Fear and Loathing

Did you know the Patriots are 5-0 when Corey Dillon rushes for 100 yards? Of course, they're 4-1 when Dillon doesn't rush for 100 yards. And in the one loss, Dillon was injured. So they're 4-0 in games that Dillon plays, but doesn't rush for 100 yards. So really... what does that statistic tell us?

Statistics have become my pet peeve recently. Ok, maybe not statistics per se, but bad statistics, unclear statistics and people just plain being afraid of statistics. Granted, its easy to get statistics wrong. But its just as easy to get statistics right. I'm not talking about multiple regression analyses or chi-squared distributions. I'm talking about a little bit of addition, a little bit of subtraction and a little bit of common sense.

You'll start to see what I mean as I post more. In some cases, the mistake is a result of someone clearly not knowing what they're doing (the above example seems to apply). In some cases, its an intentional misrepresentation of data. But in most of the cases, it only requires a little common sense to find the errors. Stay tuned.