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When hyping their sport, there are few things media writers love more than a new record.   We see this a lot in baseball, the most statistically rich of all sports.   The heavy promotions surrounding Mark McGuire and Cal Ripken in recent years are good examples of sports marketing gone wild.

 

In many cases, at least some of the hype is justified.  In others, not so much.  Sticking with baseball, let's consider all the "post-season" records that are broken every year by guys like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.  

 

From 1922 until 1968, baseball's post-season consisted a single four out of seven series.  In 1969, a series of playoff expansions were initiated, culminating (for now) in the current system, in which players now have an opportunity to play in as many as 19 post season games instead of the previous seven.  Morever, due to the relaxed playoff admission standards, they have much more opportunity to reach the post season than older era players.

 

To use Jeter as an example, while Joe Buck may wax poetic about how Jeter just passed Yogi Berra for the most post-season doubles ever hit, I'm not impressed.  I like Jeter, but if I want to compare him to older era players, I'm going to be looking at factors other than his post season statistics.

 

In college football, it seems that every week another all time passing record falls.  I got in a discussion this summer with Alabama fan Catch5 about Julio Jones.  I was arguing that Julio Jones didn't live up to his recruiting hype at Alabama.  I delcared him a disappointment at Alabama.  Catch responded to me that Julio Jones was in fact the all time leading receiver in Alabama history.  I had no counter to this grade A smackdown, and skulked back to my man cave to lick my wounds.

 

A couple of months later, I read Bear Bryant's biography.  At some point during the book, a light bulb went on over my head.  Hold it, these guys hardly knew what a forward pass was until Joe Namath showed up at training camp in 1962.  In three years at Alabama, Namath had 2,713 passing yards.  The all time leading passer at Alabama is John Parker Wilson with 7,826 yards, also in three seasons.  ( A side note: I was surprised to see that Namath also had 655 career rushing yards).

 

Just last week, two new records were trumpeted to me, Aaron Murray broke Matt Stafford's Bulldog career record for most touchdowns in a season and this kid at Yale who's skipping on his Rhodes scholarship interview is due to break one of Yale's career passing records as well.

 

I may still be wrong about Julio Jone's career at Alabama, but at least now I've been able to put his career statistics in better perspective.  Like baseball's post-season records, college football's passing records have to examined carefully for their true meaning.  The passing game hardly existed in college football until the modern era.