From the course: Everyday Statistics, with Eddie Davila

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Different sports, different stats

Different sports, different stats

- [Narrator] Sports analysts, sports fans, sports executives, and coaches. All of them, in our modern age, are dependent on statistics. It's how they make, criticize, and defend decisions. Statistics are the fuel for sports arguments, and, of course, sports statistics are vital for making predictions. But not all sports statistics are created equal. Some statistics are more likely to be the result of luck. So just like flipping heads with a coin four times in a row may be a lucky anomaly, for certain, luck-based sports stats, a player or team streak of good statistics is unlikely to continue. If you are relying on statistics to make decisions or predict outcomes, we need to consider sample size. In many professional sports leagues, teams have dozens of games in a season. For example, 82 games in both the regular NBA and NHL season or 162 games in a regular major league baseball season. But in American football, the NFL, each of the 32 teams plays only 16 games. Some opponents they'll…

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