Excellent NYT article by Michael Lewis

by El Payo on Dec 4, 2005 12:03 PM PST

The author of Moneyball has a fantastic article on the science of football sabermetrics up on the New York Times site.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

I love using actual statistical analysis over 'received wisdom' in baseball, and to see it extend to other sports is like a dream come true for me.

The article covers the player 'rejection and redemption' phenomenon that A's fans are so familiar with and makes me secretly wish that my poor, put-upon UCLA Bruins would fire Karl Dorrell and find a wunderkind like Texas Tech's Mike Leach to replace him.

Read and enjoy the article. It made football suddenly intriguing to me again. If you need a password, I'm sure there's one at bugmenot.com

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Run-and-Shoot II

The story made Leach's offense sound a bit like the run-and-shoot from the early 80s, which Mouse Davis popularized with Portland State (led by Neil Lomax), and which didn't really seem to work anywhere else (including Cal, where they scored a ton of point in the 1st 30 minutes of the 1st game of the '83 season, I think it was, and then sucked the rest of the year).

I think the problem that a team would face transposing the Texas Tech offense to the NFL is that, while the field stays the same size, the players are much, much bigger and faster (and more experienced). The advantages of spreading the field and forcing the defense to run wouldn't be nearly as pronounced.

"And Julio Franco is batting right-handed!" -- Wayne Hagin, A's radio play-by-play, mid-80s

by Nick on Dec 4, 2005 12:10 PM PST reply actions

I'd love to see a team try it.

But then the NFL is so institutionalized that I think they'd immediately call it an illegal formation or find a way to preserve the status quo.

"Meanwhile, Kirk Gibson's a coach with Detroit and I'm in the Hall of Fame.'" - Dennis Eckersley

by El Payo on Dec 4, 2005 12:52 PM PST up reply actions

I agree

But I'd be particulalrly curious to hear from someone who knows the NFL a little better than myself (I stopped following it very closley about 7-8 years ago) how much of the game within the game strategy tweaking goes on. Leach talks about running plays to see how the defense will react, and I assume that everyone in the NFL adjusts as the game goes on, but I'm not positive. Any thoughts?

by Doug on Dec 4, 2005 3:09 PM PST up reply actions

That's not me!

I'm in the same boat as you -- I don't really follow football much any more, and was always a much bigger baseball fan than football fan, anyway. You can look here for my recent rant on the NFL. I don't like the sport as much as baseball (or basketball, probably, for that matter), and the league makes the sport even less interesting.

I'm sure Leach's offense would work with, say, Indianapolis's talent, but that's not really a big deal, winning with that kind of talent. The question is, could he win with castoffs, has-beens, and never-wases? I guess it could work. Maybe the 49ers should hire him -- could their offense actually get any worse?

"And Julio Franco is batting right-handed!" -- Wayne Hagin, A's radio play-by-play, mid-80s

by Nick on Dec 4, 2005 3:47 PM PST up reply actions

Ah yes, the Run and Sh*t

Having sat through that opening game (was it against Texas A&M under the truly vile Jackie Sherrill) next to Nick, I share the vivid memory of the only 30 minutes in which the Run and Shoot (we all quickly had another name for it) worked at Cal.

Mike Leach, however, is a lot smarter than Mouse Davis. If nothing else, he's a helluva a lot of fun to have giving press conferences (he was our offensive coordinator during Bob Stoops's first season at OU). He's incredibly smart, and has a dry wit of a kind fairly unusual in football. And he's done pretty well coaching a program that, all else being equal, tends to be (at best) a distant third banana in Texas (behind UT and aTm, as well as, essentially, OU, which does a big chunk of its recruiting in the Lone Star State).

I've never really understood why the guy doesn't spend every waking moment trying to find an equally clever defensive coordinator. Though perhaps raw talent (i.e. size and speed) -- at least at the college level -- is more determinative on defense than offense, where Leach can seemingly turn every QB who shows up into a world beater.

Incidentally, I just saw Nick's earlier post on the NFL and I think he's entirely correct about it. Of course, much of what he says is true about big time college football, though there are a couple differences. First, if the NFL is a league dominated by parity, especially if you look at, say, ten season chunks of pro football history, college football is dominated by mismatches (as King Kaufman and other iconoclastic sports writers frequently point out). Among good college football teams, even those playing tough schedules only face even the remote possibility of losing about a third of the time. And entire conferences at the I-A level are essentially incapable of ever contending for a national title, no matter how many games they win. Secondly, at least in places like Norman, Oklahoma, college football provides a kind of collective experience that is otherwise entirely absent from the local culture (OU football games are literally the only place in the state where more than 50,000 people -- 84,000+ in fact -- gather in the same place at the same time.)

by GreenNGoldSooner on Dec 4, 2005 7:28 PM PST up reply actions

You beat me to it!

I read this article yesterday and had to wiat till today for the online version to be made available. Great article.

by Bambi on Dec 4, 2005 1:01 PM PST reply actions

Agree

I read it today and loved it. The part where he talks about starting up a pirate group for Tech students (in response to the A&M cadets) had me busting a gut laughing. Leach just shot up about a million places on my list of people I'd like to meet.

by Doug on Dec 4, 2005 3:07 PM PST reply actions

The one thing that really bugged me

was his having the team join together and recite the Lord's Prayer before a game. Texas Tech is a public institution, and I think it's totally inappropriate for public institutions to organize and enforce prayer this way -- and it's pretty clear that the courts would consider this a violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.

"And Julio Franco is batting right-handed!" -- Wayne Hagin, A's radio play-by-play, mid-80s

by Nick on Dec 4, 2005 3:50 PM PST up reply actions

Ah, but it is Texas,

and this is football. Having lived in TX for a couple of years, you'd have better luck trying to get Michael Moore elected governor than you would trying to completely squelch the pre-game prayer. From my point of view, it depends on the environment in which it is done, but this comes very close to not-AN-appropriate-conversation, so I will stop there.

by Doug on Dec 4, 2005 4:35 PM PST up reply actions

Not So Sure About the 1st Amendment Angle

Courts have banned such prayers before high school games. So far as I know, the SCOTUS has never considered a public college pre-game prayer. But the decision in the Texas high school football case from a few years back, IIRC, drew a pretty sharp distinction between high school kids and adults (which would include those in college). The former are seen by the Court as being much more coercible; the latter as being mature enough to resist any coercion implied by a formally voluntary prayer.

Funny story. Prior to this ruling, OU had a decades long tradition of having the crowd pray before each game (the prayer was carefully crafted to be nonsectarian, but everyone in Oklahoma knows what generic prayers are about in this state). Within a week or two of the SCOTUS ruling banning prayer before high school football games, our university's president, former U.S. Senator David Boren, announced that he was getting rid of the pregame prayer starting in the upcoming season (the decision was handed down in the spring or summer). Boren's announcement stressed that his hands were tied, and that this was just an unfortunate result of the way the court had ruled. This was, in fact, total BS. Boren had, very cleverly, created a phony excuse to do the right thing and get rid of a ritual that was wholly inappropriate at a public institution, but that would have otherwise been politically impossible to eliminate. One of his finest moments, IMO.

by GreenNGoldSooner on Dec 4, 2005 7:39 PM PST up reply actions