As a lifelong fan of the Detroit Lions, it’s been great to see them become an elite NFL team. I don’t know how long it will last, but it’s quite enjoyable right now as they’re clearly one of the best teams in football.
There is one stat in particular that is crazy to me: over the last five games, the Lions have scored 25 touchdowns but have only thrown a total of 20 incomplete passes. These are not stats that are normally compared, because they’re generally not even close.
As an example, the 2018 New England Patriots (who won the Super Bowl led by Tom Brady), threw 195 incomplete passes and scored a total of 47 touchdowns that season. That was shockingly good, but was not even a 3-to-1 ratio. The fact that the Lions are well above a 1-to-1 ratio in recent games is just staggering.
More wins than walks
It reminds me of a goal that Greg Maddux had when pitching for the Atlanta Braves. While he never accomplished it, he always wanted to have more wins than walks in a year. Again, it’s not a comparison that is even in the realm of consideration for most folks, yet it was something he went after. The closest he had was in 1997 when he put up 19 wins and only walked 20 batters for the entire season.
Related, for his career Maddux faced 8,025 hitters and only threw 8,006 balls — less than one per hitter. Crazy.
Business
Just like in sports, crazy goals are very rare in business. If a company finds a way to make incredible amounts of revenue, others will quickly eat into it. It’s like the early days of Google when they routinely made more than $1M in revenue per employee (like in 2004 when they had 3,021 employees and $3.18B in revenue).
None of these situations pop up often, but they’re fun to watch when they do. Let’s go Lions!
