INTRO
The Super Bowl is coming up in a week, and I felt like I should write something about it. It's a big game. Unfortunately, I do not know a lot about football. I mean, as it is, I'm not a baseball analyst. But as little analytical ability as I happen to demonstrate for the sport of baseball, my football analysis is even weaker. So... not promising.
However, despite my limitations, I am very good at deferring to people wiser and more knowledgeable than I am. For example, the good folks at Football Outsiders, who produce the annual book Pro Football Prospectus. Providing analysis on their own site, as well as serving as resident experts for ESPN, the gang at Football Outsiders are at the forefront of football statistical analysis. Breaking down every single play in the league and measuring the success of each call using their proprietary DVOA metric, they shed insight on the intricate tactics and the hidden values of gridiron play. It's mandatory reading if you're a fan of the sport.
I've known the founder of Football Outsiders, Aaron Schatz, for a couple of years – well before I started writing for Bill James Online – as we competed in the same fantasy baseball leagues together (I finished in the basement every year. Gah.) And I have an even longer history with Bill Barnwell. Bill, an analyst and writer for Football Outsiders and ESPN, is an old friend of mine. I met Bill back in 2001, just as he was starting his freshman year in college. He's been over to my home hundreds of times, and we've been known to swap a dozen emails a day, trading ridiculous ideas and absurdist humor. He's a great guy to have around, except that I consistently drop a lot of money to him by gambling on cagefighting results. He's also won $125 from me in a hand of poker, which is probably the largest sum any of my friends has taken from me in a single hand. Other than that, great guy.
Bill was kind enough to give me an interview where he discussed his background, detailed his work for Football Ousiders, shared some quick thoughts on the recently completed NFL season, and broke down the Steelers and the Cardinals as the teams approach next weekend's championship showdown. I don't have a lot of insight on the Super Bowl. But fortunately, I know people who do. So please enjoy my conversation with good pal Bill Barnwell, writer, analyst, and resident expert for Football Outsiders and ESPN. --RT
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BACKGROUND
RT: Bill, thanks for taking the time to talk to me and the readers of Bill James Online. Can you tell me a little about how you got started and how you ended up at Football Outsiders.
BB: Let's see. Born in 1984 and raised in and around Long Island. Ran a website in junior high and high school about the Football Pro series of games from Sierra which I forgot to sell when it was actually worth something.
RT: I think that happened to a lot of people. Timing is everything.
BB: Started reading Baseball Primer as a high school student and that led me to Baseball Prospectus and their series of books, which led me to the Abstracts.
RT: Good. It's important to try and plug the Abstract whenever possible.
BB: Went to Northeastern University because it was the first campus I visited and got excited about. Majored in Computer Science until I realized that I was dreading going to all my CS classes and loved the media classes I was taking as electives. Switched to communications and wrote research papers on pro wrestling and the sexual roles of each of the characters on Full House. Graduated.
RT: Looking back at my academic career, I regret the fact that I did not write more papers on Superfly Snuka and Mr. Wrestling II. Uh, sorry about that. Please continue.
BB: Played poker. Took various odd jobs after the government outlawed online poker until I developed a resume with Football Outsiders. Ended up writing for IGN – the video game and entertainment portal based out of San Francisco – last year as their Sports Editor, and now I work as a full-time Football Outsider.
RT: It seems like a good fit for you. You do a great job over at Football Outsiders. Did you always plan on ending up writing about football?
BB: It was a weird path. I don't know if there'd ever been a point where football was my favorite sport; it was hockey as a kid, then soccer, and then baseball once I really started to get into sabermetrics.
RT: Again, always a good idea to plug sabermetrics whenever possible.
BB: I'd always had a fascination with the X's and O's of football and I'd been a fantasy junkie since, honestly, I was going with my dad to fantasy drafts at seven or eight, but if you'd told me five years ago that I was going to be a professional football writer, I'd have been real surprised.
RT: I know how you feel. When I write stuff for Bill James or for The Hardball Times, I have to ask myself how I got here, you know?
BB: To be honest, I think the particular things that interest me when it comes to writing about sports aren't necessarily specific to football.
