What Am I Even Doing?

This question has a couple layers. The shallower layer is me screaming this at myself as I try to figure out how to create this blog in the first place. To all the bloggers out there, you have my respect just for not quitting at this point in the process. I never thought that the actual writing would be the easy part. (I am almost certainly going to regret saying this.)

But the more interesting question is: why am I making this blog in the first place? It’s cliché, but we probably need to go back to the beginning to understand.

About Me

I was born in Texas. Fort Worth, to be precise. And, as you may have heard (or experienced), Texans tend to be crazy about their football. So from an early age, I was immersed in football, watching Texas A&M on Saturdays and the Cowboys on Sundays, plus going to the occasional TCU game.* In high school, I was in marching band, which meant going to every football game for 4 years. So when I first arrived at Baylor in August 2011, I thought I had a good knowledge of the game.

*Wow, great work Brian. Way to run off your Baylor audience within 5 minutes of clicking on your first post. Whatever, it’s the truth.

Reader, I was very wrong. Turns out, you can watch more than one football game a day. Not only that, you can even rewatch those games or individual plays from those games multiple times over to learn something from them. Some of you might think, “That’s a little trick called film study, every football player knows about it.” This is my rebuttal:

Notice anything? Yeah, I’m the shortest one of the group. And at a towering 5’5″, that’s true for a lot of groups. So no, I never played organized football. I never felt the urge to try. But I watched. And at Baylor, I started watching and learning a lot more.

And then I discovered the world of advanced stats. Writers like Bill Connelly (https://twitter.com/ESPN_BillC) and Brian Fremeau (https://twitter.com/bcfremeau) introduced me to their metrics, S&P+ (RIP to the &) and FEI. Suddenly, I had a way to apply my knowledge of math and Excel to the study of football. For awhile I worked sporadically, looking at whatever topics I found interesting whenever I felt like it. You also may have seen me post the advanced box scores (like the ones Bill used to do when he worked for SB Nation) on my Twitter (https://twitter.com/bawolfskill).

Now, it’s time to organize my work. I’m still going to analyze topics I find interesting, but I’m going to try to do it on a regular basis and share my results with the world, even when the results aren’t what I thought they would be. I hope to use this work to increase our understanding of the game of football and start some interesting discussions. With help from collegefootballdata.com the process becomes even easier, and I recommend browsing through it just to see all the data they have available.

Why Advanced Stats?

If you trawl through College Football Twitter for long enough, you’ll find that there’s a certain type of fan who doesn’t believe advanced stats or analytics should be anywhere near football. You can usually find them saying things like “Football isn’t played on a spreadsheet!” or “Watch the games, nerd!”

My response to those, shall we say, concerns is this: no one studying football analytics wants to take away from the games being played on the field. I can only speak for myself, but I got into advanced stats because I love watching football and want to know more about it. To me, advanced stats are simply a different way to measure what is happening on the field. And because of the different approach advanced stats take, it allows people who follow them to do two useful things:

First, advanced stats allow us to compare teams who haven’t played each other, don’t have many common opponents, and/or have had widely varying strengths of schedule. Furthermore, there is an objective way to compare those teams, as opposed to a dismissive “ain’t played nobody!”

Second, we can use these sort of analytics to project future games. You’ll see me cite to Bill or Brian’s game projections as part of my analysis of a given game. Both of them have tested their models against the actual results and have found them to be as good as one can reasonably expect.

So that’s what to expect from my fledgling website! I know that the content I provide won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re interested in learning more about football analytics and what we can learn from them stay tuned for more. You can also follow me on Twitter to see updates there. (And yes, for those keeping track, I am already regretting calling writing the easy part.)

Until next time.