Safermetrics

Tonight the NFL kicked off its umpteenth (85th?) season with the Mayflower Colts led by the fabulously overrated Peyton Manning against the Tom "He's won two Super Bowls" Brady-led New England Patriots at Gillette Field in Foxboro, Mass.

As a kid I could throw the tightest spiral but couldn't imagine taking the knocks required to be a QB. Soccer and hockey (where my small size actually benefited me) are more my sippy cup of Tang. So, like baseball I never played organized ball, but I did follow both sports as a fan and endured all the cockamamied theories from those whose career experience is based upon bygone eras of playing nth-string in high school. I use nth-string because sometime in college I learned that anybody who wanted to be on the high school football team merely had to show up for practice. There were no cuts like in my sports or in baseball.

Where baseball has slowly awakened with the help of the Moneyball revolution, football still seems to be stuck in the dark ages. Granted, there are twenty-two players who are nearly all involved in each play and that football can be a very complex game but some "simple" things seem to escape analysis.

[Note to self: Not sure how football can even compare to baseball's sabermetrics but where you are going to go with this post?]

When it comes to football I don't know squat, as I've alluded, but I sure do love to watch the NFL (well, Weeks 1, 2 and 3, some of Monday Night Football, the occasional Vikings game, and the middle of the playoffs) and Satruday college football games on the West coast when living in the dreary Midwest (IOW, nap time).

So, I'd watch more football but I am quickly reminded and turned off by pro football's time management, fourth quarter/fourth down decisions, and the reliance upon setting up the ground game through the running back (overrated).

Tonight, already Game One of the season, I looked into some of this a little.

...and once again I've run out of steam to write anything more than a long lead but I'll at least let this go published as is...

Two places to go: RBs are overrated and safermetrics.

BTW, Peyton's Colts lost again to New England.