One of the things about Doug Pederson’s tenure is that he relied on data in a way that resulted in some extremely unique decision making. His Birds were ultra-aggressive on fourth down attempts and two-point conversions and didn’t exactly play for field positioning, which sometimes worked magnificently but other times resulted in major head scratching.

Nick Sirianni was asked today about his view on analytics, and gave a somewhat meandering, but refreshing answer, with the relevant takeaways highlighted here in bold:

“I think it’s just a piece of the puzzle, right? I’ll talk about more so the game planning of a team. You game plan a team, there’s a lot of thought process that goes into that. It’s you’re watching that 1st and 2nd down cut-up, you’re watching that 3rd down cut-up, you’re watching what’s (been successful against) that defensive coordinator throughout the past four years.

So, you’re putting in a lot of time studying tape, and then there’s these numbers that you have on that that can either back up what you – you look at those – you study the tape first, then you get this analytic piece of it and you’re like, ‘What do the numbers say? Oh, that’s exactly what I was seeing.’ And sometimes it’s, ‘Hey, I didn’t see exactly that. Let me go back and rewatch that and see if those numbers are telling the truth.’ So, when you’re game planning an opponent, it helps you out tremendously. But again, it’s just a piece of the puzzle.

I think a wise man avoids all extremes. You don’t want to be like, ‘I’m just putting all my eggs in this basket or just putting all my eggs in this basket.’ You use all the pieces available to you to help put your team in the best position.

And then as far as – I think you asked about game day. Again, that’s the same thing. You don’t – we use that. That’s great information to help us be able to call the game. We have a plan for 3rd down. ‘Hey, we want to run this and this and this and this, in this order.’

But that can change, right, based off of what the defense is doing, and the same thing with analytics. ‘Hey, this is what the charts are saying, to do this and this and this.’ But there’s a human feel to it, as well.

So, you want to, again, be – you want to avoid the extremes but use the information that’s given to you because it’s valuable information that can help you win and lose football games.

Yes, thank you. Nick Sirianni gets it. You look at the film and study it, and then you consider the data and use it to your benefit where possible. But you don’t live and die by numbers. You don’t ignore your gut to listen strictly to the dork who is glued to the computer.

It’s curious from the standpoint that Sirianni is only 40 years old. We’re conditioned to think that the “gut feel” guys are all old-school veterans, while the “analytics” guys are younger. In this case, Sirianni appears to buck the trend, which is good to see.

Sirianni was also asked about that:


Q.Will you have one coach or staffer designated as the guy that will help feed you that information and do you know who that is yet?(Jeff McLane)

NICK SIRIANNI: We do. We’ll have somebody feeding me that information. And it’s a group effort. There are a couple guys that are involved in that to help me out with that. And so yeah, again, group effort.

The guy who did in-game analytics stuff for Pederson was Ryan Paganetti, who left the team when Doug was fired. So it’s going to be a different person in the booth and passing along the data to Sirianni. Keep an eye on this, because while it sounds like a minor topic, the Doug/analytics stuff ended up being a huge deal towards the later end of his tenure.

“Take the points, Doug!”