There’s a certain point where thinking about numbers and functions in a vacuum stop making sense to my mind. I dropped my high school calculus class senior year because the strings of numbers, symbols, and Greek letters became unfathomable to me. I’m much more of a tactile, “hands-on” learner who likes to try things out and then learn from the results of the experiment; that’s why I switched into physics.

Theory is necessary to inform practice, but practice keeps theory from being boring.

We’ve gotten to the part of the NFL offseason where all of our NFL Draft, free agency, and training camp theorizing is finally being tested in the beaker of the NFL preseason. Preseason statistics obviously contain a lot of noise, but if we watch carefully and take plenty of notes, there is plenty of signal as well. Strap on your safety goggles and ready your litmus paper, and you too can decipher the data, my fellow football physicists!

There’s plenty to discover with two weeks of preseason gone, so what have we learned from the 2016 NFL preseason thus far?