Advanced Statistics in Football

A New Republic piece about how statistics isn't just for baseball anymore.  One statement that I did find interesting:  “'Most of the analytical brain power in football is on the financial side,' according to Burke, but teams are 'waking up' to the on-field possibilities."  To the extent that franchises believe their profits are related to their performance and win-loss record, they will care about their performance and win-loss record.  A future project of mine will be to correlate scores and win-loss records with team profits and changes in profits over time.  I submit that the teams with independently measured higher fan loyalties will show less of a difference; sure, it's kind of just common sense, but it relates to the business decisions made by the owners. 


Meanwhile, March Madness is coming up, and I'm planning a more expansive crowdsourcing experiment than the interesting one last year.  Let's see how the wisdom of crowds stacks up against the pundits that pundittracker.com follows!