In this engaging discourse, we welcome Thomas Hall from GridironIntelligence.com, a burgeoning platform dedicated to the provision of comprehensive NFL statistics and analytics. The principal focus of our conversation revolves around the innovative features of Gridiron Intelligence, which seeks to amalgamate extensive football data into a singular, user-friendly interface, thus facilitating a deeper understanding of player and team performances. Thomas elucidates the inception of this project, born from a profound passion for both football and statistical analysis, aimed at rectifying the challenges faced by fans and analysts in accessing coherent and contextualized NFL data. By offering insights into pre-snap formations and play outcomes, Gridiron Intelligence endeavors to enhance the analytical capabilities of its users, ultimately enriching the viewing and analytical experience during the football season. We invite our listeners to explore this invaluable resource as we delve into the myriad ways it can augment one's engagement with the sport.

Take Thomas up on his free trial offer at gridironintelligence.com

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Here just in time to enjoy some information that may spark your fantasy football and your analytical knowledge of NFL football this season as we have a gentleman, Thomas hall from GridironIntelligence.com to bring us some new stats and a new way to look at analytics.

Thomas is up in just a second to tell us all about it.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of.

American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darrin Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another segment where we get to investigate some great football history.

We're going to do it a little bit differently here.

We're going to do it with some statistics which we all love to nerd out about.

And we have a perfect guest here to share with us tonight.

We're going to be trying to run a series here with him.

Coming up here he's to going got a fairly new site, it's called gridiron intelligence.com he is a past guest, came and talked to us about the Denver Broncos about a year ago.

His name is Thomas Hall.

Thomas, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

It's great, it's great to be back.

It's been, it's been too long.

Yeah, most definitely.

I guess to start off with, why don't you tell us, you know, about this, this new project you have going and you know, maybe sort of its origins and where it came from and where, where you want to go with it.

Yeah, well, it's called Gridiron Intelligence.

It's a web based stats and analytics site where you can go self serve NFL stats, play by play stats.

And where it really came from is my passion for football.

I, I've loved football since I was young and I've loved stats since I was young.

And over the years I've been an analyst for, you know, Fortune 500 companies.

And I decided to put that all together and come up with Gridiron Intelligence and you know, start this, it's a subscription model but you can go in and you know, take look at any play by play stats pretty much that you want.

And the reason why I started, the real reason why I started is because for people like us who want to know, like fans or analysts who want to dig in and compare players or teams it's really tough to get really good data all in one place.

So we wanted to be able to bring this to, to everybody in one stop shop, so to speak.

And then the second thing that we wanted to take care of was we wanted to add some context around it because a lot of this stuff, you see a lot of stats out there, a lot of metrics that people don't know what's really behind them.

Right?

They don't.

There's.

Some of them aren't very transparent.

They, people are using them incorrectly and I can get into some examples of that a little bit later.

But we wanted to add that context and transparency so that people understand what it is that they're using when they're looking at comparing a quarterback to another quarterback or running back to another running back.

And then finally it's really expensive to do all that.

I mean it, these other sites charge a lot of money to give you part of the picture.

And so we wanted to make that a very cost effective way of doing, you know, we, we don't want to charge an arm and a leg to get people like you and I access to this data.

So we've come up with a way to log the data so we can calculate pretty much any kind of metric and we have some exclusive data as well.

So that's where it generated.

Those are the problems that we're trying to solve.

And it's really just, it's on a website with a easy to use dashboard.

You just go in and you select what you want to see and then, you know, you, you can use those metrics.

Right now it's just sample data.

But right now it's free to go look at.

Okay.

Now I noticed, you know, just scanning through the site and everything, I, I see a lot of it look charted plays, you know, or even like something you would see a play being drawn up.

I'm seeing, you know, a lot of arrows on, on a field and things like that.

So maybe explain to us, you know, what's going to be different about it.

Like let's say we want to look at, you know, some of Saquon Barclays runs, you know, how, how would that be displayed?

Well, the run, the actual way they run is not going to be displayed.

But what will be Displayed is pre snap formation.

So we, we will show you what the defense formation was and the offense formation was right before they snap that ball and handoff.

So that, that's something that I haven't seen out there.

So we will be able to provide that.

So if you're interested in seeing what happened right before the snap, kind of what the quarterback was seeing when he snapped that ball, then you have that formation they'll also be able to record.

We'll also be able to give you what happened during that play.

So was he contacted before he even hit the line of scrimmage or was it after the line of scrimmage?

How many yards after contact did he have?

Was there a missed tackle?

Did he make somebody miss?

I mean, all those kind of stats that you really want to know.

Like you, you could go get his yards for that play.

He ran for five yards.

But there's a lot of other information on that play that if you don't, if you don't have, you can't provide that context when you're talking about it.

Because a four yard run or a five yard run for one running back may be completely different than a five yard run for another running back.

So that's what we want to do is add a little bit more of that flavor, a little bit more ability to slice and dice and understand just what really happened on that play.

Now does that, like if you keep, if we keep Saquon Barkley as sort of our example now, does that lead to us seeing what he does against a stack box against, you know, a too deep safety?

Look, is that, is that what you're.

Yes.

So we'll see what the, you know, like I said, the pre snap formation, you can, you can understand what that is.

So you can see what the coverage was.

We know how many defensive linemen are lined up in that.

And maybe it's not a defensive lineman, but the number of people that are lined up along that defensive line, plus how many defenders are in the box.

So you'd be able to slice that and dice that a few different ways.

So if you want to know does Saquon Barkley, how he does against an eight man box, you can find that out versus other players or teams as well.

