Stats are fun. Stats of both the basic and advanced varieties can, if interpreted the right way, tell you a lot about a team. The ways that most sports are played and coached today are as influenced by statistics as they’ve ever been, and that includes football, perhaps the last bastion of the old-school, “go with your gut” mindset that sounds cool but doesn’t really mean anything unless you win the game.
A lack of stats can also be very telling … but not always in obvious ways.
Take the Big Ten defensive statistics, for example. The list of the top 25 leading tacklers does not include a single Penn State player, nor do the lists of leaders in passes defended or interceptions. No Nittany Lion has more than 2.5 sacks, and only Zane Durant (4.5) and Adisa Isaac (4.0) are among the top 25 in the conference in tackles for loss. In fact, Penn State’s leading tackler through five games, Curtis Jacobs, has 11 fewer stops than the 25th player on the conference tackles list, Michigan State’s Dillon Tatum, and 44 fewer than the Big Ten leader, Iowa’s Jay Higgins.
Why? Penn State’s defense simply doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field these days.
