A Comedy Of Errors, East Rutherford Style

March 16, 2021 8:16 AM

In the latest edition of Dorktown, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein discuss a 97 yard drive that contained less than a first down's worth of actual played yardage, and how that one drive reshaped the destinies of two teams, and thus the NFL.

On the written side, Alex and Jon further discuss how crazy this drive was.

posted by NoxAeternum (14 comments total)

It's a good story, but I watched the whole video and even went back to look at it again, but I never figured out what that "games above .500" chart means that you spend half the video looking at. Everytime I thought I might understand what the green and red colors meant and what kind of units it was measuring, they pointed to it again in a way that made it clear I had still no idea.
posted by straight at 10:16 AM on March 16, 2021

Wasn't green the Jets and red Kansas City?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:22 AM on March 16, 2021

It was the cumulative win-loss record of the teams (green = New York, red = Kansas City) starting at the beginning of the 2009 (?) season. So every step up was a game won and every step down was a game lost.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:25 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks.
posted by straight at 10:27 AM on March 16, 2021

I know Jon Bois gets lots of dap here on MeFi, and there was even some comps to his work from the fantastic State Birds are Garbage video from a week or so ago. So, with a free half hour this afternoon, I figured I'd check it out and see what the fuss is about.

Love the format! Information dense, but enough ambient vibe with the music & motion that I feel like I have enough time to really process what I'm looking at (even if part of that processing is to understand what's up with the confusing W/L step graph mentioned above). For presenting the straight-ahead data of just how wacky, how much of an outlier that drive was... it's great!

But that same ambient vibe works against the subjective "and this is why that drive changed the NFL" thesis. At 12:51: "I think we all know what inconsistent play is code for. Penalties." What... no!? It's... not playing consistently?

That might be the most egregious line in the video, but from ~13 minutes on, it's trying to draw a straight line from that drive to the next 10 years of NFL history. And either they're dropping "we all know"s to try to get me to draw that line too, or they're glossing over facts that are just (or more) as consequential in the big picture (that KC victory over Green Bay the next week, for example. To say nothing of, uh, drafting Patrick Mahomes?). Sorry, you need to hypnotize me a lot better with your soothing charts to make me follow you on that trip.

The data drills down great about the drive as an outlier; but you can't keep drilling down to prove 10 years of cause-and-effect -- that only comes with much more big-picture context. It's a perverse, data-fueled version of the "one weird trick" phenomena: "this statistical anomaly will change the fate of your franchise!"

It's a fun sports video, I oughta lighten up! Fully agree in a vacuum, but strongly disagree given my professional interest in "data storytelling" and my concern for viewers to understand how it could be used with bad intent on topics of, say, public policy, economics, or public health. I'm sure there's no shortage of examples of bad actors weaponizing this sort of thing, presently.

Actually, most egregious line in the video: it's called the BUTT FUMBLE, not the ass fumble.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 12:39 PM on March 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

That's kind of Jon Bois's thing, though, Theophrastus Johnson. I don't think he's under any illusion that his thesis is beyond critique or even that he's actually proven it. He loves weird shit like this and loves drawing grand conclusions from it. It's schtick.

Also, re: "I think we all know what inconsistent play is code for. Penalties." In this context, it's the ownership's code for that penalty filled fiasco. Maybe the line isn't clear, but it's not saying that "inconsistent play" is always code for penalties. Just here.
posted by that's candlepin at 12:44 PM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

The ending did feel like they were trying to shoehorn this one play into some bigger story but at the same time this one game did serve as a point for when the two teams' relative trajectories changed. Why was this the Jets' zenith and Kansas City's nadir? Probably no single reason but it is fun to point to this one anomalous drive as the thing behind both.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:03 PM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's uninteresting or unwarranted to say, "Hey, the most important coach acquisition of the decade only happened because some weird and unusual circumstances created a vacancy at just the right time, including THIS crazy game..."
posted by straight at 1:04 PM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed watching it and I also thought it was straining a little hard at the changed-football-forever significance level.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:19 PM on March 16, 2021

I enjoyed watching it and I also thought it was straining a little hard at the changed-football-forever significance level.

