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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 1, 2019 12:50:40 GMT -6
www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/e47cza/since_nick_sabans_first_season_at_alabama_in_2007/This stat probably needs more refinement to give an accurate picture of Alabama kicking, but on the surface, Alabama has kicking issues over Saban's time at Alabama. What are your hypotheses for this? Unless I am mistaken, Saban has never had good special teams. It's kind of stunning because of how detail-oriented he is, how much of a micromanager he is, how dedicated to building and maintaining a successful program he is, and just how good of a football coach period he is. Also, throw in that he used to work with, and still has ties, to Belichick, who is very big on special teams. You'd think that somewhere along the way, Saban would have went to Belichick for special teams help... Is it maybe that the pressure Saban puts on everyone, including coaches and players, is counter-productive when it comes to kicking, which is already a high-pressure job? Alabama has recruited good kickers, so it isn't necessarily a talent issue... Maybe Saban just does not give a rat's @$$ about special teams? Maybe Saban wants to try to prove he is so good at defense, or takes on as a challenge being so good at defense, that his defense is good enough to put them in position to win games without needing good special teams?
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Post by coachd5085 on Dec 1, 2019 19:51:03 GMT -6
www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/e47cza/since_nick_sabans_first_season_at_alabama_in_2007/This stat probably needs more refinement to give an accurate picture of Alabama kicking, but on the surface, Alabama has kicking issues over Saban's time at Alabama. What are your hypotheses for this? Unless I am mistaken, Saban has never had good special teams. It's kind of stunning because of how detail-oriented he is, how much of a micromanager he is, how dedicated to building and maintaining a successful program he is, and just how good of a football coach period he is. Also, throw in that he used to work with, and still has ties, to Belichick, who is very big on special teams. You'd think that somewhere along the way, Saban would have went to Belichick for special teams help... Is it maybe that the pressure Saban puts on everyone, including coaches and players, is counter-productive when it comes to kicking, which is already a high-pressure job? Alabama has recruited good kickers, so it isn't necessarily a talent issue... Maybe Saban just does not give a rat's @$$ about special teams? Maybe Saban wants to try to prove he is so good at defense, or takes on as a challenge being so good at defense, that his defense is good enough to put them in position to win games without needing good special teams? I heard that stat this weekend as well, and it is an interesting one no doubt. Especially when put in the context of Bama quite possibly being the most dominant team over a 10 year period in history.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 2, 2019 11:11:19 GMT -6
www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/e47cza/since_nick_sabans_first_season_at_alabama_in_2007/This stat probably needs more refinement to give an accurate picture of Alabama kicking, but on the surface, Alabama has kicking issues over Saban's time at Alabama. What are your hypotheses for this? Unless I am mistaken, Saban has never had good special teams. It's kind of stunning because of how detail-oriented he is, how much of a micromanager he is, how dedicated to building and maintaining a successful program he is, and just how good of a football coach period he is. Also, throw in that he used to work with, and still has ties, to Belichick, who is very big on special teams. You'd think that somewhere along the way, Saban would have went to Belichick for special teams help... Is it maybe that the pressure Saban puts on everyone, including coaches and players, is counter-productive when it comes to kicking, which is already a high-pressure job? Alabama has recruited good kickers, so it isn't necessarily a talent issue... Maybe Saban just does not give a rat's @$$ about special teams? Maybe Saban wants to try to prove he is so good at defense, or takes on as a challenge being so good at defense, that his defense is good enough to put them in position to win games without needing good special teams? I heard that stat this weekend as well, and it is an interesting one no doubt. Especially when put in the context of Bama quite possibly being the most dominant team over a 10 year period in history. Yeah. I mean, you'd think they'd at least be middle of the road...
