Anybody Create Their Own Connelly-esque CFB Stats?

[bookie]

Before he got hired at ESPN Bill Connelly published these spreadsheets that showed how each team ranked in different categories related to each unit and phase of the game.

I really miss being able to look at those numbers to help me track strengths and weaknesses of each team, especially the G5 teams, and have been thinking about doing my own version of them next year.

Is anyone doing that now who would be interested in helping me understand where they get the raw data (for example parsing game logs for how many plays qualify as "explosive") and what they've found to be the bumps in the road trying to do this work?

Has anyone purchased the data from CFBstats who could give a review on how easy it was to work with?

I've worked with Excel some, and but by no means deeply experienced with it and especially have hit bugs when importing data to work with so I'd love to have a mentor for this project.

[yak merchant]

Think what you are looking for is here under advanced stats.

https://collegefootballdata.com/category/stats

[Waterstpub87]

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/27997932/sp+-rankings-week-10-getting-ready-monster-week-11

He still publishes these. They are just on espn.

[gojetsgomoxies]

not sure how granular/detailed you want... i think he published offensive/defensive pass/run until last year.... now i'm not sure.

i haven't done any work on it, but i like the idea that of those 4 functions, finding a big negative or positive outlier..... and then maybe that's opportunity

an example is last week.......... army at air force....... af playing well beforehand, army beaten by sjsu the week before (yikes!!). but SJSU has a very strong passing attack and a stud senior QB. air force runs the ball mostly. so that wasn't captured in power ratings.

[bookie]

@waterspub...No. All he publishes now are his S&P+ Power Rating Ranking. When he was with SB Nation he published rankings like "Havoc" and "Explosiveness" which allowed you to match up individual position groupings against each other for a deeper dive into strengths vs. weakness.

@yak merchant...I've got that site bookmarked as a fantastic site for raw data, but the display tool is crude. I'd still like to be able to create a spreadsheet that would point me toward interesting potential mismatches instead of just being able to look up a graphic and then compare. I just looked at it again, and as of now, it doesn't seem the Queries are working at all. (https://collegefootballdata.com/category/stats)

Connelly seemed to suggest he will go back to publishing his next year once he's settled into ESPN. I hope so, but even if he does I think there's some nifty ways to use this data if it were better formatted than on his "Team Profiles." Hopefully I'll find some time this summer to work on this, and meanwhile if someone is reading this in the future and wants to talk about it PM me.

[CanuckG]

@waterspub...No. All he publishes now are his S&P+ Power Rating Ranking. When he was with SB Nation he published rankings like "Havoc" and "Explosiveness" which allowed you to match up individual position groupings against each other for a deeper dive into strengths vs. weakness.

@yak merchant...I've got that site bookmarked as a fantastic site for raw data, but the display tool is crude. I'd still like to be able to create a spreadsheet that would point me toward interesting potential mismatches instead of just being able to look up a graphic and then compare. I just looked at it again, and as of now, it doesn't seem the Queries are working at all. (https://collegefootballdata.com/category/stats)

Connelly seemed to suggest he will go back to publishing his next year once he's settled into ESPN. I hope so, but even if he does I think there's some nifty ways to use this data if it were better formatted than on his "Team Profiles." Hopefully I'll find some time this summer to work on this, and meanwhile if someone is reading this in the future and wants to talk about it PM me.

Colin Wilson does explosiveness and havoc articles for the Action Network

[scottgodson1985]

he just steal's bill's stuff

[bookie]

Colin Wilson does explosiveness and havoc articles for the Action Network

Yeah, and he seems to use the CollegeFootballData.com stuff to generate his own numbers to compare all the other dimensions. What I'd like to do is exactly what he seems to be doing.

It's weird that he calls his podcast a podcast about analystics-based handicapping, but never talks about how he creates his numbers. I would think there'd be a lot of interest in that.

[bookie]

Here's the kind of stuff that apparently Wilson uses Connelly's formulas and the CFBdata to create that I would like to create. Seems like a big investment, though, considering ESPN or someone else will have a tool like this up one of these days soon.

https://twitter.com/_Collin1/status/1194670337503481862

[bookie]

Here is a nice portal to the CollegeFootballData stuff:

https://collegefootballdata.com/exporter/stats/season/advanced?year=2019&excludeGarbageTime=true