Here’s an easy way to skew a statistic.
Say, for instance, you’re looking at the last time ACC teams lost their first games of the season. If you didn’t know any better you’d fix on 2020 and think a wave of futility swept through the conference, resulting in more openers dropped than at any time in modern memory.
But you’d also need to know the ACC inaugurated its 20-game intraleague schedule that year, assigning a number of those clashes as season debuts as a way to gin up interest.
The result? Six teams lost their openers that year.