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 3, 2019 12:49:07 GMT -6
It's measuring total FG attempts missed, without considering anything else. But consider that Alabama is a very good team, and their offense is very good, so they're going to drive into FG range a lot more often than most teams, and thus attempt a lot of FGs, because even if the drive doesn't score a TD it's more likely for Alabama than for other teams that they're in position to kick a FG. And if they're recruiting great kickers, which I assume they are, then it extends their definition of FG range even more, so they take even more FG attempts, and from longer. Alabama is also the only team to have been at the top of college football the whole 12 years, everyone else has had some ups and downs. Without knowing, at a bare minimum, how many attempts they've had compared to other teams this isn't a useful stat.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 11, 2019 23:07:14 GMT -6
It's measuring total FG attempts missed, without considering anything else. But consider that Alabama is a very good team, and their offense is very good, so they're going to drive into FG range a lot more often than most teams, and thus attempt a lot of FGs, because even if the drive doesn't score a TD it's more likely for Alabama than for other teams that they're in position to kick a FG. And if they're recruiting great kickers, which I assume they are, then it extends their definition of FG range even more, so they take even more FG attempts, and from longer. Alabama is also the only team to have been at the top of college football the whole 12 years, everyone else has had some ups and downs. Without knowing, at a bare minimum, how many attempts they've had compared to other teams this isn't a useful stat. Fair enough. How would you set up your study on this?
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 12, 2019 0:34:21 GMT -6
Depending how fancy you wanted to get you’d set up a model of expectation. Simple version we just figure out P(FG) based on distance (setting aside selection/desperation bias at longer distances). Then as a metric I’d probably use: Sum (1-P(FG)_makes) + sum(-P(FG)_misses)/ Sum(1-P(FG)_all) An average kicker would score a 0, better kickers would score higher, worse kickers would be negative. It’s normalized so there’s no sample size issues, and I’d bootstrap a distribution to get some confidence intervals - I’m also going to ignore the uncertainty in my initial model because it makes things vvv messy. Do this for all qualifying kickers and look at the distribution. There’s about 15 years of data, probably close to 500 kickers with > 100 kicks including PATs, so you can look at the distribution of all kickers and where the Alabama kickers fit into percentiles. This is now a bit outdated but it’s a primer on where we were a couple years ago: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2018/12/three-point-plays-analytics-of-field.htmlOr for a deeper look into the making of the sausage: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-up-and-its-good-field-goals-in-u.html
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Post by dytmook on Dec 12, 2019 7:37:47 GMT -6
Depending how fancy you wanted to get you’d set up a model of expectation. Simple version we just figure out P(FG) based on distance (setting aside selection/desperation bias at longer distances). Then as a metric I’d probably use: Sum (1-P(FG)_makes) + sum(-P(FG)_misses)/ Sum(1-P(FG)_all) An average kicker would score a 0, better kickers would score higher, worse kickers would be negative. It’s normalized so there’s no sample size issues, and I’d bootstrap a distribution to get some confidence intervals - I’m also going to ignore the uncertainty in my initial model because it makes things vvv messy. Do this for all qualifying kickers and look at the distribution. There’s about 15 years of data, probably close to 500 kickers with > 100 kicks including PATs, so you can look at the distribution of all kickers and where the Alabama kickers fit into percentiles. This is now a bit outdated but it’s a primer on where we were a couple years ago: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2018/12/three-point-plays-analytics-of-field.htmlOr for a deeper look into the making of the sausage: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-up-and-its-good-field-goals-in-u.htmlNERD ALERT! I love it, great thoughts man.
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Post by Defcord on Dec 12, 2019 7:43:39 GMT -6
Depending how fancy you wanted to get you’d set up a model of expectation. Simple version we just figure out P(FG) based on distance (setting aside selection/desperation bias at longer distances). Then as a metric I’d probably use: Sum (1-P(FG)_makes) + sum(-P(FG)_misses)/ Sum(1-P(FG)_all) An average kicker would score a 0, better kickers would score higher, worse kickers would be negative. It’s normalized so there’s no sample size issues, and I’d bootstrap a distribution to get some confidence intervals - I’m also going to ignore the uncertainty in my initial model because it makes things vvv messy. Do this for all qualifying kickers and look at the distribution. There’s about 15 years of data, probably close to 500 kickers with > 100 kicks including PATs, so you can look at the distribution of all kickers and where the Alabama kickers fit into percentiles. This is now a bit outdated but it’s a primer on where we were a couple years ago: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2018/12/three-point-plays-analytics-of-field.htmlOr for a deeper look into the making of the sausage: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-up-and-its-good-field-goals-in-u.htmlNERD ALERT! I love it, great thoughts man. I don't know what any of that means. I just want to know if Alabama's kickers really suck or not.
