Football related musings

[spikydavid]

So, recently on Football Outsiders, there was a discussion about whether or not Randy Moss was deserving of the Hall of Fame. My gut reactions was "No", though opinion on the boards seemed to be fairly divided. However, my next thought was, if Randy Moss isn't good enough, who is? Imagine my surprise when I realised that, past a couple of very

Comments

[djonma]

As a purely Bengals fan thing, and cos I'm way too tired and ill to read all of that and have it all make actual sense...

It's pretty impressive that Chad's on the list and his numbers are all good despite his amazingly small number of games.
If he can keep it up that should bode extremely well for him in the future.

Other than that... it all generally made sense, but my brain is frazzled and I just woke up again, so it also just kind of looked like numbers and words.
:-)

[spikydavid]

Actually, the only thing that gets Chad on the list is the fact that he's made 3 Pro Bowls after 1980 (that being my qualifying criteria).

Now, whilst 3 Pro Bowls in five years is quite good, you could also view that as the poor quality of other receivers in the AFC...

[borusa]

That's quite cool. One thing you could do to make it work across eras would be factor in the single-season receiving record during the years they played.

I know you only looked at modern era, but I ran the stats for Don Hutson, counting being named to the all-NFL team as a probowl appearance. 9 PB's, 99 TDs, 7991 yds, 488 receptions gives a result of 31.77. Which is pretty respectable, really.

[spikydavid]

Yeah, I think it's going to be really hard to make it work across eras, being a purely statistical analysis, which is why I was really glad to see Largent and Lofton with the sixth and seventh positions, because that shows that the numbers have not changed that much in the last twenty years.

As I mentioned above, I *think* that when running the numbers for post-2000 players/seasons, some element of fiddling is going to have to be applied to get a proper comparison with the 1980-2000 stats. Luckily, we don't have to do that just yet, except to maybe suggest that Randy might need a little more than 3 years to really establish himself as a HoF candidate.

I believe that the amount of work needed to fiddle the numbers across eras reliably would be very large, and I'm happy to live with the wisdom of those that saw them play, that says Hutson, Hirsch, et al. were all really good players, deserving of the Hall of Fame.