HC Candidate/Rumors/Info Thread

[MountainBuzzMan]

What statistics are out there for coaches that you can use to play “moneyball”? We already know how to do it. It rhymes with nipple auction (triple option for those who can’t put it together.) Money ball works in baseball because the season is so long, the numbers and averages are going to level out pretty reliably. It’s basically impossible to apply that level of detail to a 12 game season. Especially when you’re looking to do it with the coaches, not the players themselves. Moneyball isn’t fool proof, either. It works when you get it right, (Tampa Bay Rays), but when you get it wrong, you look like the 2022 Oakland A’s who finished 60-102. Development and culture are still large aspects of what makes moneyball work. It’s not just picking numbers out of a pile.

If you wanted to build a staff based completely on “moneyball,” you’d start with hiring a head coach who has played for and won championships at a lower level, G5, FCS, D2, even down to NAIA. Then you’d look at the top coordinators, or other head coaches from lower levels who call their own plays on one side of the ball and hire them to be your coordinators. Fill in position coaches with more top coordinators from lower levels, maybe even taking some of the best high school coaches to fill positional roles. You really think you’d be able to sell a staff like that to a fanbase? To recruits? To your existing players? It could work, and it could work great, but that’s taking a huge risk of embarrassing your program if it doesn’t work.

Thats where the smart part comes from. What leading KPI's can be created for the different position coaches that provide insight.

 

[JacketOff]

Thats where the smart part comes from. What leading KPI's can be created for the different position coaches that provide insight.

But it’s never going to happen, nor could it ever really work. You’d have to have an administrative staff telling a head coach who he could hire. For somebody who maybe has never coached P5 or even FBS football before, bringing in a staff entirely made up of other P5 virgins sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

But it’s never going to happen, nor could it ever really work. You’d have to have an administrative staff telling a head coach who he could hire. For somebody who maybe has never coached P5 or even FBS football before, bringing in a staff entirely made up of other P5 virgins sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

You are thinking too inside the box. Can't never did anything.

it is never going to happen. Until it does. So many na sayers say so much about so many things until they are disproved. Just the fact of being human. Then it seems normal. Just takes one to disprove all the Never People

 

[JacketOff]

You are thinking too inside the box. Can't never did anything.

it is never going to happen. Until it does. So many na sayers say so much about so many things until they are disproved. Just the fact of being human. Then it seems normal. Just takes one to disprove all the Never People

Go ahead and try to build a “moneyball” staff on your own of just current NFL coaches to coach a current NFL team. A league where every team is more or less equal talent and resources wise with way fewer variables than college football. The very first thing you have to do is find a head coach who is willing to let the front office, or administration, or owner, or whoever else in an authority role entirely pick his staff for him. Good luck finding anyone who would consent to that. That’s a dumb thing to even consider anyway. But let’s say you find a poor brave soul willing to do it. What exactly are you going to “moneyball” about a coaching staff? Coaching is about leading and having a strong relationship with your team as much as it is about anything X’s and O’s related. You think you can just pick 11 random coaches who are all going to magically get on the same page about what direction the team needs to be going?

It’s infeasible, and impossible to expect something like that to work. Moneyball isn’t possible in football like it is in baseball, or even basketball. There are far too many variables involved, and not enough games to see the fruits of your labor, especially when your entire strategy is centered on the coaching staff and not the players anyway.

 

[4shotB]

Moneyball isn’t possible in football like it is in baseball, or even basketball. There are far too many variables involved, and not enough games to see the fruits of your labor, especially when your entire strategy is centered on the coaching staff and not the players anyway.

I tend to agree with you here and think the moneyball stuff is overly simplified and romanticized due to (like so many other things) Hollywood and a movie. Consider this paraphrased quote, taken from John Bogle's book, 'The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" (I highly recommend it if you are interested in analytics and investing), Wiley and Sons Publisher, copyright 2017. "it takes between 20 and 800 years of data to prove statistically that a fund manager is skillful and not just lucky. To have a 95% confidence level, you would have to have a 1,000 years of data. For a 75% confidence interval, the sample size must be between 16 and 115 years." The source of this quote is Ted Aronson. See page 137 for the exact quote.