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Post by dytmook on Dec 12, 2019 14:09:07 GMT -6
Basically for kicks of a certain distance you give points for a make and take away points for a miss. Further the kick, the more positive points it is worth if made. Opposite is true for closer/"easier" kicks. Add up all the kicks. Average kicker scores is a 0 and anything above 1 is above average.
If I understand correctly.
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Post by Defcord on Dec 12, 2019 14:11:12 GMT -6
Basically for kicks of a certain distance you give points for a make and take away points for a miss. Further the kick, the more positive points it is worth if made. Opposite is true for closer/"easier" kicks. Add up all the kicks. Average kicker scores is a 0 and anything above 1 is above average. If I understand correctly. So does Alabama suck at it or not?
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 12, 2019 14:21:09 GMT -6
Anything above 0 is above average but yeah. Evaluating kickers isn’t that hard. Evaluating punters is a nightmare though.
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Post by silkyice on Dec 12, 2019 14:37:02 GMT -6
Basically for kicks of a certain distance you give points for a make and take away points for a miss. Further the kick, the more positive points it is worth if made. Opposite is true for closer/"easier" kicks. Add up all the kicks. Average kicker scores is a 0 and anything above 1 is above average. If I understand correctly. So does Alabama suck at it or not? Yes.
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Post by Defcord on Dec 12, 2019 16:39:29 GMT -6
So does Alabama suck at it or not? Yes. Has anyone figured their kicking number?
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Post by jared10227 on Dec 13, 2019 18:32:58 GMT -6
The biggest issue, imo, is that Saban expects kickers to walk-on to the Alabama football team, and uses the scholarship to sign another position player. I know that’s the reason Eddie Pineiro went to UF instead of Alabama. I can’t speak for more recently, but I know that was the issue before, and immediately following the “kick six” game.
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Post by fantom on Dec 13, 2019 21:41:40 GMT -6
The biggest issue, imo, is that Saban expects kickers to walk-on to the Alabama football team, and uses the scholarship to sign another position player. I know that’s the reason Eddie Pineiro went to UF instead of Alabama. I can’t speak for more recently, but I know that was the issue before, and immediately following the “kick six” game. As far as I know most schools expect kickers to walk on before giving them a scholarship.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 13, 2019 23:30:40 GMT -6
Depending how fancy you wanted to get you’d set up a model of expectation. Simple version we just figure out P(FG) based on distance (setting aside selection/desperation bias at longer distances). Then as a metric I’d probably use: Sum (1-P(FG)_makes) + sum(-P(FG)_misses)/ Sum(1-P(FG)_all) An average kicker would score a 0, better kickers would score higher, worse kickers would be negative. It’s normalized so there’s no sample size issues, and I’d bootstrap a distribution to get some confidence intervals - I’m also going to ignore the uncertainty in my initial model because it makes things vvv messy. Do this for all qualifying kickers and look at the distribution. There’s about 15 years of data, probably close to 500 kickers with > 100 kicks including PATs, so you can look at the distribution of all kickers and where the Alabama kickers fit into percentiles. This is now a bit outdated but it’s a primer on where we were a couple years ago: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2018/12/three-point-plays-analytics-of-field.htmlOr for a deeper look into the making of the sausage: passesandpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-up-and-its-good-field-goals-in-u.htmlThanks, coach! What is P, a variable?
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 14, 2019 0:01:02 GMT -6
Probability. P(FG) is the probability of a making a field goal.
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Post by jared10227 on Dec 14, 2019 2:24:15 GMT -6
The biggest issue, imo, is that Saban expects kickers to walk-on to the Alabama football team, and uses the scholarship to sign another position player. I know that’s the reason Eddie Pineiro went to UF instead of Alabama. I can’t speak for more recently, but I know that was the issue before, and immediately following the “kick six” game. As far as I know most schools expect kickers to walk on before giving them a scholarship. Definitely. Which is crazy to me based on how easy it is to lose a game due to the kicking game.
