Calgary’s Bulcke studying Stamps
Bulcke researching team behaviour related to wins
To defensive lineman Brian Bulcke, the Calgary Stampeders are more than just his employers.
They’re also his research project.
The 25-year-old Windsor, Ont., product is collecting data throughout the season as part of a project looking into organizational behaviour and whether it relates to a football team in the same way it does to a business.
Inspired by a professor at Stanford University, where Bulcke earned his master’s degree in industrial engineering, it’s the first step in a postgraduate project that could continue over multiple seasons as Bulcke, in essence, looks to find what makes a successful football team tick.
“I’m trying to compare a bunch of different intangibles,” said Bulcke on Wednesday. “I’m basically measuring a lot of different things during a day that can make a change for a football team. Everything from tardiness to conduct (on and off the field) to all the extra work we put in — lifting, running, all the extra things. So you measure them using time and numbers, and we’re trying to relate that to the weekend (games) and the win-loss production of the group.”
These are uncharted waters, said Bulcke. Much of it would seem to be common-sense, but leading up to the start of his project, he was unable to find any hard data to back up the theory that discipline and extra work, on and off the field, will lead to success in games.
So with the backing of Stamps coach and GM John Hufnagel, along with defensive co-ordinator Rick Campbell and defensive line coach DeVone Claybrooks, as well as support from Dr. Tina Seelig, the executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in that university’s school of engineering, Bulcke started collecting and recording data in training camp.
“I’m finding some awesome things,” said Bulcke, who also, along with a fellow Stanford student, has cofounded a company, Fantravel.com, that specializes in fantasy sports trips, focusing largely (but not solely) on college football.
“There are definitely times where a lot of conflict during the week can lead to big efforts or big wins on the weekend. Things that you might not think will relate to a win actually do end up relating. The obvious things, like consistent lates (showing late for meetings and practice) add up as well (in leading to problems). And what you can see is that you can go back week by week and say that over the span of one week, we were like this, and compare that to other weeks and see that we have wins where we’re putting in the extra work, and we’ve got losses when we don’t. And now there’s evidence to show to the guys to back that up.
“I think there’s a wealth of information out there about how teams in football are organized, so this is about collecting and dissecting the data. From there, we can put it all together and come up with a hypothesis.”
Already, Bulcke has been surprised by some of the findings.
“There have been situations where conflict leads to cohesion,” he said. “Days that are really, really tough actually end up with some great performances at the end of the week — that was surprising. I had the business idea that conflict leads to cohesion, but it was great to measure that in football.
“It’s amazing how much study and theory there is in the business world about organization and success, and yet there’s so little relationship between that information and what we live day to day. The evidence we find on a football team, you can relate it to almost anything, in theory. It’s great to find something, test it and then reiterate it.”
Bulcke hopes to present the data from his first season of research to the team prior to the playoffs (the Stamps can clinch a playoff berth with a win Saturday night in Vancouver).
“I think it’s a great way of looking at everything we’ve collected and saying, ‘OK, this is why we won from a numbers perspective,’ which is something Coach Huff loves,” said Bulcke. “And I’m in the process of taking the results and looking for what trends we can find that relate to other sports or business, and relating it back to the data.”
Claybrooks has been down a similar path in his educational background. His master’s degree work at East Carolina focused partially on at-risk youth, and football’s role in shaping young people was an element in his research.
“You always want to see how the numbers crunch together, and when you peel back the layers of the onion, what things are really like,” said Claybrooks of Bulcke’s project. “It’ll be interesting to see the outcome.”
EXTRA POINTS . . . Keith McClelland, a 49-year-old Calgary lawyer, was drawn to be one of the four finalists in the Wendy’s Kick for a Million contest. He’ll be matched up against Winnipeg’s Richard Pope on Saturday at BC Place Stadium for the right to move on to the semifinals later this month in Toronto.