The event of the team going up the court happens so many times, you can chart shots, rebounds. In basketball, there’s a natural progression-up and down, up and down. “You start to appreciate the sheer volume of the numbers, and how they compare over time. “In baseball, you have 162 games, and the same exact play starts every play, and that’s the beauty of it,” says one AFC general manager. And, if you believe the cliché, it continues that football’s tough-guy culture has made it slower to change than other sports.
On one side you have the gym teacher with the whistle around his neck, on the other it’s the dweeb with the taped glasses, pocket protector, and stacks of hard-to-decipher numbers and data.
#Nfl play by play data series#
SMARTER FOOTBALL WEEK: A series examining the cerebral side of the sport, including technology, analytics, how a brainy linebacker prepares and just what goes into a typical NFL play.The Walsh/Belichick robot is not on the market. Another step here that’s expected to come eventually is in profiling the minds of players.ħ. The NFL is just scratching the surface with this technology, and the floodgates will truly open only when the league makes available all the Zebra data it’s been collecting. There is one strong consensus league-wide: Analytics data related to injury prevention, which straddles sports science and comes through player tracking, is useful and will only get better. And that, of course, implies the truth about the NFL then, which is that few in football had even given that concept a thought.Ħ. The idea of using advanced statistics to drive decision-making in baseball was still in a nascent stage, at least publicly. Moneyball-the best-selling book based on the baseball team across the Bay from the Niners, which would shed light on the coming numbers craze-was still two years from release. And it was a total match with all of Coach Walsh’s trades.”Īll that work, and all that was proven was what some guy on his couch down the street in Santa Clara could’ve told them: Walsh was a savant. And once I was finished, I looked at all of Coach Walsh’s trades over the years. “And it wasn’t like Coach Walsh was telling me, ‘Hey, a third rounder has more value than it says here, and a second rounder has lower value.’ It was meant to be totally independent. “I tried to use historical trends and true value,” says Marathe, now the Niners’ chief strategy officer and EVP of football operations. And after a couple months work, the senior associate from the Boston consulting firm Bain readied to show team president Bill Walsh and GM Terry Donahue his findings, in disbelief at the results being spit back at him. Paraag Marathe arrived in San Francisco with a very clear directive from the 49ers, to reimagine the Jimmy Johnson draft chart.
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