Drafting NFL quarterbacks. The National Football League (NFL) is a lucrative business, generating an annual revenue of about $8 million. One key to becoming a financially successful NFL team is drafting a good quarterback (QB) out of college. The NFL draft allows the worst-performing teams in the previous year the opportunity of selecting the best quarterbacks coming out of college. The Journal of Productivity Analysis (Vol. 35, 2011) published a study of how successful NFL teams are in drafting productive quarterbacks. Data were collected for all 331 quarterbacks drafted between 1970 and 2007. Several variables were measured for each QB, including draft position (one of the top 10 players picked, selection between picks 11 and 50, or selected after pick 50), NFL winning ratio (percentage of games won), and QB production score (higher scores indicate more productive QBs). The researchers discovered that draft position is only weakly related to a quarterback’s performance in the NFL. They concluded that “quarterbacks taken higher [in the draft] do not appear to perform any better.”

a. What is the experimental unit for this study?

b. Identify the type (quantitative or qualitative) of each variable measured.

c. Suppose you want to use this study to project the performance of future NFL QBs. Is this an application of descriptive or inferential statistics? Explain.

Step by step solution

01

Identifying the experimental unit

The Journal of Productivity Analysis collects all the quarterbacks drafted by NFL teams between 1970 and 2007 for doing various analyses. Each quarterback is treated as an experimental unit as the research is being conducted on the quarterbacks.

02

Categorizing the variables as qualitative and quantitative

Out of the three variables, thedraft position is non-numerical, so it has to be qualitative. TheNFL winning ratio and the QB production score are numerical and quantitative.

03

Specifying the statistics study

Projection of the performance of anything via statistical methods based on historical trends is a part of inferential statistics.Therefore, projecting the performances of NFL QBs in the future must be considered inferential statistics.

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