A Deep Dive into Gridiron Intelligence: Transforming Football Data

We have a special edition tonight where we get to talk to Thomas hall of GridironIntelligence.com as a special statistic that he has for this upcoming season that you're not going to want to miss.

Thomas is up in just a moment.

To tell us all about it.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another Thursday evening where we get to visit with our friend thomas hall of gridironintelligence.com and he's going to share some of his features that are on Gridirontelligence.com that we can enjoy this football season.

Thomas, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Well, thank you for having me back.

I really appreciate you bringing me on and I always have a good time when I'm here, so thank you so much.

Yeah, folks, if you, you missed it last week we had Thomas on and we explained or Thomas explained what gridiron intelligence is all about and where he wants it to go and how we can enjoy it this coming football season and now on, on some stats that he has in there.

So, and great offer on there.

So Thomas, why don't you just remind us again where you can get this information at and you know what, what your, your plans are here for it.

Sure, yeah.

Gridironintelligence.com just type that in.

It'll take you right to my site.

And if you want to check out the sample data with the sample dashboard of a lot of these metrics that we're going to be talking about, go to the stats and analytics page, check out the dashboard.

It's, you just got to scroll down a little bit and you can, you can select what category you want to look at, whether it's passing or defensive, you know, run defense, pass defense, pre snap formations, all sorts of things that, that'll be there and grades will be there eventually as well.

I think I forgot to mention this last time I was on, once the season starts and we get enough data, we're going to start applying grades, analytic grades.

So it's not, it's not based on, you know, my opinion, it's based on analytics.

So it's across everybody equally.

And we're actually, I know a Few experts in the field that I'm going to be able to talk to, to really vet what I've got for those grades and make sure that they're solid.

Yeah.

And you know, I think one of the biggest things, if you go to anybody in the world that has any knowledge of American football and you ask them to sort of explain an image, when you hear the word football in the American sense there, somebody's going to be imagining probably somebody throwing a forward pass, somebody catching the ball.

And that's something that you have that's very interesting on your site.

Maybe you can explain this, this feature that you have coming up.

Sure, absolutely.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So we have a lot of exclusive data that we, because of how we log it and when we're, when we're there logging the data.

And one of them is called actual past distance.

So think for example, air yards, that's pretty much what everybody has right now in order to kind of judge a quarterback's ability to throw at different distances.

And air yards, as we all know, or maybe some of you don't, is basically from the line of scrimmage, how far that ball travels to its target and minus anything past the goal line.

So if it there, you know, if on the 10 yard line they throw to the 20, that's 10 air yards.

The problem with that is it leaves a ton of information out of that play, that pass in particular.

So you, all you can know is it went 10 yards in a straight line from the streamer.

That's it.

Well, with actual pass distance, we can tell you how far the ball actually traveled.

So from where the quarterback threw to where the receiver caught it, or that targeted receiver was when that ball was supposed to be on an incomplete pass.

So you can compare passes across the board.

So for instance, say someone threw a 20 yard air pass.

That's, you know, that's great.

Straight line in the middle, 20 yards.

Okay.

That's not a super difficult pass to make for the most part.

Most quarterbacks should be able to do that.

Now you throw a 15 yard deep out that air yards.

Only 15 yards it looks like, it looks like, you know, it's a not quite as good of a pass, but that's one of the hardest.

That actually is the hardest pass a quarterback can make in the NFL.

It travels over 30 yards if they're throwing from about the middle of the field to that sideline.

So with actual pass distance, you'll know that that that pass actually traveled farther than the 20 yard air yard pass that you would see Normally.

So that gives you more information to, you know, look at a quarterback differently.

And on top of that we, we can estimate.

Estimate, not an estimate.

We can tell you what that route was that that targeted receiver ran.

So we could say it was a deep out.

So you can compare quarterbacks across the NFL by how good they are throwing that deep out.

Excuse me, throwing that deep out.

So you just filter.

Okay, I want to know how good is the quarterback throwing a deep out?

Okay, here it is.

Here's your passer rating, here's your incompletion percent.

Here's how many times you've been intercepted just on that single type of route.

And that's going to tell you how good a quarterback really is.

Who can throw that deep out is much better than throwing a 30 or 40 yard bomb, which most quarterbacks can make that throw.

Although I would say distance, the farther you throw the ball, the harder it is, of course, but not all passes are created equal, for sure.

Yeah, so that's, that's really interesting.

So you're, you're actually measuring the, the linear travel of the ball from the quarterback's hand to its target, or at least from the line of scrimmage to, to his target.

You know, it's from his hand spot that he throws, not the line of scrimmage.

Okay.

So the, the other way that it's being on some of the competitions out there right now is from the, the line of scrimmage to where the receiver catches it.

Wow.

Okay, that is, that's important.

Yeah, it's very important.

We also have real air yards, which is just like air yards, but it's from where the quarterback threw.

So if he, you know, took a seven step drop, he's quite a ways behind the line of scrimmage.

