Originally posted by 49ers81:
Sorry it's not. It's just a stupid 'stat' made up to give people like Nina Kimes (is that her name?) something to talk about. Until it reaches the point where they become actual turnovers they have absolutely no more impact on a game than an incomplete pass would.
You can try and argue it anyway you want in the realm of if, and, or maybe but at the end of the day it's like saying, well today might be Wednesday, but it's not. It's Tuesday and no amount of phony projections about how it might really be Wednesday changes the basic fact of the thing.
The point of TWP% is to normalize a dataset that is highly variable based on numerous outside factors--whether or not a specific pass is actually intercepted is dependent on the defender's hands and concentration, the receiver breaking up the play, weather, "luck." We can't accurately judge the QB solely on the outcome because the outcome was out of his control; however, by normalizing TWP we get a clearer picture of the QB's decision making based on how consistently he is putting the ball in harm's way.
And yes, it's subjective--all statistics are even simply because we choose (consciously or not) which statistics to focus on. And yes, every completion, incompletion, sack, turnover, whether attributed to the QB in the box score or not, is impacted by many factors. The key question we have to ask ourselves is what are we measuring and why? The primary goal of football is not to generate statistics but to win games. In service to that we isolate statistics and try to correlate those stats with wins, so that we might better understand how to win. Which stats we choose to correlate should be flexible depending on what correlations we can identify.
