The charm of the Nation's traditional pastime resonates in the contrast of black and white numbers with ethereal sensory experience. Time was men of any age connected like a heartbeat through a national obsession with baseball. Call it ignorant empathy; baseball made boys feel like men, and made old men feel like young boys. My dad always liked to keep scorecards when he was at a game. I think it helped him watch the game better, to keep his awareness in step with the rhythm of play. "If your paying attention" he would say, "in every baseball game you will see something that you have never seen before". Baseball has always had an intimacy to it like there is more to baseball than what is going on the game. Strange but tru is the other hand(mostly) the game within the game of statistics. The realm where even the emotionally challenged have been drawn to baseball is the oceans of statistical data. In baseball stats tell stories. As time passes and and a nations romance with baseball steadily fades the same men and boys and women and girls find a new national romance. Football is not remembered through numbers they way baseball is. Strange but true stories in football can almost never be told statistics alone. In football the reality is often much stranger than the myth. Stats are a foreign concept for football. They fail as proof of any trend or talent. They mislead in any evaluation of skill. Contrary to being a foundation of assertion in football it seems statistic fuels misappropriation like kindling. The set of data is always limited, the team dynamic of football distorts the dimensions of statistical meaning. I guess to be fair football makes more sense in the physical world, or in other words...in baseball stats are responsible accounting, in football stats are sales......All that said let me be clear about one thing. In neither baseball nor football nor life no statistic should ever be interpreted as prophecy, but no matter the domain a set of data always tells story. Ask any millennial who they want to tell the story. Stephen Hawking or Chris Nolan
Here's your Stat of the Union Address
I'm certainly not the first to point out that the Kansas City Chiefs did not have a receiver score a touchdown the entire season. The trick here is applying context. It kinda feels like a low blow to put up a gif of Dwayne Bowe Fumbling on the goal line in week 17...preserving the sort of immortality in perpetuity only deserved by the sort of city that names itself after a state that is nearby. By the way....Same logic applies to the Jets and why they deserve the butt fumble. So instead of doing that, because that requires IT skill, I'll shame them with Cleveland Browns starting quarterbacks.....no skill required there.
The Browns notoriously have had 22 starting quarterbacks in the 15 years since reanimation. Of course the REAL Browns well, they were possessed by Ray Lewis' soul and used just like Voldemort did when he moved from Cleveland to Baltimore in those Twilight films.
Anyway 4 of those 22 guys Cleveland benched threw a touchdown this year to a wide receiver. Colt McCoy, Brian Hoyer, Brandon Weeden, and Derek Anderson...all these Willy Lomans made a wide Receiver smile this year. Chiefs QB Alex Smith? No way, not on my watch. No love for armed receivers. That is receivers who have arms.
Wanna know who has caught more touchdowns than all of the Chiefs Receivers combined? Andy Dalton Has. Who threw that pass? Muhammad Sanu, Bengals WR who along with catching TDs, threw one more TD this year than all of the chiefs Wideouts caught all season. Chiefs Receivers combined for 1744 yards on 152 catches. JJ Watt caught 3 passes for 4 yards and 3 scores. The moral of the story is this....
when they are trying to score the chiefs can go a whole season without a wideout getting into the end zone. JJ Watt can't avoid the end zone. Even when the other team is trying to score JJ Watt gets in the end zone more than a chiefs receiver with his 1 interception for 80 yards a selfie and a salute.
By week 3 all other 31 teams in the league had a WR with a TD....it's starting to occur to me I'm not designed to understand how absurd a feat of mediocrity this truly is. I think they literally picked the perfect march madness bracket of mediocre. A team with no TD by wideouts? Now that's a horse of a different color! Some wheeere Oooover the Dwayne Bowwwweeee.
