TRUST or BUST?

L.T. RACKED UP STATS AGAINST WEEK DEFENSES

Believe it or not, when great players in the NFL have terrific seasons, there will always be a select few that want to downplay that player's accomplishments and argue the players padded their stats. Is it fair to say, for example, that L.T. getting 176 yards and 3 touchdowns against a poor Browns defense made it possible for him to break the record? And that many other teams the Chargers played simply weren't good enough which enabled L.T.s MVP performance? Many Baltimore fans claimed L.T. was severly limited against the powerful Baltimore defense in which L.T. had only 98 yards, no touchdowns, and the Chargers suffered one of their two losses. I have to admit, some of these instances are pretty compelling.

Well, let's look at this a bit closer. I created a spreadsheet of all 16 games the Chargers played last year. In it, I show L.T.s oppenent, his attempts, yardage, average, long, and rushing TDs scored, which if you don't remember, came to [WOW!] 28. Also in this spreadsheet are the opposing team's defensive rushing allowed (YPG, YPA, TD/season, and RANK). Then I calculated the under/over percentages for the stats he had in those games agsinst the opposing teams per game stats. And here are the query results:

The average # of rushing touchdowns the opposing teams gave up in the season was 14.25 (.89 rushing TDs per game) -- L.T. had 28, or 1.75 per game.

The average rushing defense rank of his opposing teams was 18.75 (which is a bit below the average of 16).

The avearge rushing yards opposing teams game up per game was 122.33 -- L.T. averaged 113.43 per game.

The average yards per attempt allowed by opposing teams was 4.18 -- L.T. averaged 5.2 per carry.

L.T. rushed for below the opposing teams average 11 times. He rushed for more only 5 times -- one of those times was against the Ravens, where he also averaged a higher YPC than they normally allow.

L.T. had higher than average TDs against 11 teams, while he was below only 5 times. Only 6 times did his yardage performance, or lack thereof, correspond with his TD performance. Three times L.T. scored more TD per game against 16 or better defenses, while 3 times he scored less against 16 or better defenses.

From the data, though limited to only 16 samples, there is no consistent data supporting that L.T. padded his stats against lack luster defenses. The only consistent figure is that the Chargers and LaDainian took care of business in the Red Zone during almost every game, no matter who the competition.

Maybe it makes people feel better to humanize the untouchables :) And despite all this, wouldn't it make sense for the Chargers and L.T. to exploit poor defenses? Yeah, it would...so big deal ;)