I have never met a journalist who likes math.
Never.
Most journalists gravitate toward the written word because of their inability to comprehend numbers of any sort.
So imagine my horror when I realized that sports journalism involves long strings of numbers.
We compare quarterback ratings, batting averages, three-point field goal percentages, and sometimes – when it comes to track stats – the difference between a tenth of a tenth of a second, or an eighth of a half-inch.
The only difference between sports journalism and math class is that in sports journalism, the numbers are already computed for you.
Still, the omnipresence of numbers annoys me.
At every game that I’ve ever covered from a press box, stats are religiously kept, and journalists are kept well updated on every record imaginable.
Football is particularly numbers-oriented. So much paper is distributed to journalists in the press box throughout the four quarters of a game that I often wonder how many trees had to die to make gameday at Autzen possible.
I’m not complaining about this constant supply of paper because it does make the journalist’s job easier. (It’s a lot more fun to have stats handed to you than to have to compute them yourself, as many prep sports reporters at small town newspapers have to do.) But what I do take issue with is the sports world’s obsession with using numbers to quantify performance.
Numbers are not the whole story.
A goalkeeper’s save in soccer is registered as a save regardless of whether the keeper had to make a diving grab or whether the ball rolled right to the keeper’s feet.
A three-pointer in basketball counts as a three-pointer regardless of whether it was shot from half court at the buzzer or was shot so close to the arc and so shakily that it rolled around the rim twice before deciding to fall in.
In football, the quarterback is credited with an incomplete pass even if he rifled the ball at his receiver right on the numbers and the guy dropped it, as was the case in the Atlanta Falcons’ 31-13 defeat to the New Orleans Saints last weekend.
Atlanta quarterback Michael Vick’s official game stats would have you believe that he completed only nine passes out of 24 pass attempts. What that stat does not tell you is that Vick’s receivers completely failed him on Sunday.
Falcons tight end Alge Crumpler dropped a couple of crucial passes. And wide receiver Roddy White choked at a key moment in the fourth quarter when he dropped a pass that was aimed right at his outstretched hands, and that would have given the Falcons a 14-yard pickup 10-yards from the end zone with the score 21-13.
But when you look at the stats, all you see is that Vick got credited with the incomplete pass.
Stats are mostly offensively oriented, too. That’s why it still irks me that Oregon women’s soccer player Dylann Tharp never got credit for that sick save she made in Oregon’s game against UCLA when she jumped into the goal when goalkeeper Jessie Chatfield went down, and blocked the potential game-winning shot with her body.
Numbers takes the color out of sports. And the paper required to print out pages upon pages of stats kills trees. So let’s do everyone a favor: Look beyond the numbers. Spurn a number, save a tree, folks.
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