Fun With Numbers

I loved stats when I was a kid and that made baseball my game of choice. Stats were definitive. You hit .300 or you didn’t. You hit 41 home runs or you didn’t. You had 300 strikeouts or you didn’t.

You have to understand that in 1980 little Tommy Lawlor couldn’t watch every baseball team or player. I was a die-hard Orioles fan and got to see 20 games in a year if I was really lucky. That’s what happened when you grew up in NC and Ted Turner’s TBS owned the South, showing every Atlanta Braves game.

So you followed your team by studying the box scores. Sunday was a holy day. For me that wasn’t so much about going to church as it was the stats posted in the newspaper. I was obsessed with Eddie Murray, the Orioles all star 1B, and had to study his numbers and how they compared to other star players. I would then sit in church, reviewing those stats in my head.

I bought The Complete Handbook of Baseball every year and memorized every stat I could. Cecil Cooper hit .352 in 1980. Ben Ogilvie had 41 homers. Steve Stone won 25 games. Mike Norris only won 22,  but had the better ERA, 2.54.

I bought the Who’s Who in Baseball when I could find it. A family friend gave me the 1973 copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia, so that gave me a whole new set of stats to memorize.

That all changed in 1985 when I fell in love with Buddy Ryan and his 46 Defense. Football became my favorite sport. Baseball numbers became a passive interest. Football numbers just weren’t a big thing.

I’ve grown to love football history over the years. Football numbers still aren’t like baseball numbers. One of the big problems is that stats weren’t kept the same way. Sacks didn’t become an official stat until 1982. That makes comparing Reggie White and Deacon Jones awkward. Forced fumbles didn’t become a stat until even after that. For the longest time, football was yards and points. That’s about it.

That’s changing, obviously. There are now so many football stats it can make your head spin. I don’t love numbers the way I used to so I can’t tell you who holds a lot of NFL records and what they are exactly.

I wrote a piece for PE.com on some amazing numbers and stats from Eagles history.

I could have written another 1,000 words or more with some great numbers. Eagles history is long and usually interesting. Not always good, but rarely boring.

Here are a few things I left out:

One of my favorite games from the Reid Era came in 2002. The Eagles beat the Giants 17-3 on Monday Night Football. The Eagles ran the ball 40 times for 295 yards. Duce Staley went for 126. Donovan McNabb ran 8 times for 107 yards. Dorsey Levens and rookie Brian Westbrook combined for 8-62. I really wanted them to get 300 yards, but settling for 295 wasn’t too bad. It was a thing of beauty to see the Eagles beat up and impose their will on the Giants and their big time defense.

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The Chip Kelly Era won’t go down in history as anything special, but the 2013 season did have some great moments. The Eagles had 99 explosive plays. Those were runs or passes that gained 20 or more yards. That is an amazing total. The combination of a DeSean, LeSean, a hot QB and Chip’s offense being new to the league led to plenty of highlight moments. The underrated part of all that is a dominant offensive line. The five starters stayed healthy all year and played at a high level.

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Jim Johnson never had an all-time great defense like Bud Carson or Buddy Ryan. But JJ’s 2001 defense was incredibly consistent. No team scored more than 21 points on the Eagles during the regular season. Think about that. Even Gang Green gave up 23, 25, 30 and 22 points in games. An underrated part of that defense was the fact Donovan McNabb did such a good job protecting the ball. McNabb threw 12 INTs. Gang Green had to deal with QBs who threw 27 picks.

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Brett Favre had 4 games against the Eagles when his Packers were held to less than 10 points. This came against different head coaches, defensive coordinators and players. The Eagles did that in just 12 games. The Vikings held Favre to less than 10 points just twice…and that was in more than 30 meetings. Crazy.

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