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Post by silkyice on Dec 14, 2019 8:49:08 GMT -6
The biggest issue, imo, is that Saban expects kickers to walk-on to the Alabama football team, and uses the scholarship to sign another position player. I know that’s the reason Eddie Pineiro went to UF instead of Alabama. I can’t speak for more recently, but I know that was the issue before, and immediately following the “kick six” game. As far as I know most schools expect kickers to walk on before giving them a scholarship. If they could just have 86 scholarships instead of 85, they could all give a kicker a scholarship. Actually, it should 89. They should be able to scholarship 4 deep on both sides of the ball before they hand one to the kicker. I mean the kicker is many times the leader scorer on the team and many times the whole game rides on his foot. But in no way is he more important than the 8th offensive guard.
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center
Junior Member
Posts: 480
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Post by center on Dec 14, 2019 10:19:58 GMT -6
NFL is having kicker issues also. Look at the FG and PAT stats this year. Lower than ever.
Obviously PAT stats are different due to longer NFL distance. But FG % are way down. Maybe kicking us down all over the place.
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 14, 2019 10:21:55 GMT -6
Or there are fewer short FG attempts. Distance is the biggest predictor of FG success.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 14, 2019 11:34:34 GMT -6
Probability. P(FG) is the probability of a making a field goal. How is that determined?
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 14, 2019 11:49:16 GMT -6
You have to model it, but you can use a trivial model. Just using distance is going to get you a 90/10 solution (90% perfect, 10% effort). You can get much fancier.
You can then adjust for selection/desperation bias at longer distances, but it’s tricky. The crux is that longer FGs in ordinary situations are only attempted by better kickers, inflating the true average. But late in the halves they’re attempted by teams with no other options, depressing the average. There’s an interplay here where selection bias dominates, then they sort of cancel out, then desperation bias takes over.
If you want to get real cute you can incorporate lots of other factors - distance, wind, altitude... but then you need a more sophisticated model. Some are very “interpretable,” which is a fancy way of saying that I could explain how it works such that you’d understand and be able to recreate a small version on pen and paper, and some are less straightforward. The fanciest ones we call “black boxes,” because stuff goes in and stuff goes out and you have no idea what’s happening inside. But my research showed that you can use a simple kNN model and get excellent results. That stands for k-Nearest Neighbours, so you’re just averaging the results of the k most similar kicks in your dataset.
Adding features also creates problems. Imagine an NFL model that considers altitude. It seems like a good idea, but only one stadium is at high altitude and second place is in the same division. So I’m trying to factor in altitude you end up massively over representing the Broncos kicker. If you want to consider weather you need to think about what constitutes “weather,” and find a way to get good weather information, because the NFL data only gives approximate weather at kickoff. Are you going to split wind into headwind and crosswind? You’ll need to know which way the field is oriented and what direction teams are kicking.
Every decision has consequences and you need to know what the question is before you try to answer it. Since we’re looking at a 12 year sample of a team based at low altitude, I’d just use straight distance and assume the rest will average out.
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Post by fantom on Dec 14, 2019 12:16:54 GMT -6
As far as I know most schools expect kickers to walk on before giving them a scholarship. If they could just have 86 scholarships instead of 85, they could all give a kicker a scholarship. Actually, it should 89. They should be able to scholarship 4 deep on both sides of the ball before they hand one to the kicker. I mean the kicker is many times the leader scorer on the team and many times the whole game rides on his foot. But in no way is he more important than the 8th offensive guard. Yeah but they're also hard to evaluate.
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Post by Chris Clement on Dec 14, 2019 12:18:00 GMT -6
As far as I know most schools expect kickers to walk on before giving them a scholarship. If they could just have 86 scholarships instead of 85, they could all give a kicker a scholarship. Actually, it should 89. They should be able to scholarship 4 deep on both sides of the ball before they hand one to the kicker. I mean the kicker is many times the leader scorer on the team and many times the whole game rides on his foot. But in no way is he more important than the 8th offensive guard. I’m getting a sense of Poe’s Law here.
