The desire to stat bust

We start with two bits of news: -- Various news outlets have reported that the St. Louis Rams have hired Josh McDaniels as their new offensive coordinator. McDaniels was fired as the Broncos head coach during the 2010 season and will now oversee the further development of the Rams number one pick QB Sam Bradford, instead of his own first round pick in 2010, Tim Tebow. For all his perceived and/or actual failings as a Head Coach, McDaniels guided and molded the Broncos into a high scoring unit led by QB Kyle Orton. It was the defense that persistently gave the team trouble. The hope is that McDaniels can do the same for St. Louis and the chances are he'll at least take them up one notch from their 2010 showing. -- The Seattle Seahawks have a new Assistant Head Coach and offensive line coach all in one; Tom Cable, the former Head Coach of the Oakland Raiders. Cable has worked previously with famous line coach Alex Gibbs and thus should be able to bring the kind of zone blocking run attack that Pete Carroll was hoping for when he came to Seattle. I like Cable and I wish him all the best in his new role. Of course as a 49ers fan I now have to hope that the defense crashes and burns in spectacular fashion, but there you go. Finally today I have to have a moan. It's not right for me to go more than a few days without a moan, so here we go. Regular readers will know that I'm hardly enamoured with the idea of using statistics to try and break down football, in much the same way as Sabermetrics are used in Baseball. Phrases such as "Win Probability Added" and "Expected Points Added" etc just don't sit well in my vocabulary. There's a mixture of reasons for this, predominantly the fact that after years of study now and plenty of man hours poured into the research, the stats guys seem to have come up with precisely diddly squat when it comes to useful applications to football. The often cited champion of the stats heads, Bill Belichick, has been one of the more active at trying some of the theories espoused by stats heads, and has promptly suffered a series of rather embarrassing gaffs in recent seasons, all of which (naturally) seem to fly under the stats radar. But the biggest problem I've always had is the approach of trying to explain a game that is highly dependent on skill, physical abilities and psychological attitude into a contest of spreadsheets. We're always hearing about how xyz factor should cause certain teams to win more or make certain teams more successful because the numbers add up, and yet we never seem to see the end product of all this speculation, usually because the above factors of skill, physical ability and mental attitude are somehow neglected. The most recent example comes from an article on AdvancedNFL stats.com hosted and run by Brian Burke. Mr. Burke could be considered a leader in this field and has been asked to make various contributions to a number of high profile newspapers, magazines and websites. His articles have been cited by such sites as ProFootballTalk.com and he's been sought out for information and consultation by no less than the mighty ESPN. In other words he's been bloody successful and yes, I am just a little jealous of his success. But I take serious issue with the statements made in the article linked to above, which I shall highlight for you here, because I know how damn lazy some of you can be. Talking of the Green Bay/Atlanta game; "Well, their luck had to run out sometime. One game proves nothing, even a blow-out like this, but it was hilarious to watch ESPN's Sports Reporters Sunday and see the likes of Lupica and Albom struggle to comprehend such an upset. They threw up all the usual fallacious narrative nonsense: momentum, wanting it more, playing under the big lights. Frankly, I'm not sure what all the excuses were because none of it made sense." Basically what appears to be happening here is that Mr. Burke is laughing in the face of the possibility that psychological issues could somehow have an influence on the game. And while the reporters in question probably aren't adverse to the chance to work on their narrative building skills, probably in the hope that one day it will see them kindly in the future when they sit down to right a biography of some famous player/coach/executive, I also believe there is legitimate merit to what they're saying. Psychology plays a factor in sports. Momentum, wanting it more, playing under the big lights. These may sound like esoteric Eastern Martial Arts terms, but they have a genuine place in football. I can recall some fond (and some less fond) memories of my own experience in various team and individual sports over the years, including the impact that emotions and psychology played in those experiences. I remember in my early twenties when I was playing with a group of friends in a purely amateur 6-a-side soccer tournament. We were doing it primarily for fun and for the exercise, so you can imagine our shell shock when by the end of the first 15 minute half of game 1 we were down by 4. The game ended something like 9-0. It had a depressing effect on morale. We didn't score a single goal until the last game of the season, when we won a penalty which yours truly slotted home. Even though we lost that game, just like all the others, the feeling of elation at having finally scored lifted our team and encouraged us to come back for another season, brimming with sadly misplaced hope. Now, I understand that on the scale of importance our team basically represented a cockroach compared to the Leviathan that is the NFL, but that only serves to convince me more of the importance that emotions and psychology play in the league. If we were down in the dumps mid-way through the season having lost all our games up to that point, imagine how much worse it would be if every single loss was broadcast on national television, with the media hanging over you like a pack of wolves after each game just waiting for one sheep to break away from the flock and with the distinct prospect of a loss of employment should the poor run continue. This is why I believe that things like momentum are at times perfectly valid explanations of what we see on the field. As a fan, how many times have you watched your favorite team go down by two scores and suddenly had that sinking feeling. Now apply that feeling to the players on the field. Think of the range of emotions they're experiencing. Anxiety. Apprehension. Outright fear. Fear of losing the game. Fear of having their pride dented. Fear of being embarrassed. Fear of making another critical error that perhaps sinks the team. Are any of these things conducive to creating the required mental approach to play sports? What about wanting it more? Or to be a little more precise; determination and desire. These are powerful tools for a sportsman or sportswoman. One thing that is fairly common across all sports is that as time passes, competitors who are behind and are about to go into an outright downward spiral have an early tendency to display certain common body language, such as drooping of the head and dragging of the feet during breaks in play. Desire is a trait. We can't really measure it. But we can observe it. We see the players on the field who run that little bit harder, who fight and claw for every ball. It's the difference between a ball carrier who regularly steps out of bounds to avoid a hit versus the player who tends to cut back inside and take on a hit in the search for extra yards. We see it in the way some players chase down ball carriers from behind. We see the difference in a desire to make the tackle just by comparing someone like Ray Lewis to Peyton Manning. As for playing under the big lights? Again, I think that can be classed as a fairly legitimate factor worthy of consideration. There's a hell of a difference between a playoff game where it's a "lose and you go home" situation versus a regular season game where a single loss doesn't necessarily break a season. It's a lot of added pressure to cope with and unless you have experience of handling it, it could become a factor that ultimately effects performance on the field. So anyway, that's me done ranting. Hopefully if Mr. Burke takes the time to read this, then in future he'll give the "usual fallacious narrative nonsense" a little more consideration and credit, instead of trying to break everything down into a solvable equation.

