Ultimate Stats

The Count brought up the issue of stats in his blog.

To get to a point where stats mean more to us, first we need to better define them. If the current nomenclature were a type of defense, it would be the Cupasaurus -- not entirely useless, but ignoring too much of what's happening on the field and (in highly technical terms) really sucky.

For defense, the "D" stat is just too generic. In football, there are sacks, hurries, knockdowns, interceptions, tackles, etc. We don't need that level of granularity in Ultimate, but we can all see the difference between a point block and an interception when it happens, just not when we read "D" on the stat sheet.

For offense, here's something I wrote 2 years ago:

The thing about goals being scored is that the thrower often actually deserves more of the credit than the receiver. And further, the deserved credit to the thrower is directly proportional to the distance from which the goal was thrown. The term assist suggests they didn't have as much involvement in the play as is reality.

And as a pre-emptive strike, this is entirely unrelated to any debate on being a team player and who cares who gets the credit. It's about being able to understandably and accurately record the events of the game.

Typically, people are recording stats in an effort to determine who is making the most valuable contributions to the team and conversely who's hurting it. In that regard, I think there are 3 (positive contribution) offensive stats that are important:

TG - thrown goal
RG - received goal
A - assist

TG and RG are obvious. The assist is the throw that provides an excellent opportunity to the new thrower for a TG (e.g. the 55 yard throw to within 5 yards of the goal, the 15 yard crossfield swing to the break side of the field, etc.). The current use of the "assist" stat is both inconsistent with current sports stats and doesn't make sense semantically -- since the player didn't just "assist" in the goal, but had a direct contribution in creating it. The throw prior to a TG, however, very often contributes to creating ideal conditions in which a TG can occur and makes sense semantically to be referred to as an assist. This throw has historically gotten way too little credit.

Yeah, two years ago I wrote that! And the UPA has yet to address my concern. Sometimes I get the feeling they don't even read my blog.