My point is to say that all stats are basically useless without context...and this is *especially* true for the "advanced" stats like pressure/win rate/etc.
Presented on their own these measures don't speak at all to...
who were they lined up against?
who was providing pass rush on the opposite side?
what kind of stunts were called? did they have blitzing support?
was it a "designed pressure" on the part of the offense (for instance, a screen pass may often "invite" a pressure and the defender gets credited for it, but that's how the play was intended to function)
what was the game situation/context? Was the opponent "chasing" the game and playing catchup? Did both sides have their starting personnel out there?
Did the player *actually* influence the play in any perceptible way?
For instance, with pressures in particular, there is both an "objective" and "subjective" definition. The subjective definition (which seems to be more commonplace) more or less says that if the QB is touched, flushed out of the pocket, forced to scrambled, hurried, or has his throw/progression impacted, it's a pressure. Objectively, for example, Next Gen Stats says "any pass attempt or sack where a defender was within 2 yards of the QB at pass forward or within 1.5 yards of the QB at any point during the play" is a pressure. So you can understand how there is plenty of room for interpretation here on both counts.
And beyond all that: do the numbers line up with what your eyes are telling you? I've said it before that we should not evaluate solely on eye-test - there's a tendency to see what we want to see (or ignore that which we don't) and this is an inherently subjective way to assess*. But we should also not rely solely on the numbers OR fall into the mistake of (perhaps subconsciously) assuming that all statistics are created equal and should be weighted the same....or that these measures are by themselves predictive of future performance
*of course, as noted, many pressure statistics are created precisely by the "eye test" in the first place, so maybe we have come full-circle...
So to bring it back around, when you look at Gary's stat sheet...there are a number of measures that you might look at and conclude that he must be a pretty good player and he must've had a good year. Do your eyes tell you the same? (In this case obviously the team - having access to the same statistics and then some - felt that his pressure numbers were not good enough to warrant keeping around)
We can say "LVN had a great pass rush win rate last season!" and that may be objectively true in itself but also itself doesn't support many of the conclusions we might want to draw from that. It doesn't provide any reliable predictive measure and it doesn't address any of the above-outlined context concerns.
So yes, in a nutshell...if you have "raw" pressure statistics in one hand and a nickel in the other, you have five cents. Now if you have a nickel in one hand, and pressure statistics that are provided in-context, outlining the game situation, personnel, playcalling, measurable impact on the play outcome, and demonstrate alignment with the eye-test, well, then you might really have something!
