Stats are deceiving

[MNSpaniel]

Stats and rankings can be deceiving. The total yards other teams get against your defense can be totally related to how many minutes your offense is on the field. If you have a real ball control offense then that offense is going to eat up minutes. A poor offense is going three and out a lot. Thus putting your defensive team on the field a lot more.

I think even if Brewster's defense ranks similar to some of Mason's defenses it is not a good comparison. I would suggest that Brewster's defenses would be far superior for the same reason I stated above. That those best defenses of Mason's had a minutes eating offense on the other side.

[Dr.Don]

Liars can figure, and figures can lie. Hell, man, I can prove Algebraically that 2=1.

[GophBen]

Yards per play is usually a decent indicator of how a defense looks overall, but that's flawed with this team. 5.2 yards per play is ugly. However, when you factor in that the Gophers took 96 fewer offensive snaps than their opponents you can see that there was a little problem.

[Art Vandelay]

86% of all statistics are made up anyways....

[MNSpaniel]

The point being ... I'm going to steer off course a bit ... I know this is a Gopher site but I'm going to use the Vikings as an example. This dates back a few years ago when the Vikings defensive line was pretty weak and had a very poor pass rush. Nobody was running on them at all because teams could pass on them at will. This went on the whole season. However, on the stats sheet it said they were good against the run. It was only because a large percentage of the plays were pass plays.

Someone else mentioned average yards per play. I agree to a point. However, if the defense is on the field way too much then they will get worn out. Then that average is bound to go up. So yep ... you can make stats say what you want.

[GophersInIowa]

86% of all statistics are made up anyways....

Actually, it's 73%