Football, Cancer, and Anecdotes versus Statistics

This weekend is the Superbowl, and if some of the articles I've been reading are accurate, a fair number of people are going to be watching and thinking someday that will be me (or, possibly, my kid).

It makes sense. American sports broadcasting is mostly about the anecdote; descriptions of the life experiences, skills and physical attributes that explain why the person being covered is a part of the event. And in that context, it's easy for the viewer to compare themselves to what they're hearing and decide that they meet those standards. I have no doubt there are a lot of good NFL players who have never made the Superbowl and will be watching and thinking, next year that'll be me. And some recent studies have reported that between twenty-five and forty percent of parents of high school athletes think their kids will make the pros.

Oh really.

The joy of the modern Internet is that you can get some pretty good numbers, so let's move from anecdote to some statistics. Although I wasn't able to find out the number of NFL players who have played in a Superbowl, Wikipedia is kind enough to provide the starting line-ups for the forty-nine games played to date. Pull out the guys that have been multiple times and you find about 1,450 individual players have played in Superbowl. Let's represent them with this lovely alien head, which was the closest thing I could find to a football or helmet.

Now the NFL reports that there have been 23,000 players that have moved through the modern NFL. This means that roughly 21,500 NFL players have never been to the Superbowl. So let's color them red, and now our chart looks like this:






Approaching it this way, that NFL players belief that they'll one day be part of the starting line-up at the Superbowl starts to seem a lot less reasonable. They're as close as anyone may be, but the odds are still largely against it. But you want to see long odds, let's add the college players to the mix. The NCAA reports that 1.6% of college football players will make it into the NFL. This means approximately 2,25 million college players will need to find something else to do with their lives. So let's add them to the chart in blue:

And we'll stop there since adding the high school players would take way more real estate than my little blog template can support. But the picture makes it pretty clear that if you're watching Sunday's game thinking that'll be you someday... well, I wish you luck.

But this is a cancer blog, not a football blog, so all of that was just a lead in to what I really want to address. (It also gave me an excuse to post lots of alien heads.)

A friend recently sent me a link to this video of a Weather Channel announcer talking about his cancer:

I have to admit, I find myself hugely conflicted by this. On the one hand, I think it's great that he's willing to share his story -- and a ten year survival? respect to that -- but on the other I think his encouragement to fellow cancer patients may cross the line from supportive to cruel. Simply put, his encouragement to seek treatment at a cancer center is spot on, but his description of that treatment as "we'll fix you up" is, what's the phrase I'm looking for? oh yes, complete and utter bullshit.

Since his is pancreatic cancer, let's look at the numbers for that. Like football, you can find lots of stats for cancer online (most coming from the National Cancer Institute, and then refined), and so I pulled down the cancer center survival rates for pancreatic cancer. These get reported as percentages, so the numbers are pretty easy to work with.

Cancer survival is generally reported to five years (so we'll ignore anything post year five), and let's represent our pancreatic cancer patients who survive five years past diagnosis with a little ambulance, thusly:

So our man above is in one of those two ambulances. But now let's add the people who survive just 4.5 years post diagnosis:

We could add an ambulance for the people who survive four years, but if you make it four you make it 4.5 so there's no ambulance to add. So let's move on to those who survive just 3.5 years:

And again, survive three years and you'll survive to 3.5, so there's no ambulance to add for three, but we can add one for 2.5:

Here's two years:

And eighteen months:

And one year:

And six months:

And finally, those pancreatic cancer patients, being treating at one of the national cancer centers, who don't survive six months past diagnosis:

This hardly looks like "fix you up" to me.

That said, the host is correct that you're better off in a cancer center -- at least for the first three years. Cancer center survival rates are basically double those of the overall national average, though after three years there's no significant difference. 

So sure, head to a cancer center, but I wouldn't expect miracles. And remember, the people making videos are the ones in one of those ambulances in the top row. You won't hear much from the folks in the bottom seven. 

Anecdotes are great, but, sadly, it's statistics that actually describe how the world works.