It’s easy to forget sometimes in sports that stats are only a data point.
They can help tell whether an athlete performed well in a game. Especially advanced analytics. The grades that Ohio State gives its players, the ones Ryan Day references when he says someone “graded out a champion,” are very helpful to coaches in determining how well everybody is performing.
But the ones that draw the eyes of fans? Those can be misleading sometimes. Like in basketball, sometimes fans or media or others just watch how many points a player scored and form their opinions of that player based on that data point alone.