Boring, meaningless stats.

[Lee Van Cleef]

What are your favourite boring, pointless stats so far this season?

I was looking at the standings for the divisions and my eyes were drawn to the Net Points column. Division leaders ranked by their net points:

Patriots +92
Texans +88
49ers +86
Bears +85
Giants + 73
Falcons +71
Broncos + 52
Ravens +13

[BigPlayReceiver]

Just about any scripted stat that some ESPN monkey drops during a broadcast.

[HoustonRaven]

I'd hardly call the Net Points stat meaningless.

Power Rankings on the other hand ...

[RavNMadMan]

Meaningless: Power Rankings
Meaningful: Turnover Ratio and Penalties/Yards

[JAB1985]

What are your favourite boring, pointless stats so far this season?

I was looking at the standings for the divisions and my eyes were drawn to the Net Points column. Division leaders ranked by their net points:

Patriots +92
Texans +88
49ers +86
Bears +85
Giants + 73
Falcons +71
Broncos + 52
Ravens +13

do you mean this sarcastically... because this isnt any of the above in my opinion. Sure it means nothing because a wins a win, but it also can show you how that may not be the case if it continues. getting blown out certainly helped that look out of proportion but its still something thats worth noting.

[Ravenblue]

A few people have said power rankings. I'm not sure these qualify as 'meaningless stats' as they are not stats at all, they are someone's opinions.

They are qualitative, subjective, what ever you want to call them, whereas stats are quantifiable and objective.

Either way, you can prove anything with stats so they must always be taken with a degree of a grain of salt (It's not football related, but my favourite example of this is- (from soccer) "David Nugent averages 8 goals a game playing for the England national team.". Now, anyone who didn't know the context may think this must mean he's the greatest player ever, when in actual fact, he came on for the last 11 minutes against the mighty Andorra, and scored a tap in. He's never played for England since and is currently languishing in the lower divisions!

[Coastergenius]

Meaningless: Power Rankings
Meaningful: Turnover Ratio and Penalties/Yards

I'm sure that those two parts of the game greatly affect a team's W-L that have already happened, but I assume that we're talking about stats that are predictive about the future here. In that case, turnover ratio is a very poor stat for predicting the future. While turnover ratio is not all luck, it's more prone to luck than other aspects of the game, but can swing the outcomes. If anything, look at a team's W/L or point differential, and adjust for if the games were turnover neutral to predict future outcomes.

[Lee Van Cleef]

do you mean this sarcastically... because this isnt any of the above in my opinion. Sure it means nothing because a wins a win, but it also can show you how that may not be the case if it continues. getting blown out certainly helped that look out of proportion but its still something thats worth noting.

I think it's a little bit serious, a little bit sarcastic. Outliers can skew these things, but in the Ravens' case the outliers are the Bengals and Texans games which cancel each other out essentially. It basically tells us what we've seen, that the Ravens don't win convincingly, which explains why, despite being 5-2, people are down on them.

[Beau Petard]

Lee-
FWIW and IMO, outside of the W & L's, all stats are meaningless without some context. I'd say they can help explain where a team's issues or successes lie - for example, turnovers lost and kept don't necessarily mandate that a team will win or lose, but a losing record team with a poor turnover ratio obviously has a credible signal as to where they need to change things. A winning team with a poor TOP may say, "Who cares?", and if they were to keep on winning, I'd agree. The context might be, do they keep on winning, or does a trend begin to emerge, and TOP becomes the stat to deal with.

[Corvus Corax]

I find NFL statistics online very useful - especially team statistics (NOT individual stats; it's still a team sport) and how they rank in comparison (e.g., total defensive yardage).

What 'gets me' is the overuse of the word "record" by ESPN and game broadcasters when describing DERIVED statistics. They must have sophisticated and powerful database queries and search engines that constantly generate such statistics. But their importance/relevance is always questionable - used only to entertain and fill air time. Such statistics are NOT records. It's hard to think of an example since they usually bore the fans of the other 31 teams. But they frequently pop up on the screen - even during game action.

OK, here's one example (made up): The New Orleans Saints have a 92-206 win-loss record when the starting game temperature is below 39.5 degrees, and 286-191 otherwise. Who cares?