HOBBY MUSHROOMS, LANDS ON BIG STAGE
Data company will help shape title picture
NASHVILLE It started with a homework assignment, a fake business plan that was never supposed to see the light of day outside of a masters program at Vanderbilt University.
Stephen Prather, a former baseball player at the school but devout football fan, had noticed that the industry of hiring coaches relied largely on personal relationships or reputation. His idea was different: to start a search firm that used analytics and a database filled with detailed information to determine which coaches were truly affecting wins and losses.
“But I did nothing other than just made a presentation, got a grade in class and moved on,” said Prather, who went into commercial real estate and never thought much more about it.
Four years later, though, the market was struggling, and a conversation with his brother Scott — also a former college baseball player and commercial real estate broker — revived the search firm idea.
They enlisted the help of Drew Borland, a computer engineer and Stephen Prather’s former teammate at Vanderbilt, to build a database. And then they began to come up with hundreds upon hundreds of statistics.
Fast-forward to 2014, and their business — SportSource Analytics — has carved out a niche in college football beyond their wildest dreams. They never cracked the search firm business and realized quickly that the market for their data was small, but their client list is impressive. Coaching staffs from Ohio State, Oregon and Kentucky — to name a few — religiously use their data. Some of the most influential coaches’ agents in the business, including Jimmy Sexton and Russ Campbell, are subscribers.
And, perhaps most notably, the College Football Playoff has contracted SportSource Analytics to provide data for its 13-member selection committee.
“I just assumed there would be a ton of people in the analytics world doing what we’re doing, but there’s not,” Stephen Prather said. “It’s a fun way to spend the little extra time I have.”
INSIDE THE NUMBERS
And SportSource Analytics is — at this point — more of a hobby than a livelihood. The Prather brothers and Borland have their day jobs and recently added Marty Couvillon, founder of CFBstats .com, into the partnership to help expand the volume of information they’re providing.
They have no office, little overhead and no interest in making their database accessible to the general public.
“Drew and Marty’s skill set, if we had to pay for it, would be too expensive to make this work,” Prather said. “We’d be a couple million in after four years, and it wouldn’t be profitable. We’re not getting rich off this. We can’t do this full time. A year from now, who knows? But it’s something I was passionate about and turned from a hobby into something a lot more serious.”
Serious enough that a Twitter exchange between Prather and Michael Kelly, the CFP’s chief operating officer, led to an online demonstration of the website’s capabilities last year. That led to a series of meetings in Dallas with CFP executive director Bill Hancock and eventually a contract to build a unique data platform accessible only by the selection
“I just assumed there would be a ton of people in the analytics world doing what we’re doing, but there’s not.”
Stephen Prather, SportSource Analytics
committee and CFP staff.
What they’ll see is a way to organize data and compare teams that goes beyond typical statistics.
Prather uses an example from the 2012 season when Florida and Kansas State finished the regular season with 11-1 records. Though the Gators averaged 26.8 points and Kansas State averaged 40.7, the teams’ offensive output was almost identical when adjusting for how many points their respective opponents were allowing on average.
“Kansas State was scoring more points but playing teams that were giving up more points,” Prather said. “Twenty-eight points isn’t equal, depending on what teams you play.”
That kind of information could, in theory, be useful to the selection committee.
NO MAGIC FORMULA
Some statistics — such as which teams score the most touch- downs when they get at least one first down in a drive, or which teams are best on third down in the fourth quarter — might be too detailed. Others, such as the socalled Walsh Ranking that indicates which teams avoided third downs — Florida State was No. 1 in the country in that statistic last year — might be of interest.
There’s a statistic they call “mayhem” that counts what percentage of a team’s plays on defense end with a sack, tackle for loss, interception or fumble. (Clemson had the highest tally last year.)
With the correlation tool, you can take any team in the country and find out, for example, what their record is over the last 14 years when they play power conference opponents away from home and allow more than 150 yards rushing while winning the turnover battle by one or more.
Certain trends regarding coaches and programs are interesting, if not useful to the playoff exercise.
For instance, in the last 14 years, LSU is the best team in the country when trailing at halftime (23-23). Five programs in the country during that span have won 35% or more when trailing at half. Conversely, Kansas State coach Bill Snyder has won 97% of the time since 2001 when leading at halftime.
And thanks to SportSource Analytics, committee members can find all of that data with a few clicks.
“Some might use it a ton; some might not use it at all. I don’t know,” Prather said. “It’s just a part of it.”
But in the end, it’s all just information — not a secret sauce ranking intended to predict outcomes of games. That’s the biggest difference between what SportSource Analytics does and those that tout different metrics that try to put numbers on which teams have the most efficient offense or strongest schedule.
“Everyone wants to create the magic number that matters, but I’m not a fan of predictive analytics,” Prather said. “No one really knows the math behind it, and what does it really tell you? To me that’s not very useful. We’re trying to study, not predict.”