Analytics in the NFL? Definitely useful, and so prevalent in the league that BMitch and Finlay have WaPo NFL numbers guru Neil Greenberg on every week to look at things by those numbers.
But that’s just what they are, numbers, and they don’t tell the whole story.
“I want to talk about the acceptance and emergence of advanced analytics in football, and how these numbers became gospel, and a real problem I have in the evaluation process,” JP Finlay said. “Pro Football Focus was originally built to be a tool for scouts, and it gained such immediate commercial success with fans because NFL fans are just so obsessed with the game, and there's a burning desire to be smarter than the guy you're arguing with on Twitter, and PFF allows these metrics for people to do that. I think that has value, but it's also incredibly speculative and not always correct, so it’s a good tool to have in your toolbox, but it is hardly gospel, and I think people have started to treat it such.”
But advanced analytics in college football? JP has NO time for that noise.
“College football is really, really different from pro football, and the level of competition that college teams face varies dramatically from week-to-week,” JP said. “In the NFL, even the bad teams are still giving you a baseline; but in college football, there’s 10 times as many teams and some are really bad, the offenses and defenses are so different and the rules are so different. So to the folks that want to send me PFF metrics based on college football, on sack rates and pressure rates and scramble rates and big-time throw rates and turnover-worthy play rates and all of these things: I'm not sure that we can definitively trust everybody that scouts and grades for PFF doing their PRO football product, so I sure as hell don't for college football.”
Obviously, the impetus of this is the Commanders having the No. 2 pick and likely taking a QB there, and
“I appreciate the discourse and you being part of it, but I want to be clear that when you send me the graph of Jayden Daniels’ scramble rate to his pressure and sack rate, I think we really need to chill out on trying to say that Daniels takes a lot of sacks,” JP said.
“Greg Cosell called into this show, and I put a lot of faith in Greg Cosell as not somebody that's just throwing a graph out there, and he talked about how good Daniels was as a pocket passer and doing things of that nature, so I don't really care about what most people say,” BMitch replied. “If you’re not at Greg's level, I'm not listening to you.”
JP isn’t that extreme, simply saying use that data with caution, but BMitch said ‘I have to believe that they're not giving you everything exactly as the pros will see it,’ and Finlay agrees, because there’s just too much breadth to the college game to really know what you’re looking at, or even for.
“I just don't think there is enough depth of coverage and consideration. Frankly, if you are going to give me analytics on college quarterbacks, I don't want to see any of them from the three cupcakes they play a year, because it moves the baseline so far,” JP said. “I would frankly only want to see it in conference play, but then how can you compare? I think it's overly simplistic to say, ‘Jayden did it in the SEC, which is the toughest conference’ – it is, but how do you compare that to the ACC? You're not close to comparing apples to apples, I think you're comparing apples to eggplants.”