NFL NETWORK ANALYTICS EXPERT CYNTHIA FRELUND JOINS THE RP SHOW!
By: Andrew Benson
RP Show Intern
Winning in the NFL is never easy, and teams will use every advantage they can to get ahead. As fans, we might see flea flickers to catch the other team off guard or the running back get a few more carries when playing against a poor defensive line.
All these advantages teams use come from data. Looking at the past, to help the team succeed now. For Cynthia Frelund, she began working as a banker, but now holds the position of analytics expert for the NFL Network.
“I was an investment banker and I went back to get my Master of Business Administration and during my MBA I went to work in the league office in New York,” said Frelund. “ I learned how to tie in what you see on the field to how it flows down to your bottom line.”
Frelund said while the term analytics is relatively new to football compared to how long the sport has been played, the philosophy behind analytics has been around forever.
“People have been using strategy in football since the beginning of time,” said Frelund. “If you think about how you can use modern technologies and capabilities, and then you honour the past way of doing things, then you create a really good marriage where you get a chance to create a strategy where you can make a team incrementally better which is how you win games.”
Frelund works as a predictive analytics expert, which means looking at previous games to predict the future.
“You take the strategy of what the coaches call in the past, what the attributes of the players on the field are, and you map them all together,” said Frelund.
Every action teams take during a game get run in a simulation to predict the future.
“This year I have run 300,000 simulations per game which means for the season it’s like 81.6 million,” said Frelund.
That is a lot of numbers…
Everything from play calls, how a quarterback does against the blitz, and even the weather affect the numbers Frelund presents.
“If you have gusts of wind over 17 miles per hour that are sustained, that does affect passing and kicking. If you have enough data, you can start to see trends. Then you see who diverges from the trends and who doesn’t, and you have to factor that in,” said Frelund.
The analytics Frelund presents are not just for fun. The numbers help determine who wins games, and in sports, any help to get a win should always be used. There are a few things however, that analytics can’t take into account.
“Heart, personality, things like that,” said Frelund. “You can’t and you’re not supposed to be able to track things like that, that’s what makes it fun.”
Frelund can be seen on NFL Gameday every Sunday morning at 9am ET.
Andre!
Andre!
Andre Proulx!
Yeah_ Andre!
The Saskatchewan Roughriders Football Club will attempt to squeeze out 5 more playing years out of Bo Levi Mitchell when they aquire his player contract. Within this 5 year plan, the Riders hope to have at least 2 CFL Championships out of this to justify this blockbuster move. Good luck Bo.
Officially – The Calgary Stampeders Football Team is now in the hands of the young Jake Mair qb.
Good interview. If I may there needs to be some correction on what she is stating or at least clarified. Football in one variation or another has been played for over 100 yrs starting in the late 1800s up to today. Paul Brown in the 1950s was the first to use classroom simulations, film work and that morphed into what was called “tendencies”. Tendencies are still used..for example breaking down all plays on each down. Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi were on the same coaching staff in New York. They took it a step further into their head coaching jobs… Read more »