Gaelic football stats guru Rob Carroll has form when it comes to tweeting out info which confounds the claims of the traditionalists and nostalgics.
In spite of the limp atmosphere at Croke Park on Sunday, Dublin's hammering of Longford has been treated as a watershed game by many pundits in the days since.
The match allegedly offered conclusive proof that things can't go on like this.
However, Carroll has indicated that there have been less hammerings in Gaelic football since the turn of the millennium than there were in the previous fifty years.
Football is more competitive than ever ? pic.twitter.com/aGkZ18NLJr
— Rob Carroll (@gaelicstats) June 3, 2015
One qualification here - the 1950s to the 1990s is a wide timeframe and we've a hunch here that eye-watering hammerings were more of a feature of football in the 50s and 60s than they were in the 90s.
Given the pasting Leinster is taking, Carroll tweeted out stats indicating that Munster has actually been the home of the hammering for the past 15 years.
Connacht has the second highest proportion of double digit games, even after Carroll excluded New York games from his calculations.
Again, one suspects that the results may be a tad different if the data was restricted to the last five years. Dublin's current hegemony in Leinster was not as pronounced during the noughties.
Indeed during the early 2000s, Dublin struggled to win the province.
How competitive are the Provincial Championships? pic.twitter.com/SPnsRbygZq — Rob Carroll (@gaelicstats) June 3, 2015
