Unveiling Revolutionary Football Statistics: A New Era in Analytics

You know, just when you thought that the stats of football could not get any greater, somebody comes along and does something that blows your mind.

Our guest tonight joins us to tell us about their new stat and their new website.

It's all coming up in just a moment.

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.

He's a pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And boy, do we have some positive football history and some current football stuff going on here.

That's really exciting.

The last couple weeks, if you haven't listened in, we have had Thomas hall of GridironIntelligence.com on telling us about his new site.

That's up.

And some great features are, are really making people geek out about the, you know, football stats and getting excited for the season here.

Thomas is joining us again tonight.

Thomas, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Thank you for having me.

I love being here.

It's been a lot of fun.

Yeah.

So for those listeners that you know, haven't caught an episode yet and, and you can always go back in the archives and listen to it on your favorite podcast provider or on YouTube.

Thomas, why don't you tell us what your site is and just real briefly what people can expect to find there.

Sure, yeah, it's Gridiron Intelligence.com it's two things.

One, there's some written content about football analytics but the main thing is self service access to play by play stats, exclusive data that we only have and you know, ability to slice and dice those that football data any way you want to add context to plays.

Instead of just looking at yards or looking at, you know, yards after contact or looking at air yards, you've got ability to see more about that play than ever before.

Yeah, very fascinating stuff.

And, and last week we talked a little bit about the passing game and some receiving routes and some really cool stuff that you're analyzing and sharing with those that are viewing it.

I guess maybe to, to counter that, you know, the defensive line is like sort of the, there's the, the first line of defense that the quarterbacks have to get through.

So maybe you could tell us a little bit some of the features that you're measuring there.

Yeah, so we'll start with run defense.

So I think this Is a, some of this is going to be exclusive data that I don't think I've seen anywhere else but defensive line penetration, right?

So when you have a run, a rushing play from the offense, how well does that defensive line hold up against the offense?

So if a defensive lineman has a negative defensive line penetration metric, right, that means they're getting pushed back off the line of scrimmage.

If they have a positive number, that means they're actually advancing towards into the offense.

So for example, if you have, and you can slice it by position, you can slice it by, you know, kind of where they lined up.

So you know, you know who's on the field, what's happening.

So if you have a nose tackle, the 330 pound nose tackle, and he has a negative average defensive line penetration, you know, he's getting, not doing his job, he's not holding his ground, right?

So that's, I don't never seen that anywhere before.

But we're logging the data so that, that we can bring that to you so you can understand just how good or bad some of these defensive linemen are against the run.

So if they're, you know, if they're, like I said, if they're lined up with the nose tackle and they're getting pushed back, you're going to see that the defensive ends are a little bit different.

They usually penetrate a little bit more.

But, but the nice thing is like, like I said before, you have that context.

You'll know what position they lined up at, you'll know if they should be getting a little bit more penetration or not.

And that will, that will add to your football knowledge with that defensive line penetration.

Well, we always like to expand our football brains, so that's, that's really something to nerd out on.

And some of these stats, that's, that's a really cool stat.

Yeah, absolutely.

I love it because you can argue with someone all day long about, well, this defensive lineman's better than this one, but it's all opinion, right?

By looking at film and saying, yeah, I, he just doesn't hold his ground.

Well, okay, well, let's hear some hard stats on it.

Okay, here's some hard stats on it.

He has got a half a yard negative penetration for the entire year.

Seems like he's getting pushed back a lot more than watching a few minutes of film will tell you.

So I think that's a key metric that you can add to your football knowledge, your football repertoire.

You know, whatever argument you may want to have down the road, it just Gives you more evidence to support any opinion or anything you've seen on film.

Now, going to pass rush, the other thing that we have.

So going back to the defense, so pass rush, we have two metrics that I don't think anybody else has.

So everybody has time to throw, right?

They know how much, how much time a quarterback has to throw.

So if it has a, if a quarterback scrambles around a lot, like we were seeing a couple of years ago, or still seeing with Russell Wilson, where he panics and runs around, he has this long time to throw.

Okay, well, what does that mean?

Is he getting pressured or is he just getting afraid and running around the pocket or running outside the pocket?

Well, we have time to pressure, so we know how fast pressure occurred.

So we can tell if a quarterback is facing greater than average time to pressure or if, you know, that particular play that you're looking at was much quicker than what usually happens.

