The Rise of Football Sabermetrics?

The Rise of Football Sabermetrics?

I don’t hate sabermetrics like some purists do. I think numerical analysis gives scouts, general managers and coaches another tool to evaluate a players potential. Several baseball teams live and die by it. The Boston Red Sox won World Series based on a sabermetrics philosophy. The Oakland Athletics continuously try to build and it they have been moderately successful.

In football, especially the pros, there is a rise in sabermetric stats but mostly it is the province of website weekend warriors. I’ve read various stats on different blogs that try to put a numerical value on a player or team’s production. The writers then try to use the numbers to project a player or team’s future production.

Unlike baseball, I’ve yet to read where scouts and personnel evaluators use the numbers. Scouts and coaches will admit nothing tells more about a player than game day film. So many aspects of football can’t be measured and boiled down to a number.

Combine stats are usually overrated but are gobbled up by fans and the media. Teams are more interested in letting doctors, shrinks and other people interview and examine a player at the Combine. A team already has a pretty good idea of a player’s time and strength numbers. At the Combine, they just want to verify what they already know or start looking at the player’s mental make up. They’ve had a whole college career of game film to study.

College pro days are also vastly overrated. Teams show up not to see the star players trying out but to take a look at other players that didn’t get a combine invite. Media and fans fawned over Colt McCoy’s perfect or near perfect completion rate at the Longhorn’s pro day. Coaches and scouts could have cared less. He was throwing in a controlled environment to his own receivers and not chased by a certain Nebraska defensive tackle. The game film of McCoy’s years as the Texas start will weigh more than all the stats of pro days and combines one can imagine.

The same was said of Tim Tebow’s throwing transformation after he changed his mechanics. Other than Josh McDaniels, no one was buying it. I read a quote in Pro Football Weekly from Mike Holmgren in which basically he said it is one thing to change mechanics but he feared Tebow would revert to old habits during game pressure in the NFL. He played one style his career at Florida and he can’t change easily in on off season. Yet McDaniels is banking on it. I’m guessing McDaniels will be unemployed in two seasons.

I just don’t see a switch to a numbers based scouting system in the NFL. There are just to many variables that go into evaluating a player. No one system will be able to capture what coaches are looking for. I’m not saying it can’t be done. Somebody might come up with a few stats that teams can use to filter out players and make the process more efficient. However, I don’t think football scouting will ever be replaced by a numbers game. Sometimes there is just as much art as science to evaluating a player.