MizzouHawkGal
Well-known member
If you can ignore the noise we have some seriously knowledgeable guys that know football here.
Thanks, and it's very kind of you to say that, MizzouHawkGal.DD I hope you like it here it's very different then Seahawk Blue but you articulate well even if you disagree with me so I'm fine with that and we need more people like that here.
If you can ignore the noise we have some seriously knowledgeable guys that know football here.
You are officially OG in my opinion. But it doesn't really matter because it's mostly dog eat dog here so if I can defend myself you sure can and will fit right in.Oh good gawd, can I please be excused from being advertised as the new guy?
I'm not liking this at all.
No, not gonna blame you.Fun fact.... right after the first Iraq war I was all over the Middle East and Western Europe updating our RDF and NATO munitions bunkers. So if a nuke war happens you can probably blame me.
Mathy question for you Ad Hawk- Maybe you have an answer...
(Others feel free to chyme in)
NFL teams always look at average yards per carry. Yet, I think more in terms of the arithmetic mean being the more common factor that advances the 1st down chains, especially when it comes to yards per carry. Examples to follow...
RB1 - Runs 20 times in a game, but averages 2 yards on 19 carries (38 yards). Then he explodes for a 62 yard run that gives him a total of 100 yards and a 5 yard average on the day. Result, 1 first down. This is my example of, Average.
RB2 - Runs 20 times in a game, but all his runs are for between 4 to 6 yards. Most of those runs being closer to exactly 5 yards, and he gains 100 yards during the game. Result, 10 first downs. This is my example of, Arithmetic Mean.
Question being, I've never seen any online statistical site that tracks & compares Arithmetic Mean, versus average, have you?
Fun fact.... right after the first Iraq war I was all over the Middle East and Western Europe updating our RDF and NATO munitions bunkers. So if a nuke war happens you can probably blame
Lagartixa,"Average" in its most common usage and "arithmetic mean" are the same thing: add up the individual numbers and divide by how many there were. Both of the hypothetical RB games you cited had average rushes of five yards, that is, the arithmetic means of both running backs' rush yards gained per carry was 5 yards/carry.
There are two common and easy-to-understand tools from descriptive statistics that you could use to differentiate the two. One is the standard deviation (or equivalently, the closely related variance) and the other is the median.
The standard deviation is a rough measure of how far the individual points are from the arithmetic mean. RB1's yardage would have a larger standard deviation than RB2's. If you want the technical details, it's not hard at all to calculate a standard deviation. You calculate the arithmetic mean (average), and then you subtract that from each data point, square each result, and then add up all those squares and divide by the number of data points. That gives you the variance. The standard deviation is the square root of the variance.
The median is simply the middle value in an ordered list of numbers. To find a median, you have to take the list and put it in order first (either from smallest to largest or from largest to smallest). Then if the number of numbers in the list is odd, you just take the middle one and that's the median. If the number of numbers in the list is even, then you take the arithmetic mean of the two in the middle.
Example
Let's say I'm looking at this list of numbers: 8, 5, 11, 2, 16, 27, 1, 7, 8, 6
There are ten numbers in the list.
The arithmetic mean of the numbers in the list is (8+5+11+2+16+27+1+7+8+6)/10 = 91/10 = 9.1
The sum of the squared distances from the mean is (8-9.1)² + (5-9.1)² + (11-9.1)² + (2-9.1)² (16-9.1)² + (27-9.1)² + (1-9.1)² + (7-9.1)²+ (8-9.1)² + (6-9.1)², which turns out to be about 520.9.
The variance of the numbers in the list is then about 520.9/10 = 52.09
The standard deviation of the numbers in the list is then the square root of 52.09, or about 7.2
To find the median, I have to put the list in order first. I'll go from smallest to largest, but the opposite would work too. Either way, the middle's the middle.
The ordered list is 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 11, 16, 27. It has ten numbers, and 10 is an even number, so I need to take the arithmetic mean of the fifth and sixth numbers in the list (the two in the middle). Those numbers are 7 and 8. The arithmetic mean of those two is (7+8)/2 = 7.5. So the median of the list is 7.5
Let's pretend that last number in the original list (a 6) isn't there. Then the list is 8, 5, 11, 2, 16, 27, 1, 7, 8.
There are then nine numbers in the list.
The list in order is 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 8, 11, 16, 27.
The element in the middle is the fifth (there are four before it and four after it). That happens to be 8 in this case, so the median is 8.
A great example to understand why the median is useful is to consider three people: a homeless guy on the street, Bill Gates, and me. On average, we're multibillionaires, because if you add up our fortunes and divide by three, you'll get the arithmetic mean of our collected wealth, which is tens of billions of dollars. The median fortune is mine.
Now consider the population of the country. In the same way that Gates's fortune skewed the average, a few wealthy people can make things look better than they really are if you consider mean wealth or mean income. A way to get a better idea of how things are for the people in the middle (and as a better description of how the population is doing) is to look at median wealth or median income.
In your example, RB1's median rush would be lower than RB2's.
Thanks, Aussie Seahawk.Oorah, Dvl Dug!
Aussie Seahawk - Thanks for your reply, and that's a cute story! My wife and I are located southeast of Seattle, so we have Mt Rainier in view most days, depending on the Rain... part.Late reply from me, but I have always lived in South Australia, ever since I arrived here from England as a toddler (I'm 63).
I barrack [=US root, etc] for the Seattle Seahawks because when I first became interested in American Football, in 1985, I chose Seattle, simply because of a poster I had seen before; the "obvious" view from Queen Anne Hill, looking towards Rainier... of course with the Space Needle in centre focus. I didn't even know if Seattle had a team in the NFL back then!
Spent three weeks near Seattle (Poulsbo) in Oct 1996, and went to two games at the Kingdome. A definitive visit for me.