Nets forward Kris Humphries put up great numbers in the seventh season of his NBA career, his first as Kim Kardashian's beau. The couple announced their engagement (with a disturbing description of an "intimate family celebration" involving horses), and while there are no shortage of possible motives (love, reality programming, her butt, etc.), we've found the real one. Kris must have done some advanced analysis of Kim's exes' on-field performance after she broke up with them.
It's likely Humphries looked at the careers of Reggie Bush and Miles Austin using Football Outsiders' DVOA, a metric that measures a players' success per play compared to what an average player would have done in that situation. After sorting their stats into pre-Kim, with Kim, and post-Kim, the results would have horrified him:
Bush Before: 276 plays, 8.6%
During: 571 plays, -2.7%
After: 78 plays, -5.9%
Austin Before: 157 plays, 31.6%
During: Only one game, but it was the best effort of any NFL wide receiver that week.
After: 119 plays, 12.2%
Humphries could have remembered the lessons from his statistics class: he only looked at two players, the samples were small, and their previous successes and post-breakup declines could have been attributed to a variety of confounding variables. But he didn't. He panicked. He imagined being benched and spending a whole goddamn year just sitting there next to Johan Petro as he rattled one dumb joke after another in barely comprehensible English. "I'm trying to watch the fucking game, Johan!" he screamed to no one as he ran out the door straight to the nearest jewelry store. (That $2 million engagement ring? A pittance compared to what he stands to make on the free agent market.) He knew a marriage could end before his career did, but Khloe and Lamar gave him just enough hope to take the plunge.
New Jersey Nets' Kris Humphries engaged to Kim Kardashian [LA Times]