A brief thought about thinking about the game; or, brevity is the soul of wit.

Although having conversations with one's self is a fairly reliable indicator of insanity, it is a hallmark of writing or thinking about a given subject.  Solipsism is a (big-ish) part of cogitating about any subject. The trouble is that when thinking about Ultimate (or any team sport) one's on field performance and individual effort only matters in the context of one's team.  However, it is so easy to consider Ultimate from the tried and true perspective of the narcissist.

Sadly, as much as it pains me to admit it, any worthwhile analysis of either Ultimate strategy or Ultimate tactics is almost completely dependent on context.  To wit, the worthwhileness of any Ultimate analysis depends on: the athletic makeup of the team, the individual's athletic makeup, the mental makeup of the team, the individual's mental makeup, the interplay of specific individuals on the team from a physical/mental perspective, etc.

The above may seem strange for me to write, given that I've written tens of thousands of words trying to figure out some useful insights about strategy and tactics.  In the end, however, I'm the only one whose thinking about the game has become any clearer.  Those readers who have had moments of clarity while reading most likely did 99.9% of the clarifying for themselves (and the remaining 0.1% could have occurred while reading a cereal box or updating their facebook or sleeping).

The only intellectually honest thing to do when I attempt to look at the game (which I may still do on rare occasion) is to find a few specific objective measures that can provide SOME context and SOME useful comparison between different teams/different leagues.  Specifically, I'm talking about 2 stats.

Thinking about offense
Touches: count how many times a given player touches the disc.
Turns: count how many times a given player is the last one on his/her team to touch the disc in a possession that doesn't end in a score.  A turn gets counted for both thrower and would-be receiver regardless of the quality of the thrower, provided the receiver actually touches the disc.
Touches-to-turns ratio: a rough approximation of a given player's ability to offensively benefit his/her team (aka stay on offense).

Thinking about defense
Touches allowed: count how many times a given player's mark touches the disc.
Turns created: count how many time a given player's mark makes a turn.  A turn gets counted for both thrower and would-be receiver regardless of the quality of the throw, provided the receiver actually touches the disc.

Everything beyond these two basic statistics seems to be too idiosyncratic for my feeble mind to feasibly analyze.