One Night Only: Offensive Packers-Redskins Game Review, Mythbusters Edition

I know this is off topic but the one buzzword/phrase that everyone uses that gets on my nerves is - sample size. That buzzword always reminds me of food servers at a mall food court giving away little bite sized food samples with toothpicks.

An entire game, by definition, cannot be a sample. A sample is supposed to be a portion of something that is meant to represent the whole. I can see a series being a sample of a game, but what does a "sample size" really consist of?

"Sample size" is a statistical term which describes how small or large a data set is. If you ask one mall food server what they think of the Redskins, the sample size is one. If you ask the same question of three mall food servers, the sample size is three.

If someone says, "The sample size is small," that means that there weren't enough instances to draw a strong conclusion.

So is RG3 now as healthy as he's ever going to get, or not?

And why haven't we run the read option as much as we used to? I don't mean the times where Griff keeps it, I mean running the RO period.

Maybe others have asked i dont know. Why does it seem like our offense has to be either the read option, designed run stuff or making Griff a pocket passer ? Why cant we roll him out several times a game and let him either throw or run based on what he sees? I mean even if he isnt 100% he is still more mobile than most qb's. Rolling him out also would not subject him to the punishment of the ro. Sort of a conventional run/pass happy medium is what im looking for. Why is it all or nothing?

I know this is off topic but the one buzzword/phrase that everyone uses that gets on my nerves is - sample size. That buzzword always reminds me of food servers at a mall food court giving away little bite sized food samples with toothpicks.

An entire game, by definition, cannot be a sample. A sample is supposed to be a portion of something that is meant to represent the whole. I can see a series being a sample of a game, but what does a "sample size" really consist of?
One game represents a part of the whole season.

... I don't think football or NFL experts are using that term correctly but whatever- it will continue to get on my nerves.

Another pet peeve is attaching "gate" to an nfl incident to represent a scandal like Bounty-gate or Spy-gate. "Gate" comes from the political scandal known as Watergate. Watergate was a facility where the scandal took place and not a scandal involving water. But Bountygate was a bounty scandal and Spygate was a spying scandal.

Maybe others have asked i dont know. Why does it seem like our offense has to be either the read option, designed run stuff or making Griff a pocket passer ? Why cant we roll him out several times a game and let him either throw or run based on what he sees? I mean even if he isnt 100% he is still more mobile than most qb's. Rolling him out also would not subject him to the punishment of the ro. Sort of a conventional run/pass happy medium is what im looking for. Why is it all or nothing?That's a good point. I thought that's exactly what we did with Cousins against the Browns. Why aren't we doing that now?

I have a feeling "not much of a sample size" really means: "I'm holding off on what I think because I may be wrong" or "disclaimer: I may be wrong so don't hold me to this".Put it this way: if the Redskins win by a combined margin of 65 points the next two weeks, the conclusion wouldn't be "Griffin was 50% in Weeks 1&2 and then improved to 100% in Weeks 3&4," it would be "that's why you don't draw conclusions on someones health after two games."

My points weren't that we can be absolutely sure Griffin is 100%, but just that he's as able a thrower as he was at any point last year. That's not to say he's not messed up mechanically, or whatever everybody else is seeing. It's just to say: if its something you ignored last year, it's not a reason for the team being 0-2.

Like the write-up GTripp, it's at least positive in a depressing time for us.

1) Two games is still a small sample size, statistics require a lot to be definitive.
2) Our O-line, RB's, TE's all struggle at pass blocking. We knew it, and we knew the zone read masked this issue. Last year in passing situations it was clear as well.
3) I think everyone agrees RG3 doesn't have his mojo yet, and I think when he gets it everything gets better. When you don't have IT the other team knows IT, your teammates know IT and get you get highlights on ESPN trying to hand off the ball in the wrong direction.
4) Gut feeling is that he planned to not run much in the beginning of season, and I wonder whether he'll start to run more as time goes on, when he's confident knee is back to normal.
5) The Eagles and GB games were tough to start off with RG3 and no practice -- but the next few games will be more of a true test of how we're progressing. If GTripp's writeup is true, we'll be seeing more blitzing and man coverage until RG3 learns how to beat it.

My question is what is a good enough "sample size"? The point in that is- since it's a statistical term, there must be statistical way to figure that out, right? And if not, why not? That's partly why I don't get that term being used in football.

Sorry Tripp. I don't see how this has debunked these "myths". I think it's more complicated of a problem than defending Robert. The dude hasn't produced. Debate more of a scheme failure or whatever but he's not explosive or able to step into his throws, thus the arguement concedes that he isn't 100% physically b/c mentally the game out to be as slow as neo in the matrix.