TRC

One of the painful experiences of my life occurred in early 1991 when I was a student at SUNY in Buffalo, New York. The Buffalo Bills were in their first Super Bowl playing the New York Giants and the game was down to the last seconds. Trailing 20-19 the Bills depended on their kicker Scott Norwood to kick a 47 yard field goal to win it all. I was one of those who was crushed when the kick sailed wide right by a yard. That was perhaps their best chance even though they went back to the Super Bowl (count ‘em) three more times and lost each one.  

The question I have is would they have been more likely to win if that game was played today? 

Comment (0) Read More...

The Blindside: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis

One of today's most thrilling events in NFL football, the quarterback sack, was not an official statistic till 1982. The previous year, Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants playing in his first season terrorized so many opposing quarterbacks and linemen that the sack was officially born. The game changed forever as, protecting the quarterback especially on his back or blindside, became one of the most important things for an offense to consider. This in turn led to the left tackle position becoming the second highest paid offensive position on the team. Michael Lewis who wrote about the way sabermetrics changed baseball in Moneyball , writes about the evolution of the game of football as protecting the quarterback became a primary obsession. In the process he chronicles the life of an extraordinary young man (boy, really) in Memphis whose captivating life story and exceptional skills form the backbone of this book. That young man, Michael Oher (pronounced Oar), is in fact in the NFL draft this year and is expected to go in the first round.

Comment (0) Read More...

I have previously written about the one number, Win Shares, needed to compare baseball players. It is a comprehensive metric that synthesizes all of a player's contribution to develop a single number to best represent that player's value. Football is a much different and more complicated game than baseball. Almost all events on the field are interdependent: that is, events where multiple players from both teams have a say in the final outcome. In that fluid environment, developing statistics that truly represent a player or team's value is a very difficult task. It is further complicated by the fact that many needed statistics (such as penalties on specific offensive linemen) are not captured by the league. Drawing on sabermetric principles, as enunciated in the popular book Moneyball , one website (Football Outsiders ) has created a metric for football that is perhaps the most comprehensive effort at developing a single number to evaluate teams and players. For this season it had at least two surprising (but true) evaluations involving the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys.

Comment (0) Read More...