Last week, an article in the New York Times pointed out that even at the highest level, kickers' performances on field goals vary widely from year to year. In fact, the author posited that NFL kickers should be valued not for their ever-changing field-goal percentage but for the length of their kickoffs, which remains relatively consistent throughout their careers.

This radical claim would change a lot about how teams and fans should view the kicking aspect of the game. But it seemed to Gelf that the stats used to make this assertion were dubious at best. As a fan of the smart, stats-laden website Football Outsiders, Gelf knew that the numbers used by the Times were not nearly as precise as they could be. Football Outsiders states, for example, that "measuring kickers by field goal percentage is a bit absurd, as it assumes that all field goals are of equal difficulty." It also compiles kickoff rankings for kickers based on the environment in which they kick and based on an average return so as to separate the kicker from the coverage.

So Gelf emailed one of the writers over at Football Outsiders to ask him if the Times's kicker theory would stand up to scrutiny using better stats. The response: Ask Aaron Schatz, the author of the Times article and, oh yeah, the editor of Football Outsiders.

Why would one of the pioneers of new sports statistics revert to using numbers that his website describes as absurd? "To use FO stats, I've got to explain them," Schatz tells Gelf, "and in the New York Times and with 800 words, that's not really possible. I did the research originally using FO stats, then did it with conventional stats so I would have something I could quote in the article."

Schatz found that the numbers produced using both types happened to agree, so he went with the better-known ones. That's fortunate, but it doesn't speak well for newspapers that their space constraints force this kind of simplification.