INDIANAPOLIS — When former NFL executive Bill Polian recently dismissed the “Moneyball” ethos out of hand as it applies to football, it showed a distinct sense of Polian’s old-school scouting roots — but also, how the old school and new school don’t always meet up in the NFL. While tape will always rule in football, more and more teams are using advanced statistical analysis as a tie-breaker when many players are graded similarly. Between STATS, Inc, Football Outsiders, and Pro Football Focus — organizations that have all done custom analytical breakdowns for NFL teams — there’s a burgeoning market for the new wave of metrics. Polian was not convinced. “As a practical tool, Moneyball does not work in the NFL because there are very few undervalued players and no middle class because of our salary cap,” Polian told Tim O’Shei of Buffalo Business First in January. “There is no middle class in football because the minimum salaries are so high, and because of the salary cap, a player will reach a point where you can’t keep him. They go. They’re going to get big money elsewhere.” NFL general managers with current positions in the league, however, tend to see it differently, and many of them were happy to talk about it at the scouting combine. Atlanta GM Thomas Dimitroff and new Chicago Bears GM Phil Emery are two who truly believe that sabermetrics do help the scouting and player evaluation process. “It helps us on both sides — pro and college,” Emery told me on Thursday. “All testing and measurable data, you’re using that as a determining factor to maybe separating players. So you may have two players that are very similar, that might have the same grade. Or you might have five at any one position that have the same grade. Then that is a way to help you determine how you stack it, one through five. Those type of metrics – the psychological testing – all those things factor in terms of creating separation between players so if you pick them in the order from the highest to the lowest.” Emery has consulted extensively with several services, and as he said on New Year’s Day, it’s going to be a major part of the equation as long as he’s got a desk in the league. “I went to STATS Inc., [and] went through all the numbers,” Emery told the Chicago Sun-Times . “Went to Pro Football Focus, did all the numbers. I’m familiar with STATS Inc. We’re one of their contracted teams. Spent quite a bit of time with their people, not only their programmers but went to their offices, watched how they grade tape, how they triple-check all their facts. So I trust all their data, that’s it’s unbiased, that it doesn’t have my hands in it, that it doesn’t have our coach’s or scout’s hands in it, or anybody else in the league. They are simply reporting fact. Some ways to look at it is in a very Moneyball way, crunching the numbers.”
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From the combine: More teams are using ‘Moneyball,’ but tape still tells the primary story (Shutdown Corner)
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