What's the equivalent of on base percentage in football?
Spending selectively on space force positions makes sense, but you're not going to really stretch your NIL dollar that way...
Analytics has yet to totally “solve” football. We’ve seen a number of adjustments, particularly coaches realizing that investing in short-yardage schemes and routinely going for it on 4th-and-short is valuable. For everything they’ve done under brainy general manager Howie Roseman, I think the secret sauce to the Philadelphia Eagles is the tush-push and their aggressive utilization of it to maintain possession and convert scoring chances.
Somehow I haven’t seen a breakdown of how much advantage the Eagles get from their conversion abilities with the tush push but it has to be considerable. How many wins is it worth to be able to make short-yardage a guarantee virtually every time?
Beyond demonstrating that clearly, a smart way for analytics to find more purchase within the world of football would be for them to find a way to Money-ball player acquisition. For instance, the Oakland Athletics’ determination to trust collegiate results in key stats and to prioritize ball players in the big leagues who could (points to Jonah Hill)…
…get on base reliably, either via walks or hits. The big breakthrough they mention in the movie is to prioritize guys who are good at drawing walks. If everyone draws walks and takes lots of pitches, any time someone does get a hit (ideally a homer powered by the juicing that was plainly going on in Oakland), it was going to do more damage. They could also get past starting pitchers faster by racking up high pitch counts and get to the weaker pitchers in the bullpen.
In my last article on this topic, before the flag football diversions after my defensive scheme was clobbered by a 5-on-5 RPO, I talked about how teams could try to stretch their NIL/TV revenue dollars in buying rosters by prioritizing Space Force positions.
Today, we’re going to try and find something more like OBP. How can teams find hidden value and new strategies to buy wins more cheaply?