This is going to be a mixed bag of a post, talking about anything that has caught my eye over the past couple weeks. The first thing I’ll note is that on the recommendation of Tom Gower (you need his Twitter feed), I’ve read Josh Katzowitz’s book: Sid Gillman: Father of the Passing Game.
I didn’t know much about Gillman as a young man, though the 1963 AFL Championship was part of a greatest games collection I read through as a teen. The book isn’t a primer on Gillman’s ideas. Instead, it was more a discussion of his life, the issues he faced growing up (it’s clear Sid felt his Judaism affected his marketability as a coach in the college ranks). Not everyone gets the same chances in life, but Sid was a pretty tough guy, in his own right, and clearly the passion he felt for the sport drove him to a lot of personal success.
Worth the read. Be sure to read Tom Gower’s review as well, which is excellent.
ESPN is dealing with the football off season by slowly releasing a list of the “20 Greatest NFL Coaches” (NFL.com does its 100 best players, for much the same reason). I’m pretty sure neither Gillman nor Don Coryell will be on the list. The problem, of course, lies in the difference between the notions of “greatest” and “most influential”. The influence of both these men is undeniable. However, the greatest success for both these coaches has come has part of their respective coaching (and player) trees: Al Davis and Ara Parseghian come to mind when thinking about Gillman, with Don having a direct influence on coaches such as Joe Gibbs, and Ernie Zampese. John Madden was a product of both schools, and folks such as Norv Turner and Mike Martz are clear disciples of the Coryell way of doing things. It’s easy to go on and on here.
What’s harder to see is the separation (or fusion) of Gillman’s and Coryell’s respective coaching trees. Don never coached under or played for Gillman. And when I raised the question on Twitter, Josh Katzowitz responded with these tweets:
Josh Katzowitz : @smartfootball @FoodNSnellville From what I gathered, not much of a connection. Some of Don’s staff used to watch Gillman’s practices, tho.
Josh Katzowitz : @FoodNSnellville @smartfootball Coryell was pretty adament that he didn’t take much from Gillman. Tom Bass, who coached for both, agreed.
Coaching clinics were popular then, and Sid Gillman appeared from Josh’s bio to be a popular clinic speaker. I’m sure these two mixed and heard each other speak. But Coryell had a powerful Southern California connection in Coach John McKay of USC, and I’m not sure how much Coryell and Gillman truly interacted.
Pro Football Weekly is going away, and Mike Tanier has a nice great article discussing the causes of the demise. In the middle of the discussion, a reader who called himself Richie took it upon himself to start trashing “The Hidden Game of Football” (which factors in because Bob Carroll, a coauthor of THGF, was also a contributor to PFW). Richie seems to think, among other things, that everything THGF discussed was “obvious” and that Bill James invented all of football analytics wholesale by inventing baseball analytics. It’s these kinds of assertions I really want to discuss.
I think the issue of baseball analytics encompassing the whole of football analytics can easily be dismissed by pointing out the solitary nature of baseball and its stats, their lack of entanglement issues, and the lack of a notion of field position, in the football sense of the term. Since baseball doesn’t have any such thing, any stat featuring any kind of relationship of field position to anything, or any stat derived from models of relationships of field position to anything, cannot have been created in a baseball world.
Sad to say, that’s almost any football stat of merit.
On the notion of obvious, THGF was the granddaddy of the scoring model for the average fan. I’d suggest that scoring models are certainly not obvious, or else every article I have with that tag would have been written up and dismissed years ago. What is not so obvious is that scoring models have a dual nature, akin to that of quantum mechanical objects, and the kinds of logic one needs to best understand scoring models parallels that of the kinds of things a chemistry major might encounter in his junior year of university, in a physical chemistry class (physicists might run into these issues sooner).
Scoring models have a dual nature. They are both deterministic and statistical/probabilistic at the same time.
They are deterministic in that for a typical down, distance, to go, and with a specific play by play data set, you can calculate the odds of scoring down to a hundredth of a point. They are statistical in that they represent the sum of dozens or hundreds of unique events, all compressed into a single measurement. When divorced from the parent data set, the kinds of logic you must use to analyze the meanings of the models, and formulas derived from those models, must take into account the statistical nature of the model involved.
It’s not easy. Most analysts turns models and formulas into something more concrete than they really are.
And this is just one component of the THGF contribution. I haven’t even mentioned the algebraic breakdown of the NFL passer rating they introduced, which dominates discussion of the rating to this day. It’s so influential that to a first approximation, no one can get past it.
Just tell me: how did you get from the formulas shown here to the THGF formula? And if you didn’t figure it out yourself, then how can you claim it is obvious?