BULCKE STUDYING FOOTBALL BEHAVIOUR .
Ex-st. Anne football player conducts research project
To Tecumseh’s Brian Bulcke, the Calgary Stampeders are more than just his employers.
They’re also his research project.
The 25- year- old defensive lineman 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.
Bulcke, who had 54 tackles and seven sacks in his senior high school football season at St. Anne, wants to find out what makes a successful football team tick.
“I’m trying to compare a bunch of different intangibles,” Bulcke said.
“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 winloss production of the group.”
Bulcke said these are uncharted waters.
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.
“There are definitely times where a lot of conflict during the week can lead to big efforts or big wins on the weekend,” he said.
“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.”
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 tonight in Vancouver against the B.C. Lions (10 p.m., TSN).