My point...I think there is a gross oversimplification to this 'moneyball" process and GT football. I think the idea that we can hire a savant of football (think John Bogle or Warren Buffett) and let him "think" our way to gridiron greatness appeals to our love for problem solvers and thinkers. We love to think we can outwit our opponents at the "lowly" football factories and not follow models that have proven to work. One logic error I find in this thought process is no one seems to know how to identify who these people are. We do not have hundreds of years of data to work with. we just scrapped the "Music Man" approach to greatness....thank goodness.

 

[cpf2001]

Moneyball as done by the A’s was all about doing things differently more than “better in an absolute sense.”

What skills are undervalued so you can get them more easily and on a lower budget with more constraints? But once everyone else starts copying you, you need to find a new set of skills to go after because otherwise you’re right back to being outbid.

Hard for me to imagine a better example when it comes to coaching than Paul Johnson (Leach has been more widely copied) and, well, not everyone wants to do it differently, even as fans! A’s fans didn’t like it either back then, and even today “but they never won the World Series” is still a popular complaint.

 

[roadkill]

I tend to agree with you here and think the moneyball stuff is overly simplified and romanticized due to (like so many other things) Hollywood and a movie. Consider this paraphrased quote, taken from John Bogle's book, 'The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" (I highly recommend it if you are interested in analytics and investing), Wiley and Sons Publisher, copyright 2017. "it takes between 20 and 800 years of data to prove statistically that a fund manager is skillful and not just lucky. To have a 95% confidence level, you would have to have a 1,000 years of data. For a 75% confidence interval, the sample size must be between 16 and 115 years." The source of this quote is Ted Aronson. See page 137 for the exact quote.

My point...I think there is a gross oversimplification to this 'moneyball" process and GT football. I think the idea that we can hire a savant of football (think John Bogle or Warren Buffett) and let him "think" our way to gridiron greatness appeals to our love for problem solvers and thinkers. We love to think we can outwit our opponents at the "lowly" football factories and not follow models that have proven to work. One logic error I find in this thought process is no one seems to know how to identify who these people are. We do not have hundreds of years of data to work with. we just scrapped the "Music Man" approach to greatness....thank goodness.

I only saw the movie and didn't read the book, but what I recall about "Moneyball" was that the process was not about hiring savants, but rather, as @cpf2001 stated, looking for undervalued skills. It also involved an analyst who advised the coach on how to do this. I believe the coach still selected the players or at least was in the decision process. This approach could be applied to selecting both coaches and players. I would expect it to be more difficult to apply to football players due to the many different positions involved and the relatively clearly defined valuable skillsets for each position.

 

[JacketFan137]

i think if there was a “moneyball” solution in college football then someone would have found it by now and applied it to a school like duke, colorado, kansas etc that had insanely long droughts with their teams regular winning 1-4 games a season for a decade+.

the option=moneyball thing i think isn’t really conclusive as we’ve only seen it in power 5 once this century and it’s with the guy who many consider the best option coach of them all. even then his win percentage was about the same as the guy before him. i don’t think there is any guarantee that a bohannon, monken or whichever other coach comes in and a money ball approach works

the true “moneyball” solution is to just find a coach who is good regardless of their system because ultimately the coach dictates anything coming into the program as far as recruits and funds from boosters

 

[BainbridgeJacket]

I tend to agree with you here and think the moneyball stuff is overly simplified and romanticized due to (like so many other things) Hollywood and a movie. Consider this paraphrased quote, taken from John Bogle's book, 'The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" (I highly recommend it if you are interested in analytics and investing), Wiley and Sons Publisher, copyright 2017. "it takes between 20 and 800 years of data to prove statistically that a fund manager is skillful and not just lucky. To have a 95% confidence level, you would have to have a 1,000 years of data. For a 75% confidence interval, the sample size must be between 16 and 115 years." The source of this quote is Ted Aronson. See page 137 for the exact quote.

