The data can reinforce your beliefs or give you an indicator there may be more to it. Of course data can always be manipulated so that's why you have to consider the course. Now the purpose of this post is not to debate the value of statistics. No I'm here to share some stats from a pretty solid third party who work with stats across many topics and therefore I find them credible. They ran some stats on the Panthers season and found themselves staring at some remarkable results they don't see very often.
The Carolina Panthers Fought The Stats — And Won | FiveThirtyEight
It may be a distant memory now, in the wake of a 17-1 record and an NFC championship, but at midseason the Carolina Panthers were a litmus test for the depth of a football fan’s sabermetric beliefs. Sure, the Panthers were undefeated, and they looked like a solid team. But there was nothing about their underlying numbers that made them seem like a steamroller hellbent for the Bay Area come early February.
If anything, their impressive record seemed liable to regress toward the mean as the season went on. Instead of backsliding toward their "fundamentals," like many fast-starting teams have over the years, the Panthers did something remarkable: They actually improved their core metrics to match their record, and kept right on winning. Since midseason, Carolina truly has played like the best team in football, culminating in some of the most impressive early blowout wins in playoff history.
You know the Pythagorean theorem right and how it applies to football right? Well if not just trust me on this one. :)
But what makes the Panthers’ improvement even more special is the degree to which their actual and Pythagorean records differed halfway through the season. At midyear, they were 8-0 but had the point differential of a 5.3-win team — the second-biggest disagreement of any team in our sample.
2 When a team’s actual and Pythagorean records disagree that much, the Pythagorean number is right more often than not, 3 though to be fair it’s close to a coin flip. But in Carolina’s case, their winning percentage was right on the money — only five other teams since 1978 saw their second-half Pythagorean improvement predicted more accurately by their first-half winning percentage. And all of those other cases featured teams floating around .500 with subpar point differentials — Carolina is the only team in modern history to post a stellar first-half record with solid fundamentals, then turn into a Pythagorean behemoth down the stretch.
The data validates what we saw. In the first half the Panthers went 8-0 but really squeaked out some games (think Texans, Saints, Seahawks, Colts) games. That would tend to indicate it was only a matter of time before an implosion. Instead, as we all saw the Panthers actually got better. Instead of squeaking by, they started blowing teams. The 2nd Falcons game withstanding, in the 2nd half the Panthers scored 27, 44, 33, 41, 38, 38, 38 and then 31 and 49 in the playoffs. It really defined the odds, or shall we say statistical predictors in this case.
Looking deeper into the reasons for the offensive surge you end up right where we thought we would:
Back in November, when I infamously described the unbeaten Panthers as the worst team ever to start 11-0, I also wrote that Cam Newton was having a "decent, but not great" season, and that "quarterback play probably isn’t the main driving force behind the Panthers’ success." That may have been true at the time, but it surely isn’t the case now. Since midseason, Newton has been the second-most valuable QB in football according to combined passing and rushing value over average,4 and his rate statistics have undergone a particularly remarkable metamorphosis.
Newton has been nothing short of remarkable since the mid-point of the season.
But to say Newton has improved his passing since then is like saying he only slightly enjoys dancing in everyone’s mug. Since Week 10, he suddenly ranks among the league’s most accurate passers, with a drastically reduced rate of off-target throws.
When he threw that INT against the Cardinals I thought to myself, 'Well we haven't seen Newton airmail one like that in a long time' and the data backs that up.
So the only question that remains is whether Newton can continue this trend against the NFL's best defense? I bet the stats for 1st time Super Bowl QBs would suggest a big fat NO but there again I think Newton will defy the predictor stats. Look at his history in championship games. Newton has stepped up in the past and I think he can will do it again. No stage is too big for Newton. He is attempting to win a championship at three different levels, something no one has ever done. After this Sunday they will have to put an asterisk by all those stats with a footnote that says 'Don't not include Cam Newton'. He defied the stats.