Panthers linebacker blasts Jimmy Graham, says he only cares about the stats

Short of a “yo’ mama” joke, the worst trash talk you can deliver to a football player is to say he’s a stat strumpet, which is to say he doesn’t care about Ws and L, just yards and TDs. And that’s basically the shot Carolina Panthers linebacker Thomas Davis levied against Seattle Seahawks tight end Jimmy Graham. Davis would know — he played Graham twice a year before the tight end who, to be fair, does seem to take a lot of plays off and was basically fired by his old team, was with the New Orleans Saints. Davis told reporters this about his team’s come-from-behind 27-23 road win:

“I don’t even know what to call [Graham]. He was out there talking trash. He’s probably one of those guys who is excited about his production and not really worried about his team losing the game.”

The “probably” qualifier makes me a little less excited, but this is some solid trash talk that Graham who, in keeping with the narrative, was too much of a — what’s the phrase I’m looking for here — cowardly scaredy-cat and didn’t speak with the media after his NFC favorites fell to 2-4. But is Davis right? Does Graham care about his numbers over wins?

Well, there’s no real way to quantify this, but we can look at Graham’s stats in wins and losses to see if he does better in one or the other. You’d think he’s do better in wins, obviously, particularly because he has more of them — 49 to 35 (via pro-football-reference):

Given the inequality of wins and losses, we have to break it down by per-game stats:

Okay, so Jimmy Graham is almost exactly the same in wins and losses, which proves nothing about Davis’s statement, but was a fun little experiment to see if we could glean anything.
While I love any trash talk, I’m willing to give Graham the benefit of the doubt. He seems like a guy who isn’t very demonstrative and isn’t particularly loquacious (can you immediately think of what Jimmy Graham sounds like?) He also earned some deserved scorn for dunking a ball last season when he knew it would get his Saints a penalty. But let’s be nice — it’s Monday, after all — and not call it indifference, but a steely manner.