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Post by fantom on Dec 14, 2019 12:32:49 GMT -6
If they could just have 86 scholarships instead of 85, they could all give a kicker a scholarship. Actually, it should 89. They should be able to scholarship 4 deep on both sides of the ball before they hand one to the kicker. I mean the kicker is many times the leader scorer on the team and many times the whole game rides on his foot. But in no way is he more important than the 8th offensive guard. I’m getting a sense of Poe’s Law here. What's that, "Never follow a guy into a tunnel when you're drunk."?
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Post by blb on Dec 14, 2019 13:55:21 GMT -6
I’m getting a sense of Poe’s Law here. What's that, "Never follow a guy into a tunnel when you're drunk."?
...or, "Never trust a naked woman"?
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Post by blb on Dec 14, 2019 14:44:43 GMT -6
There are many FBS coaches who recruit kickers-punters to scholarships rather than hoping that walk-ons pan out.
That doesn't mean they will work out any more than highly-recruited position players.
Or any less.
But when you're punting from the shadows of your own goal posts or trying a potential winning FG in a conference championship game, or one that will get you there - you better have both.
And a long-snapper.
If not, that's on you as coach.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 14, 2019 16:56:16 GMT -6
What's that, "Never follow a guy into a tunnel when you're drunk."?
...or, "Never trust a naked woman"?
Lol 😄 There's actually a lot of wisdom in that saying, and that saying can be extrapolated to other situations beyond the specific situation in the saying.
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Post by tripsclosed on Dec 14, 2019 17:13:57 GMT -6
You have to model it, but you can use a trivial model. Just using distance is going to get you a 90/10 solution (90% perfect, 10% effort). You can get much fancier. You can then adjust for selection/desperation bias at longer distances, but it’s tricky. The crux is that longer FGs in ordinary situations are only attempted by better kickers, inflating the true average. But late in the halves they’re attempted by teams with no other options, depressing the average. There’s an interplay here where selection bias dominates, then they sort of cancel out, then desperation bias takes over. If you want to get real cute you can incorporate lots of other factors - distance, wind, altitude... but then you need a more sophisticated model. Some are very “interpretable,” which is a fancy way of saying that I could explain how it works such that you’d understand and be able to recreate a small version on pen and paper, and some are less straightforward. The fanciest ones we call “black boxes,” because stuff goes in and stuff goes out and you have no idea what’s happening inside. But my research showed that you can use a simple kNN model and get excellent results. That stands for k-Nearest Neighbours, so you’re just averaging the results of the k most similar kicks in your dataset. Adding features also creates problems. Imagine an NFL model that considers altitude. It seems like a good idea, but only one stadium is at high altitude and second place is in the same division. So I’m trying to factor in altitude you end up massively over representing the Broncos kicker. If you want to consider weather you need to think about what constitutes “weather,” and find a way to get good weather information, because the NFL data only gives approximate weather at kickoff. Are you going to split wind into headwind and crosswind? You’ll need to know which way the field is oriented and what direction teams are kicking. Every decision has consequences and you need to know what the question is before you try to answer it. Since we’re looking at a 12 year sample of a team based at low altitude, I’d just use straight distance and assume the rest will average out. So, for someone who is less studied in statistics than yourself, we are tossing outliers and keeping the most common kicks, correct? Also, to back up a bit, why couldn't we just take the total FG attempts of each team over that 12 year period and compare them to Alabama's total FG attempts over that 12 year period? I mean, that was pretty much the crucial point of your original skepticism of Alabama's more kicks missed than anyone else stat, was it not? That we needed to have an idea of how many attempts Bama made compared to everyone else. Also, if a team attempts significantly more kicks than anyone else, in a sense they "get some slack" because generally speaking, the more attempts you make, the harder it is to keep a good success percentage, and the more impressive a high success percentage becomes. Consider that the New York Jets have a 100% success rate in the Super Bowl, while the Steelers have a 75% success rate in the Super Bowl, but the Steelers' record is more impressive because they have been to the Super Bowl 8 times and won 6 times, while the Jets have only been 1 time, even though they won.
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