And we also have time to scramble.

So did that quarterback take off when he felt that pressure and make something happen with his legs?

So now you can start to judge quarterbacks, you know, across the board a little bit differently.

So someone who steps up in the pocket when he's feeling pressure and delivers that pass may be more important than someone that gets scared a little early, runs out of the, scrambles out of the pocket, and then, you know, gets a one or two yard gain from scrambling or maybe, maybe not, maybe that was an important thing to do.

But now you're able to put more, more metrics behind some of those things so you can start to talk about it with a little bit more evidence, a little bit more knowledge about a quarterback rather than just time to throw.

Very, very cool.

And you know, I think the last couple segments we've talked about how this could be beneficial to fantas football players and boy, would this be great if you have, you know, two, you know, elite defenses on your team and you're trying to choose which one to play and you're playing against a running team and you're saying, oh, okay, hey, most of my guys have, you know, are getting that penetration.

I'm going to play these guys over these guys that are getting negative penetration in the running game or vice versa, and think there's so many aspects you can look at to help with your fantasy game as well as enjoy watching the game.

Absolutely.

And so each, each of those metrics apply to the person that put pressure on too.

So whatever defender that you have that's either putting pressure on or sacking that quarterback, we have time to sack as well.

You know how fast that defensive lineman got to the quarterback.

So maybe that maybe that defensive lineman is slower than normal and just happens to be lucky because somebody else is maybe moving him out of the pocket.

He gets a sack or maybe super fast off the ball and he's creating something that they, that quarterback hasn't seen yet.

So a lot of knowledge you can glean on that, those, those few metrics that we're adding to this now.

I guess just a quick question.

How, how does it, it would probably impact, let's say it's an edge rusher and they drop back into pass coverage.

That, that would count as almost a.

Negative to them or that wouldn't count as a negative.

So the defensive line penetration comes on the rundown.

Okay.

And we know who actually rushed the passer.

So we know who lined up as a defensive lineman.

We know where every defender lines up.

But if that defensive end drops into pass coverage, that he's not going to be counted as a pass rusher on that play.

So that won't go into any of those metrics.

So if he goes and defends the pass, then yeah, sure, that'll, that'll come up in, in, you know, past defense or, you know, if you want to see who is defending the receiver on that play, he'll that that player will come up, but not in a, it's not going to count against them in defensive line penetration or, you know, any of the other pass rushing metrics because he's not a pass rusher.

Well, that's really refreshing to hear that you're actually grading them on whatever their, their job is for that particular play, what their assignment is on that.

So very, very cool.

Very cool.

So, Thomas, why don't you tell us again where folks can enjoy some of these features and check them out and, and what you got going on here?

Yeah, go to GridironIntelligence.com click on Stats and Analytics and.

And then just take the time to look through the dashboard.

It's sample data right now.

There's not, it's not a bunch, but it gives you a good idea of what's to come.

And there's a lot of stuff there, but it's not a whole season is what I'm saying.

Go check it out and then sign up.

That way you'll know.

I'll give you an, I'll send you an email.

You're not going to get spammed with marketing or anything like that.

I'm going to be sending the email to remind you hey, this is, it's up now.

Let's, you know, if you want to sign up because you liked it, then you can sign up.

But yeah, definitely, definitely hit that sign up button.

It'll send.

It's just an email that comes to me.

So no, no, no.

You know, telemarketers will, we'll be after you or anything like that.

But yeah, go check it out, see what you think.

Always fun stuff to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So folks, great deal.

You get to have a little bit of fun with, with your buddies having more knowledge.

They can catch on and find out the site too.

And you know, it's just a great deal to get in on the ground floor and even help put some input into.

Maybe we'll change the way that folks are looking at football analytics here on gridironteligence.com Thomas, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

I enjoy coming onto these shows for sure.

And K, we would love to have you on again next week too.

Great.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our website, pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football with our many articles on the good people of the game as well as our own football comic strip, cleet marks comics.

Pigskindispatch.com is also on social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and don't forget the Big Skin Dispatch YouTube channel to get all of your positive flow news in history.

Special thanks to the talents of Mike and Gene Monroe, as well as Jason Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

This podcast is part of the Sports.

History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear.

Of your favorite sport.

You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com.