Bay Area Sports Blog

San Francisco49ers  Executive Vice President of Football and Business Operations Paraag Marathe attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston last weekend, where he participated in a panel discussion about the increasing use of analytics to project player performance and inform in-game decision making in football. We were lucky enough to attend.

Marathe, the whiz kid who graduated with honors from Cal, earned his business degree at Stanford, and worked at a couple of consulting giants before joining the 49ers in 2001, shared the stage with FootballOutsiders.com founder Aaron Schatz and two English Premier League executives.

While the EPL executives shared their expertise on transfer fees and the financial analytics associated with crafting an elite club, Marathe and Schatz discussed the inherent difficulty of using analytics in football and the importance of building a team of players who complement one another and fit a particular scheme.

Whereas in baseball you could put Albert Pujols on the Pirates and he’d still put up MVP-like numbers — and take a few more walks, probably — Dwight Freeney wouldn’t necessarily be the same player he is with the Colts if he were on the Patriots. Just ask the Redskins how Jason Taylor worked out.

“Two-thirds of free agent signings don’t provide commensurate value,” Marathe said. “Quarterback and running back are probably the most exportable positions.”

But even those two positions are iffy, Schatz chimed in, pointing to a certain interception-happy QB in Chicago last season.

Marathe and Schatz both questioned the current process for evaluating rookies, including the emphasis that teams currently place on the NFL Combine.

“We play track and field,” Marathe said. “Players put on their gold Nike shoes, get in their underwear, run sprints, do the long jump. It would be like if they played ping pong to evaluate baseball players. There are some things you can take from there, but only so much.”

Schatz, whose long hair and glasses reminded a friend and fellow conference-goer of Dr. Brakish Okun from Independence Day, discussed the value of the combine in an interview with WBRU last week.

The most important parts of the combine are the parts you do not see on television. The medical reports, and the player interviews that are done in the evenings, in the hotel suites by teams, which are usually a combination of personal questions and asking players to diagram plays, try to explain plays — those things are far more important than the drills that you see on the NFL Network.

Taking data from the Combine isn’t a complete waste of time from an analytics perspective, however.

One thing we have found is that you can do a lot to predict a running back if you look at just his 40 time at the combine and his weight. We used that to create a stat called Speed Score. For example, the top Speed Score this year was Ben Tate because, even though he only ran slightly faster than a guy like C.J. Spiller, he’s heavier, and stronger, and therefore, his speed means more. That’s why, for example, we have Toby Gerhart now, in Speed Score, is higher than C.J. Spiller.

(Gerhart ranks fourth among running backs in Speed Score, behind Tate, Ryan Matthews, and Cal’ s Jahvid Best. The full article is available here for ESPN Insiders.)

Getting back to the conference, Marathe said the 49ers were fortunate that first-round draft pick Michael Crabtree, who was nursing a slight fracture in his foot, elected not to showcase his speed for scouts at last year’s Rookie Olympics.

“The first round (of the NFL draft) is a beauty contest about who’s the prettiest girl in town,” said Marathe, who indicated that coaches, GMs, and scouts fall in love with a player at the Combine and then spend the next two months finding information to justify that love. “The best thing that happened to us was that Michael Crabtree didn’t run his 40-yard dash. He didn’t have the opportunity to look like a pretty girl.”

Crabtree would, of course, have the opportunity to look like a diva in the ensuing months. That fiasco illustrates the challenge Marathe faces in signing and drafting players who not only fit the 49ers’ scheme, but also meet the approval of the HC.

“Coach Singletary has a very defined set of personality traits that he looks for in a player,” said Marathe, who indicated that the 49ers are sometimes willing to trade relative skills on the field for certain personality traits. In other words, David Carr is Mother Teresa in pads.

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By Scott on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 7:55 am.
Tags: San Francisco 49ers