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Sports Commentary
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.
Title text: The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.

    Explanation

    P-hacking is the academically problematic practice of attempting to come up with a question for which the data offers a significant p-value (probability value), a subject previously covered in comic form. This is in contrast to correct scientific analysis, in which a realistic question is formulated clearly and then answered (or shown to be unjustified) with data.

    A common way of doing p-hacking is analyzing subgroups to attempt to find significance when the full dataset does not yield statistically significant results; for instance, arbitrarily restricting the analysis of medical data to male subjects to derive a significant p-value when the inclusion of female subjects would have changed the conclusion. There are actual biological reasons why treatments may work differently between the different groups, and other reasons why female subjects may be less suitable participants in the trial, but a post facto decision to only present the 'male data' would be problematic. Similarly, looking at many other retrospective distinctions and then choosing to present only the possibly-random patterns that stood out, and ignoring all those that did not, would be questionable.

    Sports commentators are known to do a form of p-hacking in which they recall facts regarding past performance, and sometimes they are made to sound more significant by choosing only such 'facts' that coincide heavily with the situation developing in front of them. By using overly narrow superlatives, a severe form of narrowing down of applicability (which was previously covered), it also realistically reduces any real confidence that such a dwindling number of precedents are a useful predictor of how the upcoming event will turn out.

    Randall satirizes this with an example in which the restriction uses very specific criteria largely irrelevant to gameplay patterns in order to narrow down the subgroup sample size to a measly two games. The 0-2 record (there were two situations considered as comparable, and neither of them resulted in the result hoped for in this current case) reflects random noise much more than any significant insight. As well as being irrelevant to gameplay, their p-hacking also makes the game sound like jargon, which can be confusing and difficult to understand. This is ironic given a sports commentator's job is supposed to be to explain the situation they are fronting, rather than making them more vague and incomprehensible. However, this may be the inevitable response to being left in front of the camera during breaks in play, or even during periods of gameplay that are nominally unremarkable — feeling the pressure to say something, they will draw upon ever more obscure and irrelevant details to justify their (or their off-screen advisors') efforts and expertise to entertain and inform the viewing public.

    The title text references the saying, "The plural of anecdote is not data", which means that if you have a collection of several anecdotes, that is not considered valid statistical data. (Anecdotes are usually based on highly-informal observations, under conditions without controlled variables. There's generally considerable selection bias; after all, stories are much more usually told about remarkable events rather than ordinary ones. And anecdotes are usually based on someone's memory rather than on properly-recorded observations, so the descriptions are often unreliable.) It then inverts this phrase, saying that if you perform p-hacking as shown in the comic to shrink your data set, all you are left with is an anecdote, statistically worth nothing.

    A breakdown of the commentary's statement

    The comparison being made is that "Over the last 36 years, they've gone 0 for 2 when they've scored in the 37th minute to lead 2-1 against a team whose country comes before theirs alphabetically." This contains the following basic stipulations:

    "Over the last 36 years, ..."
    Counting just the full FIFA World Cup competitions, assuming they qualified for every one, the total number of games that an international team will have played, prior to anything in this year's competition, would have been a minimum of twenty seven matches (i.e. playing the first round group-stages, playing once against each of the other three teams in their particular group of four). If they're ever successful enough in the group stage, they'd then progress through the knockout stages of the competition for as many matches as they avoid being knocked out plus one, and semi-finalists additionally get to play one more match to establish the third-place overall. On top of that, there are the various regional qualifying matches they will usually have had to play to even enter the main competition, plus any other international matches (e.g. 'friendlies' or other region-based inter-nation competitions) that may have been taken part in.
    "... when they've scored in the 37th minute..."
    A football game has a nominal 90 minutes of game-time, plus possible extra time. No team in the World Cup has scored any more than ten goals in a single game, but it is far more common for even winning teams to have scored just two or three times per game, statistically, the chances of scoring in any given minute is an insignificant detail. There is also effectively no useful analysis of a goal being in the 37th minute, as opposed to the 36th or 38th, and hardly any even in being between in the larger block between 30 and 40 minutes. The psychology of goal timings usually gravitates towards whether they were in the first or second half of the event (or, beyond that, in extra time), with most useful attention paid to those that occur right at the start of either half (one team immediately seizing the initiative on the field) or right at the end (when desperation, increased chance-taking or just player exhaustion can lead to much-needed/-feared game-changing goals once any attempt at mutually defensive play breaks down and possible goal-droughts are ended).
    "... to lead 2-1 ..."
    As an equivalent example, in the 2022 World Cup, 14 group stage games (out of 48) and 9 knockout stage games (out of 16) may have at some point reached a 2-1 scoreline for one or other team, depending upon the order the respective teams' goals occurred, making this a relatively rare situation to be in. For additional context, and most relevant to the full statement, that year's competition also saw just six group games that had scores that might have had a temporary 2-1 lead for the team that went on to lose, whereas no team with a 2-1 scoreline in the knockouts did not then go on to win that match.
    "... against a team whose country comes before theirs alphabetically."
    In every international match (and others, excepting perhaps games used to train the team's players against each other), there will inevitably be one national team whose name is alphabetically prior that of their opponents, even if that features very similar names (such as a match between the two Koreas, using the most similar manner of naming, where Korea DPR would precede Korea Republic) and there would also be no clear reason why a naming issue (alone) would have any significant bearing upon match outcomes.
    "... they've gone 0 for 2 ..."
    (As the stated past consequence of all these specifically combined conditions.) Just two occasions satisfied all these conditions, out of possibly many tens of matches, and we are told that neither of them ended in a victory. Not only are the comic's precedents very rare, compared to all possible games (which, nevertheless seems to be even rarer in real life), but also this mini-'streak' of results is only a matter of history. In 1122: Electoral Precedent, increasingly convoluted situations may have previously been entirely predictive in possibly even several dozen instances... until they weren't.

    This comic was published 11 days into the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The World Cup was also the subject of 3260: Messi, published the previous Wednesday. Sports commentary was also the subject of 904: Sports.

    Transcript

    [Cueball and Ponytail are sitting at a table, looking at the wall behind them. On the wall is a screen showing a soccer field with some mostly unreadable score information above it. The only readable information is that the score is 2-1.]
    Cueball: They could be in trouble. Over the last 36 years, they've gone 0 for 2 when they've scored in the 37th minute to lead 2-1 against a team whose country comes before theirs alphabetically.
    [Caption below comic:]
    I wish sports commentators hadn't discovered p-hacking.

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