One of the most important roles that advanced stats can play in sports conversation is helping us to understand what's real and what isn't. Luck and randomness play such a large part of a given outcome -- especially in the two sports I write the most about, college football and soccer -- and over short periods of time, both your eyes and the scoreboard can lie to you.
With that in mind, I wanted to see which statistics are particularly predictive from one sample to another, and which stats from one season translate pretty well when looking ahead to the next.