100% hot nerd action

This time without us. [Zoey Holmstrom]

[Hey, today's the last day of College Football Risk. Go show the other schools why MGoBlog's community is so unfairly large they need to keep making rules to nerf us.]

Every year I go way overboard in bracket prep. The result is all the data on all the tournament teams all laid out before out thusly:

Screenshot 2023-03-13 151314

For those of you who still have Excel, you get to automatically create YOUR VERY OWN SETHCHART IN EXCEL. That's a download link to the above. Put in the name of the team you want to look at, and it’ll show you the lineups and injuries and player data including the shot charts.

There's also a DUMBED DOWN GOOGLE SHEET VERSION I'm still working on if you can't get Excel to work and a simplified text only TEAM COMPARISON tool.

Those links allow you to download your own copy. FAQ for these graphics.

[After THE JUMP: how to use it and one or two findings.]

Oh man, this is not gonna help our IsoPPP+ [Patrick Barron]

I will get back on the UFR horse soon, promise, but every January/February I like to grab all of the year's play-by-play data, painstakingly repair the damaged bits, and recreate the information that (other) internet nerds used to. This all goes into those stat boxes I make for HTTV, which I've started working on in earnest the last few weeks.

image

While I'm at it I thought it might be useful to put together a companion piece to discuss the statistical profile of Michigan and other teams of interest. I also figured I could make it a reference point for those boxes in the future, and also explain some of my decisions.

Feedback is most welcome; I took Stats 404 in college and have been trying to figure out the rest as I go.

Resources:

  • College Football Data (CFBD). A good starting point. Free. You can download tons of raw stuff from them, including play-by-play and drive data. A lot of it's in admittedly rough shape, but they've done the hard part of scouring NCAA box scores.
  • Football Outsiders. Most stuff free. Home of FEI and its NFL equivalent, DVOA. Fremeau's Efficiency Index is based on drive efficiency.
  • 247 Database. Compare against rosters to see who's coming and going.
  • Pro Football Focus. Their grading is suspect but they have all kinds of useful snap data.
  • Bill Connelly. SP+ rankings remain the most predictive of all fancystats.

Also I did a data dump on Tempo.

[Hit THE JUMP for the deep nerding.]

[Patrick Barron]

UPDATE: A version of this published without the 2nd half of it and I didn't notice because I posted then ran out to pick up the kids.

A conversation in the last MGoPodcast on Rayshaun Benny's weird number (26) got me thinking that nobody has really put into words what certain jersey numbers mean in college football. I started working on a guide to what various numbers mean on various types of players, but 100 numbers is quite the undertaking, so I thought in the meantime I'd nerd out with some of the information I've picked up about jersey number assignment at Michigan.

[After THE JUMP: Max nerd]

LET'S NERD TF OUT

The early enrollees have hit campus and rather than making us sleuth through frames of 18-year-olds’ Instagram videos the program has helpfully put out a hype video. 

Stare at the chart.

Most of you intuit most of what's on there, but since they're really for people like me who need to see it to understand it, I figured we could use a tutorial to refer back to later.

The real nerds get into position changes, number changes, and walk-ons.

Isaiah Livers is the secret elite defender