Golazooooooo!

Warning: English Premier League announcers save your voices. You'll be off the air in a couple of weeks if you celebrate goals like this guy
 

It's only matchweek 3, but this EPL season is pregnant with the promise of a year with great scoring (that's the first time all year someone has combined "English Premier League" and "pregnant" without mentioning Gabby Abonlahor. Wait, I mentioned Abonlahor, damn...)

The four 6-0 margins witnessed this year are FOUR OF THE TWENTY 6-0 games in the HISTORY of the Premier League. The next logical question is what does all this scoring mean? Well, for American sports fans with ADD/ADHD, this means that soccer is more watchable. And after the huge audience/ratings of the World Cup, maybe this is finally the year that soccer "arrives". Of course soccer has been trying to "arrive" in the U.S. since the 1970s, so don't hold your breath.

For more seasoned viewers, analysis of this recent goal binge breaks down into two competing views. The first view argues that this goal-fest is indicative of an approach where more teams are playing to win instead of playing not to lose. Sports Illustrated's Georgina Turner believes that teams are making it rain goals because their opponents are chasing the game at scores that they would normally change their strategy and pack it in and start playing hyper-defensively. In the old days, teams like Blackpool, West Brom and Wigan would play it more conservatively than a Tea Party candidate on Fox News when they fell behind 2-0. Now these same teams are playing with more reckless abandon than a drunk guy at Coachella and find themselves on the wrong side of some truly lopsided results.

Alternatively, the explosion in goals can be seen as evidence for the growing gulf between the EPL's haves and have-nots. Jonathan Wilson, also with Sports Illustrated, writes that these one-sided margins are part of a growing trend in the EPL that is decades old. In 1995, Blackburn was the first and last team to win the EPL that was not named Arsenal, Chelsea, or Manchester United. Let's take a look at some of the good statistical knowledge that Wilson drops to try to explain the widening gap between the EPL's elite sides and the rest:

• The gap between 1st  and 4th is growing
• "Between 1999 and 2003, the average gap between first and fourth in England was 16 points, and between first and fifth 20.4. In the following five seasons, those averages increased to 24 and 29.6, respectively, proof of an ever-stretching league"
• The gap between 4th and 4th from the bottom is also growing
• "In 2007-08, the team finishing fourth in the Premier League, Liverpool, averaged 1.05 points per game more than the side finishing fourth from the bottom, Fulham, the greatest such separation in Europe's major four leagues over the past decade"

As with most competing theories, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle (insert crude joke here)....although I think Wilson is closer to getting it right. What do y'all think?