WSJ on PFF

In 2009, the site came to the attention of the Giants' Mr. Berger, an executive of the team since the early 1980s. As director of information, Mr. Berger is the team's official wonk, entering every play by every NFL team into a database in search of trends and tendencies that might be useful for Giants coaches.

It was while "messing around on Google" that Mr. Berger came across Pro Football Focus, and one statistic in particular struck him: player participation. The site listed the number of times each player in the NFL participated in a play during a game. That is a statistic the NFL tracks and releases only to teams—never to the public.

Doubtful about the accuracy of Mr. Hornsby's data, Mr. Berger checked it against the NFL data set and found Pro Football Focus was nearly perfect. Impressed, Mr. Berger sent Mr. Hornsby a congratulatory note.

this sounds cool until you actually think about it.

He was impressed that PFF was able to keep track of whether a player was on the field or not? Really.

C'mon football. Step into the present. Google's got a car that drives itself. If you're tracking whether a player is on the field I would expect very high accuracy.

To be clear, I'm not knocking PFF. I'm knocking the low expectations of NFL front offices.

4 months ago Fan in Thick and Thin 2 comments 0 recs |

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Thanks for the link FiTaT

Congrats to Neil and his team.

by Luke. on Feb 5, 2012 12:51 AM CST reply actions

this goes to the hubris of man, imo

people that are in sports, front offices and such, think that reporters and sports writers normally don’t know what they are talking about- and they extend that to people on the outside of even that circle to be even more worthless.

I don’t take it as him saying ‘no one could keep track of that stuff’. I take it as ‘I can’t believe some internet putz was this accurate’.

But maybe that’s just me-

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by KD Drummond on Feb 6, 2012 7:29 AM CST reply actions