Ask for a breakdown
If there is a Detroit number you want looked at properly, ask and it gets looked at.
Something you argued about in a game thread and nobody could settle. A stat somebody quoted that smells wrong. A thing you have always assumed about one of these 4 teams and have never seen checked. Those are the best questions and they make better pieces than anything picked unprompted.
Every question that arrives gets listed on this page, with the answer when there is one, including the ones where the answer is no or the data doesn't exist. Nothing gets quietly dropped. If a question needs a lot of work, that will be said too.
Answered
Questions readers have already asked, and where the answer went.
Detroit's preseason record against their regular season, just this franchise, as a scatter plot. Is there a trend line at all?
25 seasons, correlation +0.285, and a permutation test says a correlation that strong turns up by chance about 1 time in 6. Drop 2008 and it jumps to +0.514, which is the actual finding. Read the answer
Out of the teams that won all their preseason games, how would they be grouped by total wins? What does that histogram look like?
68 teams out of 798, and there's no cluster anywhere. Win totals run 0 to 14, and 45.6% of them won 9 or more per 17 against 46.9% of everybody else. Read the answer
The 2008 Lions went 4-0 in the preseason and 0-16. The sample starts in 2015, so it's missing.
They were right and the data goes back to 2000, not 2015. Rerun on 798 team-seasons instead of 320. The headline held, the best line in the original didn't, and 2 data defects turned up underneath. Read the answer
Cleveland and Chicago are the worst teams in baseball at throwing out runners. Time to let Max show off those wheels.
Both halves of the premise checked out and the answer still came back the other way. Cleveland's 15.7% is 2 catchers averaged into 1 number, and the good one had been catching. Read the answer
Open
Asked, not answered yet. Listed so it is visible that they have not been.
Does Cleveland actually have Detroit's number, or is it 3 bad months?
The real question is whether Detroit's offence falls off against Cleveland specifically or against good pitching generally, and only 1 of those is a story. Not started.
When you're only playing your starters in the preseason game you have a problem. Does starter snap count in August predict anything?
Testable if preseason snap counts are reachable for free, which hasn't been checked yet. If they aren't, that gets said here rather than the question quietly disappearing.