Buy Or Don’t Buy

You can sum up most football writing like this:

BRETT FAVRE! BRETT FAVRE! TONY ROMO! BLUE-COLLAR! SMASH-MOUTH FOOTBALL! TOUGHEST! GRITTIEST! GUTSIEST! HOTTEST! STUMBLE DOWN THE STRETCH! SAVED THEIR SEASON!

However, there’s a place for witty, insightful and mathematically-based football writing: Football Outsiders, which attempts to apply the same statistical analysis that’s become so influential in baseball to America’s real #1 sport.

Instead of just reporting passing and rushing yards and interception, the guys at FO created a whole alphabet of new terms, most of which have meanings I’m a little unclear on but all sound important. There’s their basic performance metric, DVOA, which charts the percentage of how good someone is over league-level average, but also DYAR (roughly how many more yards a player was responsible for earning than a replacement-level one), Adjusted Line Yard (measuring an offensive line’s contribution to the running game) and KUBIAK (some sort of fantasy-football projection.)

But aside from the complicated statistics, the best reason to read Football Outsiders is the witty and erudite prose. Since the demise of Fire Joe Morgan, they’re the best people on the internet at taking down conventional sportswriting wisdom. This week alone, they’ve argued that despite going 34-of-48 for 346 yards Phillip Rivers didn’t actually play that well, named David Gerrard of the slumping Jaguars the best quarterback of the week and advocated a Tashard-Choice-for-Sage-Rosenfels trade.

The FO writers are also always good for a few enjoyable random references you will never see Peter King or Don Banks make. Take this analysis of the Tennesee Titans’ quarterbacking:

On Sunday, [Kerry] Collins was Ed O’Brien during the recording of Radiohead’s “Kid A.” He was useful, he showed up, occasionally performed and didn’t do anything really wrong, but had he not been there, things would’ve gone exactly the same as they did otherwise.

Or this apt description of the Chicago Bears’ epic bust of a running back Cedric Benson:

The Bears parted ways with former first-round pick Cedric Benson, whose tipsy, unpredictable boating habits made him the Jack Sparrow of the NFL [...]

These two excepts alone would make Football Outsiders a definite Buy under this Venn Diagram I have devised after heavy research:

However, there’s another, even better reason for the Buy. This week’s DVOA rankings have returned my beloved Philadelphia Eagles to #1 in the league, a place they have inexplicably occupied a couple of times this season. Yes, we may only be 8-5-1 and need Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Dallas to lose if we hope to get into the playoffs, but based on complicated mathematical formulas, we’re #1! WE’RE #1! WE’RE #1!

[Image: Flickr]