In the past, the best time for the Notre Dame coaching staff to conduct detailed in-season evaluations of its players was during the bye week, but thanks to modern technology and advanced analytical tools, that's no longer the case.
"We're a client of Pro Football Focus and they've now entered into the college game as well," said Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly following the October bye week. "We're not only using our analytics that we have each and every week, and we're another client of another analytics-based group. Using both of those weekly keeps us ahead of the curve.
"It used to be you get to the bye week and you do this heavy, heavy self-scout. We're kind of doing that weekly now, so that's less of a mandate."
According to Pro Football Focus' lead college football analyst Cam Mellor, this puts Notre Dame in a group of about 70 college football programs that utilize the player and team evaluation service.
He says that all 32 NFL teams and about half of the CFL also subscribed to Pro Football Focus.
"We've heard from countless departments," Mellor said. "Not only just coaches but also scouts that say, 'you've saved me at least two days a week in the season to do what you guys do because of the level of detail that you go into.'"
But for as widely used as Pro Football Focus' grades are within the football world, it's easy to question their results.
For instance, many Notre Dame fans were surprised to see that Pro Football Focus had the 13th highest-rated offensive line situation in 2019.
While no evaluation tool is perfect, it's worth noting the immense amount of time and effort Pro Football Focus puts into each one of its grades.
Unlike the NFL, where there might be between 12 and 13 games played on an average Sunday during the season, college football might have up to 80 games on a Saturday due to so many FBS teams playing FCS programs.
That means it's impossible for the games to be graded live like they are in the NFL, so over the course of a few days, Pro Football Focus senior analysts, located all over the world, will break down and review every offensive and defensive player of every game, determining if each individual was assignment correct on every snap, even if they had no direct impact on the result of the play.
In total, Mellor says that about 38 total hours of viewing go into each grade.
Once all the college football games for that weekend have been graded, ratings may be adjusted slightly.
"We have a pro coach network that comes in as well and helps decide coverages and then assignments, things of that nature — where players should have been on certain times," Mellor said. "So that'll sometimes change the grade on plays, but that usually doesn't change the zero to a hundred grade very much, unless it's multiple plays that were assigned wrong to a player or whatnot. But that's very seldom."
More often than not, a grade is adjusted because every player and their individual rating is compared to the rest of the college football world.
"The biggest factor in terms of when those numbers do change, it's usually not because there was an egregious error from the grade," Mellor said. "It was more so that because every player's grade is normalized to that position against every player for that week."
Pro Football Focus also incorporates advanced stats into its evaluations, such as using adjusted completion percentage to determine how accurate a quarterback is. But the grades will also go a step further and determine the percentage of passes a quarterback threw that are considered uncatchable.
In addition to college football coaches, Pro Football Focus is also used by everyday fans, members of the media (such as those working for Blue and Gold Illustrated), but Mellor says that the service sold to NFL and college football coaches includes a few additional features, but they're still mostly looking at the grades and evaluations that everyone else is using.
"I love to answer the questions about the grading process and get the word out there because analytics are changing the game," Mellor said. "If Money Ball changed baseball and the Houston Rockets and 76ers showed that you can trust it in basketball, we're on the cusp of the NFL embracing it and college football is also embracing it because, one way or another, if you look across the country, every team is hiring an analyst of some sports sorts to do analytics for each program."
----
• Talk about it inside Rockne’s Roundtable
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, Blue & Gold Illustrated.
• Follow us on Twitter: @BGINews, @BGI_LouSomogyi, @BGI_MikeSinger, @CoachDeDario and @AndrewMentock.
• Like us on Facebook.