RT: For example?
BB: One of my biggest causes these days is attempting to poke holes in the idea that sporting events have narratives – that every game has a story that needs to be broken down, that every player has some sort of game-long cycle that's defined at the very end. That's not a concept specific to football or even sports by any means.
RT: You want the game to speak for itself. I hear that. Some of these announcers drive me berzerk.
BB: The really exciting thing, specifically, when it comes to writing about football is the place that we're at relative to the sabermetric movement in baseball. We're in a place where we're beginning to gather enough data to answer questions that no one's been able to before -- and have a huge impact on the game in the process -- without having any idea what the answer is beforehand.
RT: That's definitely very cool. Football Outsiders is doing some really important work. No doubt they're a leader in the field.
BB: In most fields of research, I imagine that people are refining and improving on what's come before them in a very slight manner. We're taking huge leaps forward in both our and our readers' knowledge of football. That's really exciting to me.
FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS
RT: How did you get hooked up writing for Football Outsiders?
BB: It was, like a lot of things, a confluence of hard work and luck. I first spoke to Aaron Schatz (Note: Football Outsiders' creator and Bill's boss) in 2002, before Outsiders even existed. He'd posted something on Primer about looking for people for his fantasy baseball league, and I offered to join. I did not receive a reply. The next year, he did the same thing. I responded again, but for one reason or another -- I can't exactly remember why -- I didn't join.
RT: I also spent a couple of seasons playing fantasy baseball with Aaron. Pretty sure the highest I ever finished was 13th. It was humiliating.
BB: In 2004, he shot me an e-mail asking me if I wanted to take one of the open spots and I accepted. By then, Outsiders had begun to take off, so I thought it was pretty cool that I was in a fantasy league with the guy who wrote Pro Football Prospectus, but nothing more.
RT: So you managed to transition from an acquaintance to a colleague?
BB: A year later, they were looking for interns and I had some free time during my Northeastern-mandated internship, so I volunteered to do some basic work on data entry, looking for articles to link on the site, very menial stuff. I did that for about a year.
RT: Okay.
BB: During my last semester at school in the spring of 2006, they were working pretty heavily on the book and asked the interns if they could help out with some offseason content for FOX. I volunteered and put together a piece, Aaron liked it, asked me to do more writing for the site, I did another piece that was well-received, I contributed a few player comments to the book, and had my first regular column for the site a couple of months later. It's all grown from there.
RT: That's cool, man. It's a story about hard work and perseverance. That's always good to hear.
When you write for Outsiders, I am always amazed at the level of detail you guys come up with. It's impressive. What sort of databases do you work with.
BB: We actually have two separate databases that we combine at the end of the year. One is a database populated strictly by the NFL's play-by-play, which reveals the basics: Down, distance, yardage, the players involved, time, etc.
RT: So basically, every play from every game of the NFL season. Got it. That's helpful. What's the second database?
BB: Our other database is compiled by our Game Charting project, which – as you might imagine – owes its origins to Project Scoresheet. This data's compiled by a flotilla of volunteers who, off of the television broadcasts of NFL games across the country, detail 15 or so aspects of the game per play that aren't included in the NFL's play-by-play.
RT: And what goes into that? I imagine there's more observer input?
BB: That includes who was in coverage, how many blitzers and blockers there were, whether the quarterback moved out of the pocket, and all sorts of other nifty data points that allow us to analyze the game in entirely different ways.
RT: That's the kind of project that really allows you to discuss things with unprecedented depth.
BB: This is the third year we'll have that data available, so we're beginning to figure out which things are year-to-year trends and which are mirages. It's an exciting time.
RT: And I'm guessing that's how you guys calculate DVOA? Actually, let me back up – can you explain DVOA to some of the Bill James Online readers who might not be familiar with it?
BB: DVOA is our core metric; it takes every play and measures how both a team and the primary players involved – such as, the quarterback and the intended wide receiver on a pass – performed relative to the league average after adjusting for down, distance, situation, and opponent. This yields a percentage for both the offense and defense.
RT: It's definitely the best analytical measurement I've seen for measuring the performance of a football team.
