random stats

I watched the Steelers-Ravens AFC championship game this evening and so my interested was peaked when I saw a Sports Illustrated online gallery showing Pittsburgh's Road to the Super Bowl. Reading through the captions, I came upon this little fact about Week 11:

"...the Steelers beat the Chargers 11-10 -- the first time in 12,837 NFL games that a contest ended in that score."

Just for the record, this is not a jab at you Chargers fans out there. As the roommate of 3 SD fans, I'd have to say that the Chargers are my #2 favorite team. No, the reason why I mention this specific sentence is the fact that they stated the exact number of games. If it was the first time ever, couldn't they have said "the first time EVER in NFL history"? And if it wasn't history in the making, why didn't they just say how many years it's been? I mean, 12,837 games sounds like a lot...and I don't feel like doing the math...but isn't it easier to include "first time in 20 years of NFL football" or something like that?

It makes me wonder who comes up with these stats. I once met a lady who did the query lookups for these stats, but what person comes up with the idea to make those queries happen? Granted, this isn't as bad as some of the baseball stats. Honestly, do you really care if the next batter up has a 35.7% chance of getting an RBI when there's a man on third and a man on first and the left fielder is a lefty and it's sunny? You get my drift.

These stats can be useful but in the end, if I wanted to include the initial Steelers-Chargers stat in a lunch-time conversation, I would just say "Did you know that it was the first time in a long while that an NFL game has ended with an 11-10 score? Weird, huh?".