If you'll allow me to football post for a bit...
It's well known that AFL statistics are kind of fucked. Thanks in large part to the Champion Data monopoly being a closed book, and completely stifling any of the detailed fan analysis one would see in the much more open American sports. Leading to weird decisions made in the 90s becoming canonised as the way to assess player performance, because more suitable metrics are not available to the watching public.
One of the weirdest of these weird decisions is the complete polar opposite attitude to "contested possessions" when compared to "contested marks".
There is a willingness to call a possession "contested" if there is even a hint of an opposition player nearby, even if there is no actual contest. This is because the term "contested possession" is a collection of many types of statistics whose only unifying trait is that they aren't obviously uncontested 100% of the time. This ABC article ( from the https://www.hpnfooty.com people) breaks it down well.
Of course, this is completely different to the fans' intuitive understanding of what makes contested footy. And leads to cases like this video from the previous article.
| One of those possessions is contested. Try to guess which one! |
Conversely, when dealing with marks. They are uncontested until definitively proven contested. Often in spite of big collisions or impacts in the process of taking the mark.
| An "Uncontested" Mark |
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