My point...I think there is a gross oversimplification to this 'moneyball" process and GT football. I think the idea that we can hire a savant of football (think John Bogle or Warren Buffett) and let him "think" our way to gridiron greatness appeals to our love for problem solvers and thinkers. We love to think we can outwit our opponents at the "lowly" football factories and not follow models that have proven to work. One logic error I find in this thought process is no one seems to know how to identify who these people are. We do not have hundreds of years of data to work with. we just scrapped the "Music Man" approach to greatness....thank goodness.

I remember building a software to predict movement of a specific currency exchange rate. I got it to be 90%+ accurate in its predictions. The problem: it took 8 hrs to process the data required to predict the next 30 minutes of trading. It was fun looking back at it and being like "sure enough, I could've made some money on that." It was worthless at predicting extended trends, it basically was just back calculating what the combined bot algorithms would do during certain responses. Never could get it to work quickly enough to be useful.

 

[leatherneckjacket]

the true “moneyball” solution is to just find a coach who is good regardless of their system because ultimately the coach dictates anything coming into the program as far as recruits and funds from boosters

That is not moneyball. That is just finding a good coach. Moneyball in college football would be about roster management and recruiting, and would include targeting players that have physical dimensions or skill sets that most richer programs would find undesirable, but fit together in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of the individual parts. No one has really done it, but CPJ was the closest.

 

[85Escape]

I remember building a software to predict movement of a specific currency exchange rate. I got it to be 90%+ accurate in its predictions. The problem: it took 8 hrs to process the data required to predict the next 30 minutes of trading. It was fun looking back at it and being like "sure enough, I could've made some money on that." It was worthless at predicting extended trends, it basically was just back calculating what the combined bot algorithms would do during certain responses. Never could get it to work quickly enough to be useful.

Yeah, that's an arms race. I bet it could do the calculation fast enough now. But unfortunately someone has a super-computer doing it faster, and your predictions will fail as they'll make the moves before you do

 

[GTNavyNuke]

Yeah, that's an arms race. I bet it could do the calculation fast enough now. But unfortunately someone has a super-computer doing it faster, and your predictions will fail as they'll make the moves before you do

And you have to have a computer next to the exchange computer to front run others. I was very successful in the 90s trading but that advantage disappeared. Glad I made what I did when q did.

Oh well, the allegory is that college money sports are going to change more and faster. I think the reported $30M NIL money at Miss State is only the beginning.

I hope for a few more years of competitive baseball and then it will be gone too.

 

[JacketOff]

I hope for a few more years of competitive baseball and then it will be gone too.

It’s already starting to change. Tommy Tanks would have been an absolute legend at NC State. But LSU comes in and offers him 6 figures and he’s gone.

The teams who have supporters willing to spend absurd amounts of money to buy the best players will become the only ones who can compete for championships. I don’t see how it can go on for much longer. There’s going to have be a divide between the “professional” level programs and the “amateur” level programs. And schools are going to have to make an ethical decision on whether they want to get into that professional level arena or not. At some point those schools’ athletics programs won’t even be affiliated with the actual university anymore.

 

[roadkill]

It’s already starting to change. Tommy Tanks would have been an absolute legend at NC State. But LSU comes in and offers him 6 figures and he’s gone.

The teams who have supporters willing to spend absurd amounts of money to buy the best players will become the only ones who can compete for championships. I don’t see how it can go on for much longer. There’s going to have be a divide between the “professional” level programs and the “amateur” level programs. And schools are going to have to make an ethical decision on whether they want to get into that professional level arena or not. At some point those schools’ athletics programs won’t even be affiliated with the actual university anymore.

