And now the time has come to get serious

Recently I was speaking to a colleague in the analytics business. He had just finished reading “Moneyball” and was questioning me about Real Sports Analytics. During the conversation he referred to me as the “Billy Bean” of professional football. First of all, that’s quite an honor. To be compared with anyone with that much intelligence and perseverance is something I value tremendously. Secondly, I’m hoping that the underlying statement there isn’t about fighting an uphill battle or how desperate the situation may look sometimes. I’ve always been a believer in “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” so maybe that 2^nd part isn’t such a bad thing after all. I can only hope to have ½ the success that Billy has had pursuing his goals.

So, with that tidbit out of the way, you’re probably wondering about the title of this blog post. Well, this idea is something that I’ve been tossing around for a while and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.

Today I am announcing the availability of the Real Sports Analytics “LIVE” web site. The LIVE web site allows you, the reader and sports aficionado, to actively participate in scoring and seeing the LIVE results of the Real Sports Analytics solution in action. Here’s how it works…

http://www.realsportsanalytics.com/live/login.php

Click on the link above or the one provided below and sign up. The sign up process is short and sweet and basically gives me just a little bit of information about you. Please use the text entry box to tell me a little about yourself and your experience with sports. In return, I promise not to spam you or to share your information with anyone else. I will also send you the one page instructions and the Real Sports Analytics scoring sheets that you will use while watching football over the weekend (these are also available anytime in the “downloads” section of the web site). I’d like you to score the entire game, but I’ll be happy with 20-30 observations per game. Pick one or two players (it’s easiest to pick one on offense and one on defense for example), look at the skills/actions and rate their performance on a scale of 1-10. 1 being a complete “bone-head” play that gave the other team a great advantage to win the game, a 10 being a fantastic play that directly impacted (for the positive) their own team. Scores of 3 through 8 are medium type of plays that should’ve been made anyway and you’re really grading on how well they did them. Again, the lower the score the worse the performance, the higher the score, the better the performance.

E-mail these scoring sheets (Excel documents) to me and I will run them through the current Real Sports Analytics model. As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post, the more data the multi-dimensional model is fed, the smarter it can become. I’m thinking that by the 3^rd or 4^th game of the season we will definitely start to see some real trends emerge that can assist YOU in your fantasy (or other) endeavors and I will also start tuning the metrics and their associated weights to better reflect the actual game results.

I will publish the results on the LIVE web site each Wednesday and will send out a mass e-mail letting you know the results are available. (I’ll probably only do this for the first few weeks, remember, I promised NOT to spam you.)

Now, the two most important things:

1) The first 20 people who sign up and remain active scorers will always have full access to my web site, for free, for-ever.

2) The top scorer each week (that means you) will receive a $100 VISA gift card. The top scorer status is completely arbitrary and up to me – I’m looking for good scores, did you really watch the game and how much your scores match or don’t match with other submitted scores. As an example if most of my scorers score out Tom Brady at around an 8 and you’re results point to a 2, I’m probably going to question if you were watching the right game/player.

So please sign up and tell your friends! It’s time for some football!