Sports stats post: Athletes in major sports are rapidly getting better
Numbers may not tell the entire story in team sports, but they add up to a narrative every fan wants: Faster, stronger, more coordinated bodies
I started following the “Big Four” North American professional team sports—Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League—when I was around ten. (Well, I started following the Boston Bruins when I was maybe five, but for a few years all that mattered were wins, losses and the players’ jersey numbers.) Like anyone who appreciates excellence, I revel in occasional dives into highlight reels. The top playing moments of basketball forward Julius Erving, the greatest thing to ever emerge from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was a recent and fulfilling YouTube trip.
Sometimes, I care who wins championships, although I started caring about that less as players began changing teams with increasing frequency and regularity; rooting for any single club now is essentially rooting for laundry (and teams have been changing the appearance of their uniforms increasingly often, too). But for the most part, I’m interested in the statistics generated by baseball, basketball, football, and hockey players. You all know someone like this, and you have probably accepted that you have a friend who rarely watches games on television, much less in person, yet is curiously enthralled by rattling off data collected from these games to a small audience of people he knows couldn’t care less, but will appreciate that something has him excited for a change.
Almost every season, some Major Leaguer carries a .400 batting average into June, and despite the raw unlikelihood of anyone maintaining this level of proficiency over a full modern season—it hasn’t been done since Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941—it’s impossible not to become caught up in the chase even 60 games into the 162-game regular season. 60-yard field goals in the NFL, while still rare, are no longer total showstoppers. And one of these days, a center will lead the NBA in free-throw percentage.
One of the few redeeming features of the Internet is its easily queried repository of historical and real-time sports statistics. For years, one of my more pleasurable bedtime enjoyments has been scanning the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL leaderboards. I don’t check these every night, and I usually only look at one sport’s leaders when I do. But I find the automatic slide into making projections and comparisons soothing, perhaps mainly because it distracts me from whatever I was already thinking and doing.
This habit started with print newspapers, then with Sporting News (now a Web-only publication), and finally became part of the mostly undirected Internet exploration that serves to fill time between sunrises, which I rarely see.
Since I have now been tracking the statistics in these sports off and on for over forty years, I have had the opportunity to watch approximately three generations of professional athletes. Today’s unresolvable “Is LeBron better than MJ?” argument will assume an even more hectic flavor when someone like Zion Williamson enters the conversation in ten years. And how good would a young Nolan Ryan be coming up through the starting pitching ranks today.
Two trends over those past four or so decades have really jumped out at me, one in football and one in basketball. Both trends have actually been evident for longer than that; I just wasn’t around top notice, and until recently I didn’t bother using the Web as a tool to formally investigate them.
In football, the quarterback position requires a great deal more objective skill than it did just twenty, even ten years ago. And in basketball, if your job is to put the ball in the basket, you had better be able to do it at a higher success rate and from more parts of the court than the center, forward, or guard you would have been battling for a roster spot in decades of yore.
The NFL ranks quarterbacks using a passer-rating system that considers four metrics: Pass completion percentage, yards gained per pass attempt, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage. These are processed in a formula that yields a maximum value of 158.3. Although not adopted by the NFL until 1973, the data required to compute passer ratings exists all the way back to 1932 and has been used to retroactively determine the passer ratings of QBs who tossed their way through the Great Depression.
I used this table on Football-Reference.com to create the following graph of the average NFL passer rating over time.
Regardless of how much weight you assign to this stat—and a starting QB with an extremely high passer rating is a near-certain sign of a winning team—NFL quarterbacks have become more adept at completing passes while not sacrificing yardage. In other words, they have helped unquestionably improve the game of football, and with it the skill level required to penetrate the NFL ranks.
Some of this increase in rated proficiency may be attributed to rule changes I don’t fully understand (meaning I haven’t bothered to determine what they even are), and of course the idea is not to credit the QB alone and not the receivers and offensive linemen. In fact, that just underscores the point: Somehow, despite defenses obviously being just as motivated to improve as offenses are, the football is making its intended way from A to B more accurately over greater distances.
It stands to reason, practically on this basis alone, that any randomly selected Super Bowl-winning team from the 1980s would probably not make it past a conference championship game today, absent fluke activity.
I don’t really care about football, but it’s uplifting to see an undeniable trend of greater collective athletic proficiency—or proficiency in any niche—carrying on across multiple decades. And I think examples like these illustrate just how wealthy the United States is. If its citizenry cares enough about sports to reward athleticism to the extent it plainly does, then a lot of people have a lot of extra time and money on their hands.
I have an even more stark example demonstrating how much better at outside shooting NBA players have necessarily become since the inception of the three-point shot option in the 1979-1980 season. But I’m currently engrossed in this not-yet-bingeable series, which seems like a good reason to table historical comparisons for a spell.