Not Sunday spats…

 

In addition to the most views of Disaffected Musings in a month, April, 2020 had the highest number of “unique” visitors. The latter figure is just as important to me as the number of views.

The number of views for April of 2020 was about 20 percent higher than the previous high mark, which occurred in April of 2019. (The number of unique visitors was 10 percent higher.) The number of views for the first four months of 2020 was 27 percent higher than for the same period last year.

The number of views that were referred from search engines was higher in the first four months of 2020 than for ALL of 2019. Many/most of these were from people trying to find out why Cristy Lee is no longer on All Girls Garage and/or why Lou Santiago and Jared Zimmerman are no longer on Car Fix.

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	Games w/10+ Att	Rating	Std Dev	Coef of Variation
Unitas	188	79.5	32.2	0.41
Namath	132	67.2	31.5	0.47

 

No, I am not trying to re-write history. The Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, which was the first Super Bowl I watched. The outcome of that game will never change.

My impression of Joe Namath, though, is while he was an enormously talented thrower, physically, his performances were erratic. The great thing about football is that with the number of games played each year it is easy to look at career game-by-game logs. The wonderful site Pro Football Reference has these for just about every player in history.

The chart above is self-explanatory to me, but maybe not to everyone else. Johnny Unitas had 188 games in his career in which he had at least 10 pass attempts. I decided to exclude games with fewer than 10 attempts to stabilize the data, particularly standard deviation. In those games, his passer rating was 79.5. That doesn’t sound good today where the league average is over 90, but remember that in the NFL passer rating system, which is based on data from 1960 to 1972, the theoretical average rating is “only” 66.7. Unitas played from 1956 to 1973. For the first ten seasons of his career, Unitas’ passer rating was 83.8 compared to a league average of 68.5. A picture of Unitas’ “data page” in my book about the greatest NFL teams of all time:

 

 

The standard deviation of Unitas’ game ratings was 32.2. Standard deviation is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values. Coefficient of variation is simply standard deviation divided by mean. If one quarterback had an average rating of 80.0 with a standard deviation of 35.0 and another had a mean of 90.0 with the same standard deviation, then the latter had less dispersion around the mean.

Namath had less consistent performances (higher coefficient of variation) than Unitas, but not by as much as I would have guessed. Given his higher overall rating it is no surprise that Unitas had a higher percentage of games with a 100.0+ rating than Namath, 24% to 20%.

OK…that’s enough of that. While my interest in sports is less than it’s been in many years, this kind of statistical exercise for pro football still interests me. Unfortunately, it’s not advanced enough for teams to have interest and it’s not about the fraud of fantasy football, which means most football “fans” would have no interest, either. By the way, at a team level passer rating has a higher correlation to winning than any other single traditional passing statistic, MUCH higher than completion percentage, for example.

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One more chart:

 

	HP	Torque	HP/$	Torque/$
2016 Chevrolet Corvette Z06	650	650	0.0064	0.0064
2016 Ferrari 488	661	560	0.0027	0.0023
2016 Jaguar F-Type SVR	550	502	0.0046	0.0042
2016 Lamborghini Huracan	610	412	0.0025	0.0017

 

Torque is measured in LB-FT. HP/$ is horsepower per dollar at MSRP. I think you can figure out what Torque/$ is.

I am 99.9% sure that no buyer would ever make a chart like this to compare cars, but I am not 99.9% of the population. The Corvette is unmatched in bang for the buck and I did not cherry-pick the competition, but did exclude German cars with awful lineage like Bugatti, which is nothing more than a Volkswagen in a fancy dress, and Porsche.

A 2016 Z06 has more than twice the HP per dollar and almost three times the torque compared to a Ferrari 488. Yes, many wealthy people like to signal their prosperity and as long as their wealth was legally acquired I am in no position to tell them how to spend their money. Still, facts are facts…

 

 

Obviously, the top photo is of my car and I took it. The Ferrari 488 picture is from autodius.com, the Jaguar pic is from GTSpirit, and the Lambo photo is from autotribute.com.

 

#SundayStats

#JohnnyUnitas

#BangForThe Buck

#somanycarsjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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