Okay, here’s my breakdown of that Mike Pouncey football thing I messed around with. It’s not pretty, but it worked (sort of).
So, I started this whole thing because I was bored, honestly. I remembered Mike Pouncey being a beast back in the day, and I wondered what it would take to, you know, simulate some basic football stuff related to him. I know, random.
First, I went digging for data. I needed some numbers, anything to give me a starting point. I scraped some stats off of pro-football-reference, stuff like games played, Pro Bowl appearances, that kind of basic stuff. It was messy, copying and pasting into a spreadsheet. Seriously, whoever designed those sites needs a lesson in clean data presentation.
Then, I tried to figure out how to represent his career in a way that was, like, actually useful. I decided to go with a year-by-year breakdown, looking at his performance relative to other centers in the league. This involved even more digging. I used some Python with the BeautifulSoup library to try and automatically grab the data, but honestly, the website was fighting me. I ended up doing a lot of it manually. Ugh.
Next came the hard part: trying to quantify “impact.” This is where it got subjective. I ended up weighting different stats – games started, penalties, sacks allowed (if I could find that data reliably). It was all very hand-wavy, I admit. I basically assigned arbitrary numbers based on my gut feeling of what mattered most for a center. I know it’s dumb, but I had to start somewhere.
I used a simple weighted average formula in my spreadsheet. Each year got a “score” based on the weighted stats. I also factored in Pro Bowl appearances, giving them a big boost. Again, totally subjective, but it gave me a way to rank his seasons.
I even tried visualizing the data. I made some really basic charts showing his “impact score” over time. It wasn’t pretty, just some line graphs in Google Sheets. But it did give me a visual representation of his career trajectory – a rise, a peak, and then a decline.
The Results:
- His peak years were pretty clear from the charts, aligning with when people generally considered him to be a top center. So, that was validating, I guess.
- The limitations of my approach were also super obvious. There was no way to account for things like leadership, locker room presence, or the quality of the offensive line around him. It was all just numbers.
- The whole thing was a huge time sink. It took way longer than I thought it would.
What I Learned
This whole exercise was a reminder that data analysis is messy, especially when you’re dealing with subjective things like player performance. It also reinforced the importance of clean data. Seriously, clean data is a gift from the gods.
Ultimately, I didn’t “discover” anything groundbreaking. But it was a fun way to waste an afternoon and play around with some data. Maybe next time I’ll try something a little less subjective… or maybe not! Who knows?
In conclusion, messing with Mike Pouncey’s stats was a weird, but ultimately satisfying, dive into football data. It’s not perfect, not even close, but it was a fun project to kill some time.
