Anyone interested in helping me crunch some numbers?

by ReginaldVelJohnson , Thursday, February 12, 2009, 18:49 (6088 days ago)
edited by ReginaldVelJohnson, Thursday, February 12, 2009, 18:55

Last summer (and really at points throughout Weis' tenure), the idea that we don't run enough to be successful has been discussed. Unfortunately, most of the arguments are based on raw stats, which likely only tell part of the story.

Well, I found an article at that time called "The Passing Premium Puzzle Revisited". In it, the author does a fairly impressive job of trying to use data (from the NFL) for the result of every play a team ran to determine what their optimal run/pass ration should be. In the end, he finds that a teams winning percentage seems to correlate (at least partially) to how closely they conformed to their "optimal" ratio.

I contacted the author at the time, and inquired about whether he had looked at NCAA stats. He hadn't because he wasn't sure where to get full play by play summaries. After telling them that they were available on places like ESPN, he was kind enough to provide me his spreadsheets that do all the complex calculations. The only problem is that in order to actually generate the data, you have to manually compile the result of every play for the teams you are analyzing.

I'm really interested to see what the data would show for CFB. It's a definite possibility that the trends will be different (or that there may be no trend at all). After all, there is some level of parity in the NFL, which likely reduces anomalous results. Still, my goal is to compile the data for all the teams in the 6 BCS conferences plus Utah and ND. Anyone interested in helping compile the data? A tedious job, for sure...but I've already done a few teams and it's not that bad.