5/8/17 Facts vs. Data
Unseasonably cool (50s) but sunny.
Guy in the office next to mine is ranting about how all the underlying stats of the Rangers-Senators playoff series indicate that the Rangers should have won already. This is an example of something I've observed among under-40 sports fans over the last few years: the use of the extraordinary amount of data we now have available as fans to obscure the simple truth of who won or lost a big game or a championship or a playoff series.
When Leicester City won the English Premier League soccer title last year it was very fashionable among a certain (young, male) type of soccer fan to deride their remarkable accomplishment by pointing out that Tottenham had better "underlying statistics" and therefore was the "better team". This, my friends, is another manifestation of the tendency of 21st century humanity to deny facts and instead craft their own version of reality cobbled together out of cherry picked bits of information. Your team may not have won a damn thing on the field of play but you can sleep at night secure in the knowledge that you root for the best team because they generated some really sharp looking numbers while they lost.
Then again, this kind of denial and time-wasting powers a substantial chunk of the industry that puts bread on my table so who am I to complain?
Guy in the office next to mine is ranting about how all the underlying stats of the Rangers-Senators playoff series indicate that the Rangers should have won already. This is an example of something I've observed among under-40 sports fans over the last few years: the use of the extraordinary amount of data we now have available as fans to obscure the simple truth of who won or lost a big game or a championship or a playoff series.
When Leicester City won the English Premier League soccer title last year it was very fashionable among a certain (young, male) type of soccer fan to deride their remarkable accomplishment by pointing out that Tottenham had better "underlying statistics" and therefore was the "better team". This, my friends, is another manifestation of the tendency of 21st century humanity to deny facts and instead craft their own version of reality cobbled together out of cherry picked bits of information. Your team may not have won a damn thing on the field of play but you can sleep at night secure in the knowledge that you root for the best team because they generated some really sharp looking numbers while they lost.
Then again, this kind of denial and time-wasting powers a substantial chunk of the industry that puts bread on my table so who am I to complain?
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