So that's another, you know, eight, nine yards that you're tacking onto the air yards.

If you want to compare the real distance, the real air yard distance.

So there's a few ways you can slice and dice it, but the actual pass distance is going to tell you so much more about a quarterback than pretty much any other, you know, air yard type of metrics you can find.

Yeah, that's.

Well, that's kind of mind blowing.

That's, that's.

Now how, how does you do that?

Just, you're like watching a lot of film and you're taking a lot of notes or.

Well, interesting.

The way we log it, we're able to, I mean, go back to the Pythagorean theorem, right?

We can, we can calculate the Hypotenuse, so to speak.

And we, so we know where the ball was thrown from where it was caught, how far it was actually thrown.

We can calculate that analytically so we don't have to, we don't have to write down, okay, traveled this far or anything like that.

So it, you know, it's pretty much you.

We log it, you plug it into the dashboard, it calculates it, and, you know, so, so basically, after we watch that game and log that data, it's available almost as soon as we get that data logged.

And so you can slice and dice those as soon as that.

As soon as that happens.

All right, all right, kids out there, when you're saying that math is boring and you're having that A squared plus B squared equals C squared, well, remember that because you can put that into a football context here and get some neat stuff out of it.

Like, like Thomas was doing.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Now, you told me earlier there you have sort of an accompanying feature that on the receivers that are going with this passing, actual passing reading the.

Are you talking about the routes that they ran?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yes, that's exactly right.

So again, we're logging this data in a way we can, we see where that receiver started, where that receiver ended, and, you know, we can calculate if the, you know, how fast that quarterback threw the ball.

So we can tell you if that route was a deep out or a quick out or a slant or something like that, because we know where they started, where they ended.

Now, if a quarterback has to scramble, which we know because we have time to scramble, time to pressure, time to throw.

If it, if they.

Their time to scramble, pressure and time to scramble happens quickly and they've got to move, then, you know, you're not going to be able to know what route they are they're actually running because receiver is going to be running all over the place trying to get open so that the quarterback who's under stress running around can, can make that pass.

But for the most part, on a regular play, as soon as that quarterback hits the last step in his drop, he should be throwing the ball.

So we know how many steps are in that drop, we know how fast he's thrown that ball, and we know where each player started and ended on that pass play.

So we can calculate the.

The route pretty much, pretty much every time, as long as there's not some other circumstances that are happening now.

I mean, some of this data you got to, you know, if you want to know every route that a receiver has run across the entire field, then you're going to have to watch the film.

But if you want to know the targeted receivers route, then we'll, we'll have it most of the time.

Now how do you measure that?

Like if, if you have a, somebody in motion and they go out, you know they're in motion, do you just count where they are when the ball snapped or.

Yes, yes.

So that's the, the pre snap formation.

If someone's goes, and if someone goes in motion, we log who's in motion and then we know from that second before the ball is snapped where that receiver is.

So that we can calculate from the time that it takes to throw the ball to where it ends up that, that route.

Because I mean really every route has a, a certain path and a certain amount of steps and a certain amount of time that you have that that receiver has to run that in, in order to be able to complete the pass.

So if they're running the wrong route, then you know the ball's not going to go anywhere close to them.

They're not going to have a target.

You're not even going to be a target in that situation.

But for the most part we'll know what that route is.

And you'll also know why maybe the quarterback was angry with that receiver on the sideline when you.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Well, we'll calculate drops too.

So we'll know if they've dropped the ball.

That'll, that'll make a quarterback pretty mad, I'm sure as well.

Right?

Yeah, you get the Tom Brady scowl when they go over the sideline, the camera pans on them.

You'll know right away.

Right.

Well, very, very interesting.

Why don't we give folks an opportunity again and again folks, if you're driving or you don't have a pen and pencil right now we're going to put this information in the show notes of either the YouTube video or the podcast notes and on pigskindispatch.com so you can get to Thomas's site.

But Thomas, why don't you go ahead and tell us where to find these features at.

Yeah.

Gridiron intelligence.com and go to stats and analytics and you can see that sample data in the dashboard.

And where you can see the routes in particular is go to the pre snap formation and you just click on, click on one of the players.

It will pop up all of the information on that play.

Also the.

We have a pass to, from and to go there.

You can see it as well there.

It has a wealth of information in that tooltip when you click on it.

So check it out and read through all the the data.

And the nice thing too is if you get in there early, you sign up, we're giving you the opportunity to give us feedback and tell us other metrics that you would like to see.

And we can calculate pretty much anything.

So get in there, check it out, sign up, and I think you'll be happy with the product once we roll it out.

Well, Thomas, this is incredible stuff and we're glad that you're doing this and helping to to enhance our football watching and our preserving history too by by doing this, making it a lot of fun both in watching a game, fantasy football and so many different aspects of it.

And we really appreciate you coming on here and telling us about it and we'd love to have you on again next week to talk about another as aspect of gridiron intelligence.

I'd love to come back on.

So thank you so much.

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