Purple Insider is presented by Liquid Death, delicious water that's bringing death to plastic.

Learn more at Liquiddeath.com. Insider. Oh welcome to another episode of Purple Insider Matthew Coller here and joining the show,

as promised, Aaron Shots of Football Outsiders, who was introduced by NFL network on TV as a

statistical O.G. How do you feel about that, Aaron?

I am, man, I am the original. I mean, you know know we started football outsiders almost 20 years ago summer of 2003

There was not a lot of football analytics going on when I started my website 19 and a half years ago. So,

oh g I think I do get the title. And one of your one of your first things to claim to fame analytically is proving to the Boston media that it wasn't establishing the run that was the issue with the New England Patriots if I recall correctly.

Yeah, I mean that's kind of how I started was by trying to prove or not to prove, but to see whether establishing the run really meant anything.

And I think the funny thing is that 20 years later we're still trying to explain to some

commentators that it doesn't mean much.

I just saw Bucky Brooks tweet something

about the importance of the running game in the playoffs

and it's like, did you not watch last year's Rams

because that team could not run the ball at all and as far as I can tell they won the

Super Bowl. And in the Super Bowl, Aaron, they ran too much.

They kept the Bengals in the game by running too much.

But I know the Patriots of 2002, which is the team that sort of inspired me to start doing

football analytics to begin with are actually kind of similar to the bangles of today because in a sense essentially what happened with the Patriots is on their way to building a Super Bowl champion,

they somehow won a Super Bowl.

Right? Like the Patriots are better every year from 2000 through 2004 by our numbers, the regular season numbers are better. Like the 2002 Patriots are a better team than 2001 but they didn't make the

playoffs and the Bengals will make the playoffs this year but it's the same kind of

thing the Bengals this year look a lot more like what the goal was than the Bengals last year did,

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