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Brian Robinson
Yusuf Dikec is the living, breathing embodiment of the glory of boring.
Dikec, as you may have seen if you’re as chronically online as I am, won the silver medal in pistol shooting at the Paris Olympics with the most casual form you’ll ever see in Olympic competition. Wearing a t-shirt and jeans with one hand stuffed in his pocket, Dikec stood in stark contrast to his pistol shooting competitors decked out with the most technologically advanced equipment the sport has to offer. While his opponents looked like they had been sent from the future to shoot at distant targets, Dikec looked as if he had fallen out of bed, grabbed his weapon, and won the silver.
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It reminded my football-addled brain of something I wrote last summer about fantasy managers’ overemphasis on what I might call fancy running back metrics. We look to these advanced numbers to concoct a sensible story in our minds about an efficient running back carving out a lead-back role. This, of course, assumes NFL coaches care about metrics or stats in general. They don’t, for the most part, and fantasy players would do well to acknowledge this painful truth.
For most of my time in the fantasy industry, I joined the chorus of metrics nerds pointing to various obscure metrics — rush yards over expected and yards after contact per attempt and breakaway rate and elusiveness rating and EPA per rush and efficiency rating — and screaming from the proverbial rooftop that so-and-so back was destined to overtake the back whose advanced numbers were in the toilet. If one player is better than the other, the thinking goes, that player is going to win. The cream rises to the top, things of that nature.
That’s not the way it works. It’s never worked that way, actually. NFL coaches treasure a running back’s ability to hang on to the ball and pick up blitzers and get what is blocked, even if none of that adds much to our fantasy box score. Coaches want…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/why-im-drafting-boring-running-150532167.html
Author : NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-08-12 15:05:32
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