{"id":5063,"date":"2010-09-14T09:49:33","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T09:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/09\/14\/correlation-and-causation-in-f\/"},"modified":"2010-09-14T09:49:33","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T09:49:33","slug":"correlation-and-causation-in-f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/09\/14\/correlation-and-causation-in-f\/","title":{"rendered":"Correlation and Causation in Football"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the <a href=\"http:\/\/scores.espn.go.com\/nfl\/recap?gameId=300913020\">Jets losing to the Ravens<\/a> on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a lot about two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Rex Ryan&#8217;s Jets blitzing all the time, especially on third-and-long, and<\/li>\n<li>The Ravens converting an incredible number of third downs (11 of 19), especially long third downs <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It was actually kind of amazing to me that none of them thought to connect the two. Because here&#8217;s what I saw: the Jets played pretty good defense on first and second down, stuffing Baltimore&#8217;s attempts to run the ball and holding their short passing to short gains. Then, on third down, they ran some wacky blitz scheme sending seven defenders and a couple of equipment managers after the quarterback, and Baltimore picked up the blitz that they knew was coming, and either completed a pass for the first down, or got the first down on a knucklehead penalty by one of the Jets DB&#8217;s who was forced into man-to-man coverage of the very good Ravens receivers.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t an accident that they were talking about both of those things&#8211; the Ravens were completing third downs at a phenomenal rate <em>because<\/em> the Jets were blitzing like idiots in every passing situation. If Baltimore hadn&#8217;t turned the ball over a bunch of times on dumb plays, the game wouldn&#8217;t&#8217;ve been close. This is one of the very few areas where <a href=\"http:\/\/search.espn.go.com\/gregg-easterbrook\/\">Gregg Easterbrook<\/a> seems to know what he&#8217;s talking about.<\/p>\n<p>I dunno. Maybe there was something in the third quarter, while I was putting SteelyKid to bed, that invalidates this hypothesis. But for the first half, at least, it seemed pretty obvious that there was a direct causal link between these two facts, and not just a correlation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the Jets losing to the Ravens on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/09\/14\/correlation-and-causation-in-f\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Correlation and Causation in Football<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}