I was reading the yahoo sports preview of the Stanford vs Notre Dame game when I came across this gem of a quote:

“The Cardinal have lost three of four, including a 51-21 defeat to top-ranked Southern California three weeks ago.”

Wait a minute, I thought this was the team that had won 4 of their last 6 a week ago? While it was technically true, it didn’t indicate that while having won 4 of their last 6, they had also lost 2 of their last 3 (and of course now 3 of their last 4).

See, there is always a streak that runs both ways for anything but a team on a sustained continuous win or loss streak (say more that 3 games). It’s all just a matter of when you cut it off. If you’re trying to promote Stanford, you go back to they’re last win of note and use that to say that they’ve won 4 of their last 7. If you want to make them look bad, they’ve lost 3 of their last 4. For Cal, you can do the same thing: won 7 of their last 11 or lost 2 of their last 3.

Streaks are meaningless unless their contiguous win or loss streaks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Sports, Sports - Cal Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.