You're bound to make some mistakes when you are on TV for more than half of your waking hours. There's no one that talks more about sports than Stephen A. Smith. He does get paid a lot of money to do so, but one might think that Smith could get a little burnt out blabbering about sports around the clock like he does. At the very least, the quantity of content that he puts out sometimes has to mean there's a lack of quality (lack of factualness might be a better way of putting it). That was on display during a recent episode of
The Stephen A. Smith Show , when the sports show host discussed the almost unbelievable highlight that the Minnesota Vikings had this past weekend. Despite quarterback Sam Darnold being deep in his own end zone, he still somehow managed to throw a beautiful deep ball to Justin Jefferson, who took it to the house for a 97 yard touchdown. https://twitter.com/Vikings/status/1835376516076548453 How crazy of a play is that? That's what you call an "end-zone-to-end-zone" tuddy. It was such a unique scoring play that ESPN's Next Gen Stats decided to do a deep dive on it. They determined that Jefferson's touchdown added +21.3% win probability (if you believe in those kinds of numbers) for the Vikings, and determined that the 127.5 yards that the Minnesota wide receiver traveled was farthest "distance traveled by a ball carrier on an offensive touchdown in the Next Gen Stats era." https://twitter.com/NextGenStats/status/1835393769937743897 It's always interesting to see the numbers behind an exciting play like that one. Though in this age of information at our fingertips, we have to be careful when looking at the stats. If we aren't, you can misinterpret the numbers and accidentally spread misinformation (sorry to get political) like Stephen A. Smith did on his show that's separate from ESPN. It's evident that Smith saw the post from Next Gen Stats and wanted to use their findings to support a point on his show. The only issue is that he misunderstood what the numbers actually meant, and boasted about Sam Darnold doing something so crazy, I might even go as far to say that it's not humanly possible:
"Looking at Minnesota, 2-0. Where Sam Darnold is in at quarterback throwing a football 127.5 yards in the air with a damn 100 yard bomb to Justin Jefferson." https://twitter.com/WillRagatz/status/1836493937466302829 You can tell that Stephen A. Smith is thinking, "That math ain't mathing" in his head after he said that out loud. A 127 yard pass for a 100 yard touchdown? That's
insane . Some might even say it's
not possible . But according to
The Stephen A. Smith Show , it most certainly is. Go ahead and put Sam Darnold in the Hall of Fame if he's throwing 127 yard touchdowns...
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