Published October 25, 2018

The story about the statistician who drowned trying to cross a lake with an average depth of 2 feet sometimes comes to mind when I think of context. It comes up a lot lately.

For example, as the college football teams at Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama take a break from competition this week to prepare to play against each other Nov. 3, there’s a chart online with numbers showing that Les Miles had a better first season coaching LSU than Nick Saban did. It’s rather convincing, as internet memes often are.

Saban’s first season as LSU’s coach was in 2000. His team won eight of 12 games, including a 28-14 victory against Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl. The Associated Press ranked the Tigers 22nd in the nation at the end of the season. Not bad.

Miles succeeded Saban as LSU’s coach in 2005. The team that year won 11 of 13 games, including a 40-3 victory against No. 9-ranked Miami in the Peach Bowl. The AP’s final poll ranked LSU No. 6 in the country. Great season.

Miles’ first season at LSU was better than Saban’s in terms of won-lost record, the number of players drafted into pro football, victories against Top 25 teams and conference finish. Miles’ Tigers made it to the Southeastern Conference championship game, losing 34-14 to the University of Georgia. Looking at that chart, it seems pretty obvious who had the better season based on the categories presented: Miles. And the numbers are just part of the case for Miles having the better LSU debut.

A problematic meme

But that’s not the chart that I saw online that made me think about context. That chart was about the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and his predecessor, Barack Obama. Different versions of it are still being shared on social media, but the one that caught my eye got a lot of traction after being shared by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

click to enlarge

That chart, at right, shows an even more dramatic advantage by the numbers than in the Saban-Miles comparison. Job  approval, unemployment rate, jobs added, first-year deficit and gross domestic product growth — all pluses for Trump based solely on the numbers presented on the chart.

But the chart is rife with problems.

As Snopes.com reported in a fact-checking post, the chart contains false information right off the bat. It was an edited version of a graphic CNN showed on the air, one that correctly had Trump with an approval rating of 40 percent, not 50 percent as in the doctored meme.

Snopes does a good job of explaining how the CNN chart was mimicked, and later expanded, with false Trump approval numbers and other deliberately misleading construction of the chart shared by Trump Jr. and, eventually, modified and shared by other groups.

Inaccuracy is one thing; context is another.

Saban vs. Miles

To emphasize why context matters, let’s circle back to that Saban-Miles comparison. For one thing, the case for Miles gets better if one considers the impact of the 2005 hurricane season upon the first month of LSU’s season. Game 1 was postponed before Hurricane Katrina hit, costing LSU a week off in late October. Game 2 was moved from Baton Rouge, La., to Tempe, Ariz. Game 3, after a weekend off, was moved from a Saturday night to a Monday night because of Hurricane Rita.

The disruption Katrina caused to LSU’s well-designed nutrition program — along with other stress (some players had 10 to 20 people bunking in their apartments after the storm) — caused an average weight loss of 7 pounds per player. Having a stable routine, the foundation upon which coaches build a team, went out the window. Without a second week off, the team played its final 11 games in a span of nine weeks and six days. Saban’s 2000 LSU team had no such disruptions and still suffered an embarrassing homecoming loss to the University of Alabama Birmingham, a team that, on paper, was no match for LSU.

But hold on. There’s not nearly enough context here for you to decide who did the better job of coaching. We have to dig a little deeper.

In eight of the 11 seasons immediately before Saban arrived, LSU lost more games than it won. Saban was hired to change the direction of the football program, and he did — resoundingly. In each of his five seasons at LSU, his teams won more games than they lost. Under his leadership, they won two conference championships, three bowl games and one national championship. He left Miles a much better situation than the one he inherited.

43, 44, 45 …

The comparison to the 44th and 45th presidents of the United States is apt in several ways. Obama succeeded George W. Bush mere months after the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the near collapse of the global economy. As Snopes reported, the federal deficit after Obama’s first year was largely attributable to the stimulus package meant to help the U.S. economy recover from the financial crisis that occurred under Bush’s watch. In every meaningful way, Obama inherited a far worse situation than what Trump inherited from him eight years later. To view their first years as president minus necessary context is to render any attempt at substantive comparison meaningless.

The same can be said for the Saban-Miles first-year comparisons. Saban inherited a floundering football program and turned it into a well-oiled machine, complete with a new academic center, football operations facility and numerous fundraising upgrades.

Who did the better job of coaching in their first year at LSU? The chart alone can’t answer that. I should know: I covered both coaches during my newspaper days in Baton Rouge, and I made the chart. That’s how it came to be online, after I realized that it would help illustrate how flawed even an accurate version of the Trump-Obama chart is without context.

It’s easy to share a snapshot — factual or otherwise — and try to pass it off as meaningful. Many of us glance at headlines and images on social media, never clicking to see if the story confirms what the headline says. Internet memes get widely shared and have an impact because so many of us reflexively pass them along without vetting them first — especially if they appear to confirm our point of view.

All too often, news, data and campaigns are condensed into soundbites, tweets and memes that lack important context. We fail ourselves and each other when we fail to check them out but share them anyway. It’s not hard to guess Donald Trump Jr.’s motivation for distributing a flawed and intellectually dishonest meme like the chart above. The rest of us should do better. Facts matter. So does context. Intelligent, informed thinking occurs where information and context meet.

In the post-fact world, there’s a lot more at stake than a game.

Footnotes

Further reading for anyone still interested:

¶ Rankings for opponents, reflected in the Bowl Game and Top 25 Wins sections, are AP rankings from before the game.

¶ The first version of the LSU graphic featured a euphemism — Championship Game Runner-up — in the SEC Finish section of the Miles column. It was meant to show how language can shape how good or how bad things seem, but it was also a wink to Milesspeak. Les never referred to having lost a game. He would say that his team “finished second.” Late in the editing process, I revised the chart and decided to include this footnote.

¶ Miles won a national championship in 2007. He and Saban each won one at LSU. Saban then won national championships coaching Alabama in 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2017 — and has his 2018 team looking like the favorite to win another. A victory Nov. 3 against LSU would remove one of the remaining obstacles.

¶ After Alabama defeated LSU in the 2011 national championship game, Miles struggled to halt his football program”s downward slide and was fired four games into the 2016 season. Saban won the last five games against Miles. His résumé is not only vastly superior to Miles’ résumé, it will arguably be the best in college football history by the time he’s done, if it’s not already.

Venn diagram by iQoncept via Shutterstock