Unfortunately, it’s not just an ethical decision for schools like tech and our peers. It's going to be impossible for many schools to make the cost side of the equation balance and still compete for championships.

I hope that sometime in the future, perhaps within a generation, there will be a realization that the current NCAA sport model needs to drastically improve competitiveness in order to sustain interest. The pros realized this some time ago and thus implemented mechanisms such as salary caps and draft preferences. Colleges will have a more difficult time implementing similar schemes but will need to come up with something to achieve better parity. If not, then the result will be as you predict in that we will have a tiered divide between programs.

 

[danny daniel]

Out of the box thinking: To get parity you have to level out the money....almost impossible to do but some form of it ( salary caps or recruiting expenses or?) needs to be examined. One way to level out the talent is to lose a scholarship for every win or something like that. There is upside in that the "havs" will get less and the "hav nots" will get more; the downside is some negative incentives come into play along with maybe upsetting some true competition.

 

[Randy Carson]

Without an NIL cap, we'll have the Yankees and the Pirates and everything in between.

Why not just let the NFL teams set up a farm system and be done with the inconvenience of players having to pretend to go to class at all?

 

[forensicbuzz]

Without an NIL cap, we'll have the Yankees and the Pirates and everything in between.

Why not just let the NFL teams set up a farm system and be done with the inconvenience of players having to pretend to go to class at all?

NFL doesn't want to pay for it. Don't want to incur medical expenses either. Why would they do anything other than let the colleges pay for everything and reap the fruits?

 

[cpf2001]

Honestly the players wouldn’t want that either because without the (ever-stretched) college affiliation, minor league sports just don’t bring in that much money or pay that well.

Maybe you keep a lot of it if you spin it out from today’s programs, but I think you’d quickly lose a lot of the interesting aspects like different strategies and systems, since everything would explicitly just be a development league and how many fans would really stick around for something more directly “the same, just lower skill levels”?

 

[forensicbuzz]

Honestly the players wouldn’t want that either because without the (ever-stretched) college affiliation, minor league sports just don’t bring in that much money or pay that well.

Maybe you keep a lot of it if you spin it out from today’s programs, but I think you’d quickly lose a lot of the interesting aspects like different strategies and systems, since everything would explicitly just be a development league and how many fans would really stick around for something more directly “the same, just lower skill levels”?

I think if there were unaffiliated minor leagues, there would be $0. The money is there at the college level because of the school association. Take that away and there's nothing. The players think it's about them; it's not. It's about the school and the reputation of the school. After that, there is nothing. Without the school name, there's no money and little interest. The networks know that. The universities know that. The players know that. The fans know that. The politicians know that. What's going to happen is the money grab is going to cause it to eventually collapse and something very different (and probably not as good) will come out of the ashes.

 

[SOWEGA Jacket]

I think if there were unaffiliated minor leagues, there would be $0. The money is there at the college level because of the school association. Take that away and there's nothing. The players think it's about them; it's not. It's about the school and the reputation of the school. After that, there is nothing. Without the school name, there's no money and little interest. The networks know that. The universities know that. The players know that. The fans know that. The politicians know that. What's going to happen is the money grab is going to cause it to eventually collapse and something very different (and probably not as good) will come out of the ashes.

I’ve been posting that here for years. I root for the uniform not the player. I could care less about any individual player. That sounds cold but they don’t care about me because they don’t know me and this is real life not a movie. Take McCollum - I rooted for him in his GT uniform but he made a decision to leave so I don’t give a rip about him now and wherever he goes they aren’t cheering him they are cheering his uniform. Players come and go and they are only applauded because of their uniform. There is always someone to take their place because football isn’t that skilled of a sport outside of the QB position. And with the RPO era, the QB position isn’t really that skilled anymore which is why offenses are all vanilla and basically just backyard ball where the QB just runs around.