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JJ Watt Says Training Camp Stats are “Insane and Ridiculous”
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JJ Watt chiming in here:
This could be considered a direct attack on Eliot Shorr-Parks, because he’s the one who started this. Now you see beats all across the NFL, in lesser markets like Cleveland, for example, doing stats of their own.
But before you can talk about training camp stats, you first have to ask yourself why they’re being logged in the first place.
The answer is simple. It’s because football fans are diehards and they want information. They want to know what’s going on with their team, and in the case of the Eagles, for instance, they’re no longer allowed to watch camp unless they’re a money-spending sponsor or fall into some elite tier of fan that gets a camp invite. There’s no more Lehigh or West Chester, and since they’ve been iced out, they turn to ESP and myriad beats to fill the information void and scratch the itch instead.
Above all else, this topic goes back to a simple concept that people continually fail to understand in both sports and news reporting. It’s not about the information, it’s how you present the information. Jalen Hurts went 8-8 in a drill? Okay. But what’s the scope of the activity? That’s what JJ Watt is talking about. If you contextualize your training camp reporting by saying, for instance, that this is a red zone drill and Jalen can’t be touched by the defense, and he’s given five seconds to get rid of the ball, then now the statistics have much more meaning. Maybe he went 8-8 because he had time to throw, no one in his face, and the goal was to work on misdirection and pre-snap motion on the goal line. Now we’re better-informed and understand the setting in which the drill took place.
Unfortunately, sports reporters will never have the full, 100% extent of the context. Not now, not ever, as best as one may try. So we do the best with what we have. You could ask yourself why a soccer fullback, for instance, has the fewest cross attempts in MLS, but maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of his service. Maybe it’s because the manager wants him to be a defender first, and stay back and support the center halves while the rest of the group attacks. But we wouldn’t know that unless we were in the locker room and part of the team briefing, which we never will be.
TL:DR – context is king
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com