Herding Stats

There’s a saying, “90% of all statistics are made up”. It’s a funny quote and always gets a smirk from whoever you say it to. In this series, we’ll take a look at the other 10% of statistics, those cold hard numbers that make this great game of fantasy football possible. We’ll take a look at what these statistics meant for the game and what they could mean for this week’s contest or even the rest of the season. Undoubtedly there will be some statistics I share with you that you’ve heard before, others you’ll be able to share with your friends, enemies or league-mates (none of which are mutually exclusive from one another I might add) and look like the smartest owner around.

Peyton Manning – Seven Passing Touchdowns

We’ll start with the extremely obvious, Peyton Manning’s seven touchdowns is a feat the likes of which many of us have never seen in our lifetime. Manning is just one of six players who has thrown seven touchdowns in the history of football and is only the second player to do so since the Super Bowl era. It simply can’t be overstated just how amazing this is. The feat of even throwing six touchdowns in a game is a lonely feat as well, with only 33 players achieving that feat (two instances were Manning again) . A great way to put this in context is Manning is just one of three men alive on this entire planet who has achieved that feat in a professional game. Want to see how crazy that is? Here’s a number trick for you, count to three over three seconds. OK, you’ve just counted the three living humans who have thrown seven touchdowns in one game. If you continued at that rate, one person per second, for every person on earth as of the time you are reading this, you wouldn’t complete that counting until the year 2235. That’s one person, per second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 222 years straight! Staggering!

400 Yard Passers

This week saw three 400 yard passers (Peyton Manning, Eli Manning and Colin Kaepernick). This is only the fourth time in the NFL that there has been three 400 yard passers packed into one week.

100 Yard Rushers

The first week of the season only saw three 100 yard rushers. What is even weirder is the fact that only two of those were even running backs. Before week one, a regular season week in which there have only been three 100 yard rushing performances only occurred twice in the past five season. On the bright side, if your running back, or backs, performed poorly then you likely weren’t alone. It’s also likely that such a poor rushing performance league-wide likely won’t happen any time soon.

The Woeful AFC North

The AFC North finds themselves without one win to show for themselves, between all of them. The last time a division opened the first week of the season without a win was 11 years ago, when the current eight division format was introduced, in the 2002 season. Ironically enough that division was also the AFC North. How did the AFC North finish that season? I’m glad you asked – it finished with 37 total losses that year, second most out of all the divisions, something AFC North fans clearly don’t wish to see happen again this season.

It’s hard to deny that, coupled with the excitement of the kickoff of the NFL season, last week was an extremely interesting week from a statistical standpoint. It’s likely that outside of the Manning accomplishment very few fans even knew about the remaining statistics. Since we have only had one week in the season thus far it’s hard to extrapolate or use any of these statistics to predict anything with much accuracy. However, as this series goes on it is my intention to highlight trends and maybe even use those trends to help predict what we may see in the following weeks.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first installment in this series and I look forward to building upon this base. If you have any interesting statistics that you either noticed or heard about from week 1, please share them in the comments so we can have a nice discussion. Furthermore, if you have any ideas or suggestions as to what you would like to see featured in this column in the following weeks then please share those comments below as well.

Thank you for reading and thank heavens football is back!