It's more understandable if you know that Bois is a Kansas City fan.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:36 PM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

I mean, he connects the dots pretty well. KC fired their head coach the next day, in a really unusual response to this loss. The interim head coach they installed then proceeded to hand Green Bay its first loss of the season, which proved to be a fluke (Romeo Crennel is many things, but a competent head coach is not one of them) but was the kind of signature moment that any of his supporters could point to and say "this is why we need to keep this man!" which is what Kansas City did for longer than it should have... leading to the timing being exactly right for them to hire Andy Reid, who immediately righted the ship even with a washed-up Alex Smith under center, and who was instrumental in the (highly controversial at the time) decision to draft Patrick Mahomes. So, yeah, it's a little tenuous, but without this godawful loss happening exactly when it did, it is unlikely that KC would have been looking for a new head coach at exactly the time they were.
posted by Mayor West at 4:44 PM on March 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

this one game did serve as a point for when the two teams' relative trajectories changed.

but without this godawful loss happening exactly when it did, it is unlikely that KC would have been looking for a new head coach at exactly the time they were.

Completely agree, and I do think the video does a good job of connecting the dots for those divergent fortunes after the game. But the video puts out a different thesis: it's the (statistically anomalous) drive that precipitated everything. The title of the video: "The god-awful drive that changed NFL history". That's a bridge too far for me.

Also, re: "I think we all know what inconsistent play is code for. Penalties." In this context, it's the ownership's code for that penalty filled fiasco. Maybe the line isn't clear, but it's not saying that "inconsistent play" is always code for penalties. Just here.

If it's context-dependent, then why is the rhetorical trick of "we all know" employed?

I think this video is great, but it's two great stories: the first 13 minutes of a bonkers 97-yard TD drive, and a 5-minute coda of two teams swapping fates. I can't lie: the connection of the two with the "we all know" and the "and here's where it really gets weird" lines flat out bothers me. And my grouchy reaction isn't all get-off-my-lawn. I teach high school STEM, and "data storytelling" is a consistent theme in my classes. I see all sorts of "my graph/data shows X" pronouncements from students... when it's oftentimes the converse: my students hold a certain viewpoint, and look for confirmation of that in the data (crime & poverty data can be huge drivers of this). My radar is up for "assuming your conclusion".

It's more understandable if you know that Bois is a Kansas City fan.

LOL, yes! Had I known this earlier I woulda been even more grouchy LET'S GO BUFFALO
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 7:35 PM on March 16, 2021

If it's context-dependent, then why is the rhetorical trick of "we all know" employed?

Because it's the sort of euphemistic refrain used when talking about canning a coach mid-season. It is extremely rare for a coach to get fired mid-season for a number of reasons as it's pretty much admitting the team done fucked up in the off season for not biting the bullet then - hence part of why the Texans were a laughing stock last year, as everyone knew Bill O'Brien was a horrible coach who should have gotten walking papers before he crippled the team for the foreseeable future. Haley was a dead coach walking, but giving up 88 yards of offense in penalties (with 15 of those he was personally responsible for) was the straw that broke the camel's back.

As for how the drive led to the fall of the Jets and the rise of the Chiefs, the video explains that - the drive let the Jets to refuse to look at their actual deficiencies, which came to a head with the next season, the Buttfumble, and the Jets chasing the easy fix. Meanwhile, the Chiefs wound up in position to acquire Reid when he was on the market, who then proceeded to turn them from a middling-bad team to a powerhouse.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:54 PM on March 16, 2021

It's a sort of "for want of a nail the shoe was lost" situation. Yes, it's silly to think that an entire kingdom fell just because of a single nail, but there's a path you can draw from nail to kingdom. The play lost the game, the game lost the coach, the vacancy brought in a new coach etc etc until you end up with something that affects the whole NFL. Bois is extremely good at teasing stories out of what other people would see as discrete events, and I don't think he's wrong to do so.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:01 PM on March 17, 2021