You Want Some Advanced Football Analytics? Well How About A Coach Rankings That Has Adam Gase Above Brian Flores, Joe Judge, And Some Guy Named Bill Belichick?
I saw this tweet come across my timeline since we are in the middle of Daniel Jones Hamstring Watch and Art Stapleton is one of my favorite Giants writers. I quickly dismissed this as some rag tag operation looking to troll the internet like the ANUS boys do with their maps that has millions of people looking up what the fuck Meltys is.
Then I scrolled a bit further down my timeline since I knew I had seen Coach Rankings get released somewhere a bit earlier and saw this:
Noooooooooo! Not Football Outsiders! I'm pretty sure DVOA was my first introduction to analytics in football and I've always loved Aaron Schatz and company, no matter how much he said my beloved Giants were going to lose Super Bowl XLII by. Which is why I kept an open mind and checked out the rankings myself.
So not only is Coach Judge looking up that the incomparable Adam Gase after winning in Seattle with a backup QB but so are known Football Eggheads Brian Flores, Mike Zimmer, and Bill Belichick. I then checked to see what the criteria was for these rankings to see if they were computed using something that made total sense like ranking coaches based on their height. Turns out, it was slightly different:
About the EdjSports Coach Rankings
EdjSports analyzes every coaching decision during the course of a season. The EdjFootball model enables an in-depth examination of all critical calls (4th downs, PATs, and kickoffs), in terms of the amount of GWC at stake. The coach’s play-calling choices (run, pass, field goal, punt) are assessed at the point of decision (pre-snap) and rated with respect to their impact on winning the game. As a result of this process all play calling decisions can be objectively classified as either optimal decisions (correct calls) or suboptimal decisions (errors).
The EdjSports Coach Rankings are based on this methodology and consist of two main components that result in the overall ranking.
Edj Power Indexes (EPI) Ranking
This is a cumulative ranking of the Edj Power Indexes (EPIs) including Offensive Pass, Offensive Rush, Defensive Pass and Defensive Rush. This ranking is a reflection of how teams performed in every situation during the season.
Offensive Play Calling (CCI) Ranking
This ranking is based on an analysis of offensive play calling on 4th downs and compares teams in terms of GWC lost or gained, on a normalized basis so that all teams are given the same test. Additionally, the CCI rankings are adjusted to account for the frequency and situational nature of critical calls to allow for fair comparisons of all 32 teams.
Now I bet these rankings are made by chewing up more tape and numbers than Steven Cheah has seen in his entire life and spitting out the exact list we see above. However, I would counter that if your coach rankings have Adam Gase in the middle of the pack against other living breathing NFL coaches along with most of the dead ones, it's time to tweak the formula and by tweak the formula I mean dump it down the drain. However, criticizing any sort of analytics usually means you get called a big fat mouth breathing idiot by people in the analytics community. And even though I am actually the text book definition of a big fat mouth breathing idiot, I know that #numbersneverlie and truly do appreciate marrying analytical data with Football Guy values. So I'll just say good job by everyone involved and I hope my 30th ranked coach can keep it close against the *checks notes* 9th-ranked Kliff Kingsbury(!!!) this Sunday at MetLife.