Confidential to The Ref.

[Drama Queen]

I agree that it's hard for outsiders to really get a full grasp of all the blocking responsibilities in a game. Only the coaches and players know for certain how to evaluate every play. A few plays are obvious like when players get beaten physically and/or quickly. Those you can hang a hat on... more often though, its hard to make a judgement when you don't know if help was suppose to come from one side or the other. ...And then there's the QB play and RB responsibilities to consider.

[The Ref]

I agree that it's hard for outsiders to really get a full grasp of all the blocking responsibilities in a game. Only the coaches and players know for certain how to evaluate every play. A few plays are obvious like when players get beaten physically and/or quickly. Those you can hang a hat on... more often though, its hard to make a judgement when you don't know if help was suppose to come from one side or the other. ...And then there's the QB play and RB responsibilities to consider.

My point was only that those geek stat sites have arlington smell all over them. They don't know any responsibilities at all. It's a team game (the ultimate team game) and lineman stats don't tell the story. They never can. Not possible.

So if somebody says Evan Mathis is the best guard in the NFL based on stats, I call bullshit.

Time was not so long ago that even tackles weren't an official NFL stat because who actually had the tackle is sometimes subjective. And teams credited tackles with different standards. These geek sites are also subjective even though they try to pass their shit off as objective.

Put another way -- if those geek sites were really telling, there would be no need to have a combine for rookies. You would hire your own geek statisticians to chart the college games and that would be that. If it was truly objective, every player would grade out the same for every team scouting them. But they don't because those stats are subjective (even speculative) and not absolute.

Same goes for coverages in secondaries. You don't know who was supposed to be covering the wide open receiver so they blame the guy running them down. Might or might not have been his responsibility. Only his coaches know.