“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”-Mark Twain

There was an interesting post at sportsinsights.com earlier today, which looked at the performances of West Coast NFL teams based on game location. The authors hypothesize that “NFL West Coast teams traveling east suffer declines in performance.”

It’s an interesting idea, and, if true, could make the NFL re-think scheduling, which often requires teams to travel thousands of miles on consecutive weekends. Moreover, I liked how the authors looked at team performance against the spread, in contrast to this article at Advanced NFL Stats, which simply looked at team performance, and thus was not able to account for difference’s in the abilities between teams on different coasts.

The topic was interesting enough that it was look at by more than 12,000 viewers (as of 4:52, Friday) when linked by Deadspin.

Further, the results of the Sports Insights study are interesting…