“3 PBUs doesn’t turn into 13 PBUs because of “luck.” Your stats don’t improve by 433% because of random chance.)”
Playing time is probably the biggest factor here. Stribling split snaps with Clark and missed a chunk of the season due to injury in 2015. In 2016 he played nearly every meaningful snap as it was Lewis&Clark who took turns getting hurt. So he probably more than doubled his snaps.
Beyond that… yes, there is randomness and there are circumstances that influence this. You can see this by examining Jourdan Lewis’ stats. Lewis’ PBUs went way down in 2016 which — if you assume Lewis was at least as he was the year before — indicates that yes, random chance is a big part of PBUs also.
And circumstance — I would argue that teams just made a more concerted effort to not throw near Lewis. The 2015 MSU game alone had a half season’s worth of PBUs (6). That’s because MSU’s gameplan was to throw it right at Lewis. He had zero PBUs in 2016 against MSU. Would you argue that was indicative of some sort of deficiency in playmaking for Lewis? Of course not. And doing so for Stribling may have been just as ridiculous (despite being less obvious or intuitive).
It’s not reasonable to argue that these statistics told a story about Stribling and his improvement when you have Jourdan Lewis right across the field from him…unless you think Jourdan Lewis got worse while he was winning all those awards he won.