Run-down

Inevitably when I bring up the subject of statistical analysis in football and how I think many false conclusions are drawn through the misuse of statistics, two things happen; the first is that most readers switch off mentally, preferring to eat out there own intestines rather than be forced to sit through what amounts to a lecture in applied mathematics. The second is that I wake up with an e-mail inbox overflowing with literally a couple of e-mails telling me that I'm a simpleton and that I should spend more time studying at Football Outsiders or AdvancedNFLstats. (I'm sure some of you are already preparing to send your pre-written hate mail, so for those that cant wait the address is here). Anyway, stopping by the aforementioned Advanced NFL stats I came across an article that includes a run down of an article from their seemingly hated rivals at Football Outsiders. Let the graph wars begin!! But there is a serious point to be brought up. Football number crunchers, for want of a better title, have a serious thing against the run in football. It's like the hatred NFL coaches had for the pass in the '60s... but in reverse. It would appear that most football number crunchers also seem to share a trait with the vast majority of high school coaches who frequent various Internet message boards, (no names mentioned), in that they all seem to assume that anything said by any analyst on TV must be inherently wrong in some way; doubly so if that analyst works for ESPN. The classic central point and counter-point between number crunchers and TV analysts (an argument held on the analysts behalf in absentia) surrounds the issue of whether running the ball and stopping the run is important in winning football games. The analysts believe that it is. The Number crunchers do not. I'm with the analysts on this point (hold the hate mail for a minute!) and I'd like to try and explain why. I'd like to draw on a combination of my own coaching experience, the experiences shared with me by others, what I've absorbed over the years from the idiot box, and what I've absorbed from various coaching materials (books, coaches forums, etc). First we have to highlight a point that the number crunchers/analysts/everyone seems to be at a consensus on; the greater the distance to go on third down, the harder it is to make the yards and get a first down. This is important because I believe that when analysts (even those on ESPN) talk about running the football and stopping the run, they're referring to three very specific circumstances; first and second downs (that counts as one), goal line & short yardage. I do not believe that they are suggesting for a second that a dominant run defense and a chronic pass defense will breed success (or ditto for a dominant rush/poor pass offense). So why is stopping the run such an issue on first and second down? Well again we have to throw in a caveat. When I hear "you've got to stop the run!" I understand that to mean "... with your front 7, without the need to drop a safety into the box". And it comes back to that first and second down argument. If you can stuff the run on first or second down, you improve the chances of forcing the defense into long yardage third down situations. Which means one thing; Le Passe! (I'm not entirely sure that's actual French). The defense sits back a little. Substitutions can be made, bringing in third down linebackers and linemen who specialise in either pass coverage or pass rushing. You can remove that clunky, run stopping DT (Terrence Cody anyone?) and insert a more lithe and agile individual, or at least as lithe and agile as defensive linemen get. You can tell your corners to sit back a little. Let them have the short stuff. If the offense dumps it off with a short pass then you come racing down and nail them short of the first down marker. This is what I've always understood as the primary advantage to being strong against the run. It's not about the fear of an 80 yard dash, it's the fear of the 5 or 6 yard scamper. That run that allows the offense to obtain a fresh set of downs. It's the knowledge that a stuffed run plus an incomplete or short pass puts the offense in a tricky and somewhat predictable situation. This is why we call third down the defenses down. It's the one down where they have the best possible chance of predicting what the offense will do, while having the best chance to make a play. Obviously stopping short yardage runs and goal line runs is important as well. Forcing the offense into third and 3 is of no use if they then run it straight over you. Similarly in and around the goal line it is necessary to keep the RB out and force the defense to throw in the much restricted area of the end zone. I'm not expecting this to start some kind of revolution. My only hope is that the number crunchers among you will see that sometimes there is more to football than the numbers. The underlying strategy and the many inter-weaving factors that go into football sometimes bring up unexpected goals and challenges. Things that go beyond just the statistics and the analysis. Tomorrow I'm going to do the stupid and attempt to predict the play off teams for this season. I can hear the sound of crashing and burning already.... Have a great day everyone.