’t even begun to go on about the fact that the Texans’ defense was pretty awful, and that Schaub and Rosenfels played against different teams. Do you really think that a different set of teams and an easily-exploited defense (throw to whoever Petey Faggins is “covering”) have no bearing on which team wins the game?
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As you can see, there are a lot of factors in play here that determine these “records”. But even then, the MOST disingenuous part of your argument (something that Jamie Dukes and Rod Woodson on NFL Network are guilty of as well) is that you refuse to attribute the records you present to the QBs who took the majority of the snaps in the games, but instead compare the QBs by who started the games.
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Do you honestly think it’s appropriate to hand Matt Schaub a loss in Week 13 when he only had the opportunity to complete 3 out of 5 pass attempts that day? Or Week 7 against TEN when he went 5-for-9 only to leave the game? Or Week 8 when he went 11-for-19 in a loss to SD? Just right there, that’s THREE games against AFC playoff opponents in which Schaub didn’t make the most attempts, and yet you give him “credit” for those losses.
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Please try adopting a practice called “research”, and read up on a concept called “context”. What you did was pretty freakin’ lazy, to be honest. All you did is parrot a dishonest and distorting talking point that is making it’s way through the NFL commentary community. It’s hard to take you guys seriously, and it’s driving web traffic away from your site towards writers who don’t assume their readership is stupid.”
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I swear, we had higher standards of journalism in my ninth grade English class. Is Richard Justice secretly a Gremlin that reproduces asexually whenever it is criticized, producing multitudes of guys that make arguments in openly bad faith?
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September 5th, 2008 at 8:18 am
@socctty: Um, you realize that you have the ability to create new posts on this site, right?
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Seriously though, that’s a great point and I’m not completely convinced that they do it out of laziness or ignorance. It’s well documented, and further verified by the existence of reality TV, that controversy drives recognition. By that, I mean that he and Justice get more hits when they write something that will generate discussion - good or bad.
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I fully believe that these writers will knowingly and willingly violate the journalistic code of ethics by posting stats that, while technically correct, are clearly misleading. Their intent is not to provide their readers with information (although they will never admit this), but rather to draw attention to themselves.
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Clearly, this is hardly a shocking assertion to anyone on this site, but it still pisses me off that they act so offended when someone (Steph) calls them out on their journalistic integrity. Plus, it pisses me off that it works.
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September 5th, 2008 at 9:22 am
“…but destined for perennial also-ran status behind their divisional superpowers.”
Uh, did these writers get the memo about the Rays winning their division this year?
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September 5th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
@Vega: Yea, I thought about creating a new post but it would be me preaching to the choir, again, on the same topic in a 24 hour period.
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I’ve always heard that CNN is what ruined journalism for good, since their business model was based on the news department (aka the whole operation) turning a profit, instead of what ABC, NBC, and CBS used to do, which was operate at a loss on the news department and make it up with shitty sitcoms.
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Without getting too deep in to politics, it’s funny to watch ESPN during something like the two weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, and then to flip over to Fox News or MSNBC. To ESPN’s credit, they don’t confuse combative questioning with inquisitive questioning like the “real” networks do. It’s pretty fucking sad.
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And in the end the quality of football suffers, which is probably the greatest tragedy of it all.
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September 5th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
@bigwood25: They wrote the book mostly in June.