You see, the number of scheduled games per season has varied substantially over the years. Anywhere from 10 in the early 40s to the present 16.

Which means that a pro football player today has up to 67% more opportunities to do in a season whatever he’s paid to do on the gridiron — throw and complete passes, gain yards rushing, intercept passes, catch passes, score touchdowns, and so on — than those who played before him.

But evidently that means nothing to the guys who keep the NFL stats. Let me give you a concrete example.

Assume that a starting running back typically carries the ball some 25 times in a game. That means that he will have 250 opportunities to score a rushing touchdown in a 10-game season and 400 such opportunities, or 150 more, in a 16-game season.

Let’s now assume that a running back scored 10 rushing touchdowns in a scheduled 10-game season. And let’s further assume that that constituted a record at the time. According to the NFL "accountants," that record would be broken were another player to score 11 rushing-touchdowns — now that’s only 1 more than the record — even if it took him 6 more games, which means 150 more times running the ball, to do it.

Going back to our track and field analogy, that’s like saying that if a sprinter set a record by running 100 meters in, say, 10 seconds flat, another sprinter who ran 100 yards in 9.99 seconds would be the new record-holder despite the fact than 100 meters are equal to 109.36 yards. Believe it or not.

No wonder George Canning once observed that he could prove anything by statistics except the truth.

Think about it.