BB: It's not a perfect stat by any means – it doesn't take into account the coverage, or how many guys were in the box, for example – but it's far superior to yards because of how it considers context.
RT: Right. It introduces multiple layers of sophistication to each play.
BB: A one-yard run on third-and-one against the Ravens is far more valuable than three yards on first-and-13 against the Raiders; DVOA takes that into account, but raw yards does not.
RT: What kind of revelations have you come across since you've started working with football analysis? For example, have you found any drastically undervalued aspects of the game, like the football equivalent of On-Base Percentage?
BB: I don't think football analysis has developed that sort of hugely-undervalued or overvalued stat yet. It's more just things that we've found that are specific to one branch of football, like how completion percentage and games started in college are an incredibly successful portender of success – or lack thereof – for quarterbacks on the pro level. How injuries tend to regress to the mean from year to year. How teams who do better on third down as opposed to first and second down also tend to regress in the subsequent season. How fumble recovery is luck, not skill. There's not really one thing that stands out to me as an analyst or a fan.
RT: Those are pretty good examples. Those are the kinds of things that people didn't really know until Football Outsiders did the research and came up with the conclusions.
THE YEAR IN FOOTBALL
RT: What were your thoughts on the recently concluded NFL season?
BB: I think it was a pretty fascinating year. The MVP – and, in reality, the most important player on the best team in the league – went down for the season before halftime of Week 1.
RT: Yeah, I know a lot of fans around here who went into mourning when Brady blew out his knee.
BB: Their opposite number in the Super Bowl went on a huge winning streak until their star wide receiver shot himself in the leg.
RT: I wouldn't recommend doing that. No matter how much you dislike your leg...
BB: Two of the worst teams in the league a year prior rode the wave of health over Plexiglass to the playoffs, while another regressed even further and became the first team in NFL history to go 0-16.
RT: I feel bad for the Lions until I realize they let Matt Millen run the team for nine years. Then I stop feeling so bad for them.
BB: The best team in the league by our statistics – the Philadelphia Eagles – were highly-regarded by most statistical analyses and (more importantly) by Vegas, but required three wins in the final week, including a miraculous win by Oakland over Tampa Bay on the road in a game where the Raiders had nothing to play for and the Buccaneers would make the playoffs with a victory. They proceeded to make it to the Conference Championship and lose to the Cardinals, who were among the worst teams in football after they clinched the NFC West.
RT: Kind of a roller coaster of a year.
BB: Football's a weird game.
THE SUPER BOWL
RT: Okay, so the big question is: Who do you think will win the Super Bowl and why?
BB: I have to watch more Cardinals games before I have a better idea of why, but at the moment, I'm going with the Steelers. They've been the better team over the first 20 weeks of the season. It's as simple as that.
RT: Okay, I expected something a little more... analytical than that (laughing.) Tell me about the Cardinals. How would you explain their success?
BB: Variance?
RT: Meaning?
BB: I mean, they played so poorly towards the end of the year that I literally cannot find a national article predicting that they'd win the Super Bowl. They've succeeded because of the brilliance of their personnel despite making some suboptimal decisions – think throwing to Larry Fitzgerald in double coverage on a flea flicker where nobody was fooled – and ran into Matt Ryan and Jake Delhomme having the worst days of their respective professional lives despite not getting much pressure.
RT: I would have thought that the worst day of Delhomme's professional life would be when he was named third-string behind Aaron Brooks and Jeff Blake. Is the Cardinals success comparable to the momentum the New York Giants built up last year on their way to winning the Suprt Bowl?
BB: Unlike the Giants last year, who basically had every bounce break their way en route to winning the Super Bowl, the Cardinals have outplayed teams throughout the playoffs. In a way, that makes it even more unlikely.
RT: It seems to me that Kurt Warner is the key for the Cards. What do you think of him as a player?
BB: One of the better quarterbacks in football. Can make virtually any throw you ask of him. Tough – as a skill as opposed to a narrative – stands in the pocket, continues to make reads and complete throws with traffic around him.
RT: Basically, he does all thing I can't do in Madden on the PS3. Why has he had such a hard time keeping a hold of a starting job in recent years?
