One thousand games.
That’s how many are now in the Premium Stats database for you to delve into if you so choose. I didn’t know of the impending landmark until a couple of weeks ago when our Editor-In-Chief, Rick Drummond, sent a note to alert me. It’s not that I’m unaware of just how much work the team has done, it’s only that you rarely spend much time looking back, because you’re always too busy focusing on the future and the next step on the journey, or sometimes just the next game.
A Thousand First Steps
The first game in all those was Washington at the New York Giants on Thursday Night Football, but my abiding memory of that year was having so few resources we finished the season in August 2009; just in time to start the 2009 games about three weeks later.
We had a few more people by then (but still only about a quarter of those we have now) and our target for the first few weeks of that second year was to try and get the games completed before the next lot started. I recall we were just about finishing MNF on Sunday morning and there was certainly no time for articles. We managed to keep this up for three weeks and were just about to let things slip (we were doing 80-plus hours a week on analysis) when we got the first signal that things were about to get interesting.
I got an email which I initially took to be one of my friends joking around. It was from one of the teams telling us we were doing a great job, that they’d had a look at their games and that our player participation was about 99.0% accurate. They wanted to know from where we were getting the all-22 footage. In addition, they wanted us to send them the playtime sheets (and some other information) on a weekly basis. Could we help?
As much as anything, this was the signpost that told us we were going in the right direction and gave us the motivation to carry on with the ridiculous workload. Since then, when we just about got every game done by the following weekend, we’ve moved to getting everything up by close of play on Tuesday with Re-focused articles written for every game in that time too. Our player participation counts are now 99.9% accurate with every game being double-handed to avoid errors and over a quarter of the NFL teams take our data in one form or another.
Thousands of Scouting Reports
By the time each game is finished it’s taken just shy of 24 hours of effort to complete from up to five different people. The reward for all that work is that for each offensive and defensive play we can tell you which players were on the field, which position they played, how they lined up, and how they performed the task they attempted on that snap.
Our resident database expert and C.I.O. tells me all this equates to around 3.5 million data records, but all this effectively means is that we have a lot of information to substantiate what we say. In 2008 it allowed us to tell you that Jahri Evans was the second-best run-blocking right guard in the NFL, well before anyone else was talking Pro Bowls. In 2009, on the basis of only 167 snaps, we were able to document that Cameron Wake was already the third-best pass rusher around, and last year, when everyone else had Tom Brady at head of their 101 best player list, we went with Aaron Rodgers as our No. 1.
Why? Because the data isn’t just a lot of numbers on a spreadsheet, for each and every player it becomes the most detailed scouting report you’ll find anywhere. Those commentaries aren’t a lot of opinion based on how a player did in a particular game and how they may (or may not) translate to another team or develop under superior coaching, they’re a play-by-play account of game performance. They don’t take account of hype, conventional wisdom or the opinion of commentators–they are a testimony to pure delivery on the field of play and nothing else.
Continuous Improvement
So that’s it right? We just bang out another thousand games and wait for another three years to fly by? Nothing could be further from the truth; the ethos that everyone in PFF lives by is that of continuous improvement.
We still need to find that 0.01% in our player participation. We need to continue to work with the teams to get better at grading players. We have to get the games completed more quickly. We need to provide even more information in our premium site. We need to develop new ways of presenting the existing data and look at ways of collecting other data that is meaningful. The list is endless but that’s the fun part surely, the fact that one thousand games is just a way marker, another signpost on a journey that doesn’t end.
I hope you enjoy it even a fraction as much as I have.
Cheers,
Neil
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