TMQ

I have to get this off of my chest. I occassionally read the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column by Gregg Easterbrook. I have come to the conclusion that this man knows almost nothing about football. He has this habit of throwing out random stats as proof that his ideas are correct. The most common example is his assertion that teams shouldn't punt on 4th and 1 from their own territory with 7 or so minutes remaining in the 4th quarter if they are losing because the average play is a four yard gain. Perhaps he doesn't understand that a more useful bit of information would be how many yards does a team average on 4th and short from inside their own territory. But he doesn't do that. He tosses out irrelevant stats that look pretty. Recently he cited an article in the Wall Street Journal which ranked colleges based on the average wonderlic test scores of former football players who had tried to get drafted. He made the false assertion that the Stanford football team has a higher average score on the wonderlic than does the New England Patriots. How can he assert this? Not a single player on the Stanford football team has taken the wonderlic. The test isn't available to them. I guess this is just a problem that I have with his writing in general. He is not as smart as he thinks he is so he is prone to misusing statistics and making incredibly assinine assertions. I hear that his brother writes interesting judgements.

On another note, I realize that this has turned into something of a football blog of late. Suck on that.