BB: Fumbles a lot more than you'd like. Injury-prone, although I think a lot of that has to do with receiving little protection in Mike Martz's scheme as a Rams quarterback.
The fascinating thing about Kurt Warner is the case he makes for how inextricable context is to judging NFL performance, and how murky the idea of replacement-level is.
RT: That's an interesting statement. Can you explain a little bit more about the NFL replacement-level?
BB: Imagine a career in baseball where, say, a catcher spends a year or two putting up good numbers in Double-A, but he's old for his league, so he doesn't get any hype. He gets called up to the majors as Tony LaRussa's third catcher in St. Louis. One of the Molinas blows out his knee and our catcher gets the chance to start and he wins league MVP his first year with significant action.
RT: Okay. Sounds pretty implausible but I think I see where you're going with this...
BB: ...He spends two more years as one of the league's best players at any position before the injuries catch up with him and he spends two more seasons struggling dramatically with the Cardinals, mostly as a backup. He leaves after the year and ends up tutoring a young catcher in New York, and has a decent half-year, but gets hurt and loses his job. He leaves and ends up on a second-division team to play out the string. The team even acquires a great catching prospect the year after he arrives, and gives him the job shortly thereafter.
Our guy isn't going down without a fight, though; because of the prospect's proclivity for co-eds and a reputation that he doesn't prepare well, he wins his job back and proceeds to put up a season and a half of elite performance at the ages of 36 and 37.
RT: A weakness for co-eds will get you every time.
BB: Is it possible that the same sort of career could happen in baseball?
RT: No. No, I don't think so.
BB: I can't think of a comparable player at any position. Warner was judged as not good enough to play in the NFL coming out of college. He was a good quarterback in the Arena league, but he was the very definition of freely available talent at the game's most important position. He immediately emerged as the league's best player until he lost his job because of injuries, spent five years as essentially a transient, and then re-emerged as, arguably, the league's best player again.
RT: It's true. I love Kurt Warner's bio. It sounds like a sports movie pitched by a Disney screenwriter blitzed on acid.
BB: It's an astounding, fascinating career path.
RT: Okay, what about the AFC rep? What makes the Steelers so good?
BB: Nothing too fancy. They're a great all-around defense that's used the same principles for most of the past 16 years, a 3-4 zone blitz scheme that they've been able to populate with generation after generation of players.
RT: How do they get that kind of continuity?
BB: They scout and draft as well as anyone in the league, retain the players they can't replace, and have no qualms about letting the ones they can leave when they become free agents. They're one of the optimally-run franchises in the league, and amazingly, they somehow manage to succeed in the small market that the Pirates would need a salary cap to compete in. What a miracle.
RT: Is Big Ben as good as his hype? What are your thoughts on him?
BB: He's tricky. He's got a great, accurate arm, he's a great scrambler out of the pocket, but he holds onto the ball far too long and takes too many sacks on a yearly basis. The fact that he's mammoth keeps him healthy, but he's constantly nicked-up, even more so than other quarterbacks.
RT: It seems like he's won a lot of games with that team.
BB: It's funny to hear people speak about Roethlisberger as a "clutch" quarterback when he had the worst Super Bowl a winning quarterback has ever had. In the various permutations of what a clutch player is or supposed to be, it's somehow been decided that you can have an absolute howler in the biggest game of your life and still be clutch because you did well in the playoff games before that. I'm still not really sure how that works.
RT: That's the great thing about “clutch.” You can define it any way you want!
BB: He's also the only athlete to ever turn down an interview request from me because he was drunk.
RT: Huh. Really. I might edit that out of our interview.
*****
Once again, I would like to thank Bill Barnwell, good friend and football analyst for taking the time to talk to me and for lending his insights on the game. If you want to gain a better understanding of football and the beautiful strategy that drives the sport, I strongly recommend you visit Football Outsiders to get a crash course on the cutting edge in analysis. You won't regret it.
Okay. That's it for me. Load up on the popcorn and enjoy the big game!
If you have any thoughts you want to share, I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted at roeltorres@post.harvard.edu. Thank you.