SHE’S A 4TH-DOWN FANATIC
Bryant students harnessing data on the fly to help football team in 4th-down situations
Bryant student’s math skills help team plan drives
Bryant football head coach James Perry sat back in a his chair to the left of his desk of his office with the rest of his coaching staff seated along the walls, as four Bryant undergraduates delivered an analytical presentation going over the fourth-down decisions the Bulldogs made in the previous week’s game.
The scene is repeated every Thursday at noon on the second floor of the Chase Athletic Center.
The quartet of senior Elena Grigelevich and freshmen Zach Chase, Molly Healy and Bridget Healy form Perry’s “Think Tank.” The group pours through the data of every Bulldog game, plugs that data into a spreadsheet and figures out if Perry made the right fourth-down decisions based on expected value.
“This is extremely helpful in the way that it gives me confidence on gameday,” Perry said after Thursday’s postmortem of Saturday’s win over Robert Morris. “For 20 minutes during the week, it makes me think like a head coach when, a lot of times during the week, you just naturally revert to trying to come up with plays that will work on the side of the ball that you coach.”
“I played football in high school, but I wasn’t good enough to play in college,” said Chase, who was a wide receiver at Merrimack Valley powerhouse Central Catholic in Massachusetts. “I definitely missed playing and being involved with a team. This is perfect because I can contribute a little bit.”
“Honestly, we came in looking to do anything to help the team,” said Molly Healy, who is from nearby Walpole, Mass. “We were willing to do envelopes and work our way, but they proposed the idea of Think Tank to us.
The foundation for the Think Tank actually began before Perry joined the program after guiding the Princeton offense to a pair of Ivy League titles. When Grigelevich, a finance and analytics major from Scituate, was a sophomore, she e-mailed then-coach Marty Fine about getting involved in the statistical side of the sport.
Fine agreed and Grigelevich spent her junior year combing through opponents’ offensive data attempting to decipher teams’ tendencies based on down and distance. The Scituate grad said she loved what she did, but she said her work wasn’t appreciated by the coaching staff.
“I e-mailed coach Fine last year and I told him I’m really interested in analytics and I’m really interested in football,” Grigelevich said. “They really didn’t listen to me last year and they were very old school. When we got coach Perry, our athletics director Bill Smith, told me to e-mail coach Perry.”
Fine stepped down following the 2016 campaign and Perry was hired on Jan. 3 promising to bring an up-tempo, aggressive style of football to Smithfield. In March, Perry spoke at the university’s annual Research and Engagement Day at the John H. Chafee Center for International Business.
“Well, with Coach Perry it’s fun to tell him what he did wrong because he doesn’t take it harshly.”
– Elena Grigelevich
While the other three members of the Think Tank are college neophytes, Grigelevich is graduating in May. She said she’s applied for a job in the Phialdelphia Eagles organization, but she indicated she will likely return to Bryant next year to get her master’s degree.
“I’m graduating in May, which is a little scary,” Grigelevich said. “The goal is to stay at Bryant, get my masters in analytics and work for the team for a few more years. Coach Perry said he’ll have me for as long as I want to be here. After that, I’ll apply to the NFL or a big Division I college team that can pay me to do this.”
Perry’s interest in analytics began over a deacde ago when his older brother and current Houston Texans tight ends coach John Perry was the quarterbacks coach at the University of New Hampshire. UNH’s offensive coordinator at that time was a radical-thinking coach named Chip Kelly.
While most football coaches at the time believed the way to win games was to dominate time of possession, Kelly had no interest in keeping the ball for long stretches. Kelly ran plays as quickly as possible. He helped the Wildcats to the 2006 I-AA quarterfinals before becoming Oregon’s offensive coordinator for two seasons.
In his four seasons as the head coach of the Ducks (2009-12), Kelly went 46-7 with a trip to the national title game. His teams finished 99th or worse in time of possession in all four seasons – including a last-place finish in 2011.
“As an aggressive person – it was the same thing when we started playing no huddle – when I would hear the flip side of it about how important time of possession is, I would just start researching the data,” Perry said. “I went past the clichés and looked at who is doing this right.
“You have to go off the data. That was the clearest example of people seeing something new and not looking at it analytically. I’ve always had that analytic bent.”
Perry was coaching at his alma mater at the time, but he left Brown in 2010 to become an assistant coach at Princeton. Coach Bob Surace loved Perry’s “fast and physical” approach to football – and he also loved analytics.
Three years ago Surace brought in a company called Championship Analytics from Baltimore, Maryland to pore through the Tigers’ data to see if they were making the right decision according to expected value.
“They gave a weekly analysis of your decisions and the analysis of your future decisions very thoroughly,” Perry said. “I used to love being in on those discussions as the offensive coordinator because it would change how you called plays on third down because if you had third-and-medium and you could get a few yards, you would go for it on fourth down.”
When Perry was at Princeton, he never had to worry about the ramifications of going for it on fourth down because the decision was made by Surace. Now that he’s in charge, Perry said he understands that people on the outside might see going for it on fourth down as a slight to his defense.
Perry said the coaches and players are well aware of what the game plan is going into every game.
“I’ve already decided before the play happens on most of these decisions and the kids know it,” Perry said. “Nobody’s surprised that when it’s fourth-and-2 at the minus-40 and we’re going for it. The emotional aspect that concerns most coaches who don’t go for it a lot is removed.”
Perry became so interested in analytics that he recently went down to Houston to visit his brother John and also 2006 Princeton graduate Morris McNair, who is the vice president of basketball operations for the forward-thinking Houston Rockets.
The Think Tank and Perry readily admit there’s still a long way to go before their data is refined. Outside of cobbling together enough data to make the results meaningful, the Think Tank is working on ways to add variables like the weather and opponent’s strengths in shortyardage situations to the computations.
“What they [Championship Analytics] did was make a lot of spreadsheets on whether to go for it depending on time and score and I think by the end of four years here, ideally we’ll make something like that,” Chase said. “It’s going to be a lot of work, but I think it will be possible to do. I think that’s the end goal for now.”
“I think this has been amazing,” Molly Healy said. “I watch all of [Patriots coach Bill] Belichick’s interviews and he’s kind of our idol. Now, we get to see a little bit behind it with the statistics. It would be amazing to work in the NFL. Since I was little, I e-mailed Belichick to see if I could work in the stadium. It hasn’t worked yet, but now I have something I can put on my resume.”