Baseball, Advanced Statistics, and College Football

If you know me from over at SBNation, then you know that I’m a huge baseball guy. I follow it, read a bunch of articles, and generally follow what is called “Sabremetrics.” While I don’t follow it religiously, I still take the time to read objectively organized opinions about my favorite players. With that, I began to wonder: Why don’t we have things like that for college football?




Well, the answer is a bit simple. Most of the geniuses of the “industry” participate in professional sports: MLB, NFL, and NBA. College Basketball has KenPom. But yet there is no college football site (to my knowledge) that provides this. No 1st down efficiency, 2nd down efficiency, or anything like that. Sad, really. I’d love to see how Kevin Riley did on 2nd down and 5. I’m trying to change that, in my own small way.



I don’t have a magic computer. I don’t know everything I’m going to try and do. But I’m starting with something: Calculating the Efficiency of the Bears, Offensively and Defensively, on each down. Maybe we’ll be doing some more later on, like that WAR or stats like that. Who knows?



Hopefully, you will enjoy my attempt at providing more statistical analysis toward college football. It’s still a bit surprising that you don’t see more of advanced college football statistics around these days.