Sunday, January 17, 2010

J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets

In response to my post Sanchez Leads J-E-T-S Past Bengals Eric Hirschberg (a statistician) commented:

I had to laugh at a histogram with a sample size of 4 and a data range from 1 to 2! This is data that really doesn't benefit from graphic visualization. :)

Agreed... and my response:
That won't stop me from updating it with every J-E-T-S win.
And after an INSANE win (Chargers are [were?] the best team in the league in my opinion), here is the update....



J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets!

9 comments:

  1. Eric Hirschberg is a very bad statistician if he does not understand that this data does not represent a population sample, but the entire population. Perhaps our economy would be better if the statisticians who work on Wall Street understood the basics of statistics.

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  2. Jake,
    Congrats to the Jets, what a shocking win!

    Can they beat the Colts and make me a happy NFL playoff watcher?

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  3. Thanks...

    Who knows, but a D that looks deserving of the title 'Best in the NFL' and a running attack that has two solid backs and the best offensive line in football is tough for any team to handle.

    Manning will be tough, but I personally thought the Chargers were the best team in the NFL heading into this weekend's game...

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  4. Ditto on the Chargers, 11 wins in a row and beat some quality teams along the way. By the 4th quarter their defense was out of gas after getting overpowered by the running game. That TD run by the Jets back (was it Greene?) was galring in that he was not that fast or far ahead and the San Diego secondary was too tired to run him down. This is killing me to write as I am a Patriots fan, but my second long time love are the Saints so that works.

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  5. I'm awaiting a Tyler Durden graphic depiction of the number of Moon Landings since World War Two. I'm sure all his readers would find the utility in broadcasting that.

    BTW if you care to make personal attacks, don't do it anonymously, Miss Durden.

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  6. Perhaps she'll even post it in the form of an index finger, which would be so highly original!

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  7. Tsk, tsk, tsk, Eric. You’ve been busted by the interpretive-bias police.

    Tyler Durden is absolutely right, and the analogy you use as a retort shows that you still don’t get it.

    You’re focusing on the number “2” as being small, and therefore inferring it is a statistical non-event.

    But you’ve failed to realize two important points:

    1. Although the number 2 is small, the upper bounds can only possibly be four! But I guess if you don’t like a y-axis that tops out at 2, you’re prolly not thrilled with one that scales to the heights of “4”.
    2. You’ve completely ignored the fact that the measurement period used in the graph is in and of itself an extraordinary event: it’s the playoffs! Teams that have gotten this far have displayed superior competency, and each of those rookies in the graph STARTED for their team for at least half the year. As the team leader! And those starts would have been after they waded thru a competition of prolly 10 to 15 QB’s selected in the draft every year, and 32 already-starting QB’s. And this was all accomplished at the tender age of 22. What maturity! What mental toughness!

    It is truly exceptional what these fours guys had to achieve in order to rack up a number that you dismiss.

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  8. Sam,
    A rookie QB in a playoff is a rare event.
    Depicting it in its current form, however, doesn't tell you how infrequent it actually is. BTW it can be viewed as either an "entire" population sample (whatever that actually means) or a sample on a conditional population (Professional NFL quarterbacks). It's not a matter of "understanding statistics" but rather which statistics one uses.
    On this point, Eric is right.

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  9. Awesome! Good idea, but will this really work?

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