It’s only human to compare one thing to another.
But in the current day, where opinions reign supreme on the internet, sometimes comparison is the thief of joy.
Websites like Stathead and Sports-Reference allow users to compile statistics from any player across any era and pit them against another athlete in that same sport.
For example, one could take Michael Jordan’s 1996 MVP campaign and Luka Dončić’s explosive start to the 2025 NBA season and find some intriguing results.
Most are aware of Jordan’s dominance in the ’90s and how ridiculous it is to compare statistics from that era to the current NBA mold. But others do it on purpose, to create chaos.
This is what sports discourse has come to in the present day, and while people can sometimes use it to make good points, other times it’s flat-out wrong and manipulative.
The Good About Head-to-Head Stats
Athletes are in the top 1% of their craft, so it makes sense to compare them.
Matching up players’ statistics for award races, all-time greats of an era, or even the top players from a specific season is a great way to get the clearest picture possible.
Sometimes you can use it to tell the broader story of an award race; fans debated the last two NFL MVP races contentiously online.
Last year’s race saw Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen as the frontrunners, and although Allen won, many online pointed out that Jackson had the better stats and a similar record.
And although Allen certainly put up an MVP campaign last year, it sparked a (mostly) healthy debate online about one of the league’s biggest honors.
This season, Drake Maye and Matthew Stafford are the frontrunners for MVP, and the race is basically neck-and-neck. Stafford has the better basic passing stats, while Maye leads the former Super Bowl champion in most advanced metrics.
In a race that currently lacks a clear frontrunner, pitting the quarterbacks against each other is a good way to determine whether one truly has an edge over the other.
The Bad About Head-to-Head Stats
People use head-to-head comparisons to pit athletes from different eras against each other, which is truly deceptive.
In football and basketball, for example, the 90s and 2000s eras are widely regarded as among the slowest in modern sports. Passing in football wasn’t as technical and proficient, possessions in basketball took longer, and fewer points were added to the scoreboard.
Despite this, legends from slower eras are now up against superstars of today’s leagues in an unfair matchup.
Legends of the game from past decades are, for the most part, going to have inferior statistics than the superhuman athletes of today’s sports world— sports have come a long way.
These comparisons elevate already toxic social media discourse to an entirely new level. Where’s the fun in that?
Just remember the next time you log in to social media and see one of these head-to-head matchups on your screen, comparison is not the solution to every problem.
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