We could sure use it. There's an intriguing article at the numbers-heavy "Football Outsiders" website talking about applying the standardized statistical principles that are now accepted and commonplace in both baseball --remember Moneyball? And the SABR crew? -- and professional football.
College football is sort of that last statistical frontier, the Alaskan wilderness for the numbers crowd. But instead of Sarah Palin being our tour guide, we have Football Outsiders.
The most frustrating thing about college football stats is that while one team is putting up good numbers against a good team, some other team is putting up great numbers against a terrible team. It's impossible to get too much information from statistical rankings because of that.
It's generally accepted that the numbers achieved in say, SEC play simply won't be on par with those in the Sun Belt or MAC. Given this, analysts and fans have adjusted as they can and the differences have been played out rhetorically in the ongoing public conversation of college football.
A new math -- similar to that which is now common for high level statistical baseball and football analysis -- may be coming to cut through some of that fog.
Sports
Atop the measures introduced in the article are the "+" concept and "EqPts". They're basically standardized measures not only to that particular season, but hopefully a historic measure that can be used to reasonably compare various teams' statistical performances to teams of any age and era.
There's much to be explored, but the article provides one example from last year. Looking at the top offenses in college football, they standardized performance to schedule and possession rate. In doing so they factored in "both efficiency and explosiveness".
Of little surprise, Florida sits atop the offensive rankings after having put together what I think was one of if not the finest offensive seasons in SEC history.
FO concludes: "First of all, kudos to Florida and to Heisman voters. Tim Tebow quarterbacked what was simply the best offense in the country according to these numbers, and since he basically was the rushing game ... yeah, Tebow gets some dap."
There's much more to be explored, but it looks like Football Outsiders is positioning itself to do much of the initial legwork. This is exciting stuff. You'll be seeing these numbers used a lot more as they become more refined and available.
(Via: MGoBlog)