You can understand just how the team performs in that situation.

Okay, I assume that almost works the other way too.

So if you have your favorite defense and you wanted to see how they're doing against, you know, a particular formation of an offense, you would see how that would go too.

Is that correct?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And the nice thing, too is they're.

It's not just defense and offense we're going to have.

We have.

And there's some samples in here where you can see player versus player.

So maybe it's Saquon Barkley is running the ball, but you can also see on that play or various other plays, how well did that offensive lineman go up against another defensive lineman?

So, you know, play versus play.

So if they've lined up and there's no stunt or twist, you'll know that they, that offensive tackle lined up against this defensive end and how that play turned out.

So if you got five yards running right towards that defensive defensive end, you know that, that, that's a pretty decent run right at that defensive end.

So, you know, that player, that offensive tackle probably got the better of that defensive end on that play.

Well, I can, I can tell you as a, a fan that's looking forward to the season.

I think that'll be very interesting.

I, I'm a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, and with the recent trades that have gone down and all the changes they made, I'm going to be very interested in seeing what they do and how often they're running 13 personnel and what they're doing out of that, because I think that's going to be a part of the season.

So that sounds like a very good tool for me to be checking out than any other Steeler fan to see how that's going on.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's going to be so many different metrics and so many ways that you can cut up the data to, you know, to really, truly understand what's going on.

So it's going to be a valuable tool for, you know, fans and analysts, for sure.

And, you know, like I said, it's not going to cost an arm and a leg to do it.

So if you wanted to, if you have a podcast, I mean, I have a podcast and I would like to bring in different stats though some of those metrics you can get really, you know, granular and understand what happened, bring that to your podcast, talk about it, and, you know, add some more information for your listeners out there that they probably didn't have before.

Yeah, very interesting.

So, okay, so that's sort of where you're, you're at, like, this upcoming season and you have information from last season.

Where do you see it being like, five years from now?

Where do you project you would like to take this site?

Well, obviously, the first thing is what I talked about, giving fans and analysts and folks the, you know, the basic play by play abilities that I talked about.

The next step is going to fantasy football.

So if you, if we can log all this data the way we are and see every play happen in a granular, at a granular level like we're going to be able to do, you can then start to use that to create your lineups during the season based on how good or bad this particular player was versus that defense or versus a player.

Right.

So if you're talking about a wide receiver who's going to go up against a cornerback and they're, you know, they pretty much know, you know, that that's the, that that's going to be the, the defender on him most of the time.

You can see how well that that player has done, that wide receiver has done against him in the past and offer a probability of what their stats may be.

That's a difficult thing to do.

I'm sure a lot of people have tried to do it.

That's an algorithm that we're going to develop, but that's down the road and that's, that's, to me is a much bigger use for this, for this data being able to set your lineup based on these play by play stats.

And that's, I think that's going to be valuable because, you know, there's a lot of pride in winning your fantasy football matchups for sure.

Yeah, sure.

So, so I mean, I guess, you know, that comes to fruition when you have that you're going to be able to say, you know, your, your favorite wide receiver, your receiver on your fantasy team is playing against a, you know, a set defense and you can say, oh, you know, that defense likes to play, you know, man coverage, you know, 48 of the time.

And this is who's going to be guarding him if he's on the left side and he lines up, you know that you have a lot of analytics to, to study and boy, it's going to be mind blowing to fantasy football players.

They'll be.

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

I'm, I'm looking forward to that piece.

But at first, first we've got to get enough of the data to support that.

Right.

I don't want to just come out with something that you know and say it works when it doesn't.

I need a couple years worth of data to really test the algorithm, make sure that that works and then you're going to launch that as well.

So that's, that's the future of gridiron intelligence.

But right now it's just, you know, you could still use it right now for fantasy football if you wanted because you can slice and dice it pretty well.

You can see a lot of different metrics, but that's kind of at your own.

You know, you got to do it yourself.

Whereas our plan is to later get to a place where you can just enter your lineups and it'll tell you which, you know, which one you should start versus the other players that you have on your lineup.

All right, well, why don't you tell our listeners where do they start out?

Where do they check out your site and you know, check out your price, prices that you're going to be having coming.

Sure, sure.

Well, gridiron intelligence.com so just go to gridironintelligence.com the opening page can either take you to our written content because we, we are going to have analytics, football analytics written content and there's some on there now for people to read and learn about.

You know, the NFL and the analytics behind some of the decisions that are made and you know, the coaches make are, are the wrong, sometimes wrong decisions that they make.

For example, we have, I, you know, we've written up a couple articles about throwing past the first down marker whether or not they should be doing that or not.

So things that like that.

So you can go there, but on the stats and analytics page that you click on that, that'll take you to the sample data on this, the dashboard.

Now the dashboard right now is not fully complete.

I'm gonna, it's gonna keep evolving, but it'll give you a basic understanding of what we have gathered so far.

And right now there's no, there's no cost.

And if you sign up right now, you can sign up and get your name, you know, in there while we're building this thing and we'll contact you when the subscription period starts.

And you know, those, all those early sign up folks, we're gonna give, you know, up to three months free, free of charge to, to really try it out and see what it is.

But right now we're probably going to be about 6.99amonth if you pay for a whole year, which is not, not too, not too bad for the level of data that we're very reasonable.

Yeah, excellent.

Well, Thomas, we would love to have you come back on and you know, explain some more of this here, do some segments here next week, maybe talk about another piece of the puzzle here.

That's the Gridiron Intelligence.

I would love to.

That sounds great.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you having me on today.

It's been fun.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

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