05-10-2014, 12:34 PM
(05-10-2014, 12:19 PM)Stymie link Wrote:I rely on tape (much of which of Hogan's long game I have seen), but as one who aced statistics at both Stanford and Harvard Business School I solidly believe the old chestnut of "lies, damned lies and statistics." :)
Better statistics than faulty memory. I mean, here's every single ESPN highlight of a Hogan longball from 2013:
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9649332
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9649995
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9740904
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9741147
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9741283
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9815483
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9850031
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9887303
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:9943420
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:10098537
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:10098652
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:10099977
To me I see maybe one longball that even comes close to the description of your memory -- Hogan scrambling around and heaving up a ball to a receiver who comes back and does all the work. (If you'd bothered to consult the statistics rather than memory -- which has a way of forgetting things! -- you'd know Hogan ran and scrambled much less this year than last.) Of course, some of these are perfect strikes, some of them just good balls; and a couple the receiver is doing good work. Fine, whatever; basically every quarterback has receivers helping him out in this day and age. That's where we turn to statistics, where the knowledge that Hogan completed the third-highest percentage on deep passes combines with our view of the tape to say, "Well, he's a pretty good quarterback at throwing deep." Basically every QB sometimes misses guys a bit. It seems like a stretch to say that Hogan is somehow completing the most passes of everyone...but those completions are worse than others.
But I understand you have a different evaluative measure of "using your memory to summon nonexistent plays, and comparing that to your perhaps equally faulty memory of other players."