Santa Rosa man is a master of football’s metrics

The cutting edge of football data analysis can be found at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Larkfield-Wikiup neighborhood, cozied up to the hills of Shiloh Regional Park. As deer wander past the backyard fence and hawks circle overhead, Rick Drummond settles in front of a trio of computer monitors in his home office and watches an endless stream of off-tackle runs, bubble screens and back-shoulder fades.

Drummond, a Santa Rosa native, is editor-in-chief at Pro Football Focus, a statistical and player-evaluation service that is trying to break down NFL action with the sort of metrics that have long informed Major League Baseball.

Want to know which NFL receiver has dropped the most passes in 2014? PFF can tell you that it’s the Bengals’ Mohamed Sanu, with 14. How many times has Colin Kaepernick intentionally thrown the ball away? PFF says 21. The best player on the Raiders defense this year? According to PFF, it’s rookie linebacker Khalil Mack, by a substantial margin.

Drummond, 43, who graduated from Piner High, has always been drawn to football statistics. A dyed-in-the-wool Raiders fan - his parents both grew up in the East Bay - he was looking for a particular stat on infamous Oakland quarterback JaMarcus Russell in 2008 when he stumbled upon Pro Football Focus.

“The grades stood out,” Drummond said. “(Russell) was not grading well.”

He had never seen anything quite like it. PFF painstakingly charted snap counts for every NFL player and attempted to quantify their performances.

As Drummond would discover, this esoterically American website had been founded by an Englishman, Neil Hornsby, who had fallen in love with NFL football while watching Dan Marino’s Dolphins in the early 1980s. Eventually, Hornsby, who held a physics degree and ran a business consulting for the hotel industry, became frustrated with the lack of hard numerical analysis in his adopted sport.

Hornsby had always admired the writer Paul Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated’s Dr. Z, because he backed up his opinions with film study. Hornsby followed suit and started toying with player grades in 2004. The first season he and colleagues graded in entirety was the 2008 campaign, though it took them half a year to post their marks.

Drummond came aboard for the 2010 season. He was compensated with the camaraderie of other football geeks.

“We all did it for free for a long time,” Drummond said.

It was a curious rabbit hole that he scurried into, but most of Drummond’s background was unconventional. He graduated from Sonoma State with an interdisciplinary degree in sports psychology, coached hockey in Alaska, coached JV football at Piner (as Paul Cronin, now at Cardinal Newman, was starting there as varsity coach), got a chiropractic degree and opened a clinic in Santa Rosa for a couple years. When the economy doomed his chiropractic business, he toiled in wine storage.

Drummond was working at Alexander Valley Cellars in Windsor when he got involved with PFF. He basically worked double shifts - in the cellar by day, at the computer by night.

Hornsby noticed Drummond’s effort, and his attention to detail. Drummond was older, more rooted than some of PFF’s earlier contributors, and he brought a different skill set.

“I was giving projects to guys to work on, and they were failing to deliver,” Hornsby said by phone. “Not because they were not working hard enough, but because they weren’t working smart enough. They didn’t have the experience to see a project through from start to finish. Rick had that ability.”

Joining Pro Football Focus was a risk. Drummond was taking a pay cut, and he didn’t know for how long. His wife, Brook (now general manager at Skipstone Ranch winery in Alexander Valley), became the primary wage earner.

Other core PFF contributors started as unpaid interns, too. It was like an initiation. But the company has taken off, rewarding their faith. By now it employs about 15 full-time employees and an army of perhaps 70 young adults who chart snap counts and player positioning for beer-and-laundry money.

Though his title is editor-in-chief, Drummond is still foremost a grader. On a typical Sunday he will draw one of the afternoon West Coast games. He’ll record the network broadcast and catalog what every single player does - and how well he does it - on every single play. It takes him eight to 10 hours. The various graders Skype one another while they scout and enter data into standardized forms using code terms like “I>2L” (blocked or beat a block “inside at second level”) and “9R>OT” (9-route was overthrown).

At the same time, other contributors are charting player participation and individual assignments.

On Monday, the team gets its hands on the “All 22” videotape - shot from high angles along the 50-yard line and behind one end zone, and long used by NFL coaches. Different PFF people then begin to take passes through games, each charting a different element. By the time the crew is done with evaluations on Wednesday morning, Drummond said, each game is likely to have been reviewed by seven sets of eyes.

At the heart of PFF’s work are its player grades, an attempt to bring meaningful comparisons to a complex and numbers-defying sport. To minimize subjectivity, PFF director of analysis Ben Stockwell has developed a 150-page manual outlining guidelines for grading. In Hornsby’s system, each player on every play gets a grade ranging from -2 to +2. Zero is a neutral performance.

The strength of the PFF grades is their disregard for reputation. You may not be surprised to hear that J.J. Watt, the Houston Texans’ superhuman defensive end, currently owns the highest player rating in the league at 76.6. But would you have guessed that the highest-rated offensive player is Baltimore Ravens guard Marshal Yanda (42.8)? Have you heard of Marshal Yanda?

PFF offers written reports as free content on its web site, and more detailed numerical data for a subscription fee. The grades have proved especially popular with reporters and bloggers.

But the ultimate compliment paid to PFF is this: NFL teams have started use the company’s data and evaluations. Thirteen teams currently pay for a deep level of data that basic subscribers don’t get, with a preliminary report delivered Monday morning. Personnel directors and coaches like to compare their internal grades with PFF’s. Hornsby says the two sets of grades tend to jibe very closely.

PFF won a major endorsement, not to mention an important financial connection, when former NFL wide receiver and longtime broadcaster Cris Collinsworth bought a stake in the company in August.

Both sides - agents and teams - commonly use PFF numbers in contract negotiations. And, yes, players are conscious of their grades. Not surprisingly, their opinions usually depend on how they have been valued.

“I think their numbers are fair,” Denver cornerback Chris Harris told the Denver Post. “They have understanding of the concepts and if a player has done his job.” PFF rates Harris as the best corner in the NFL this season.

“It’s not a credible site,” Vikings offensive tackle Todd Kalil countered to Twin Cities reporters this week. “ … They don’t know the blocking schemes, they don’t know who’s (at) fault.” PFF rates Kalil as the third-worst tackle in the league.

As PFF expands in profile and in subscribers, it continues to add layers of analysis, like timing quarterback dropbacks and tracking every route run by a receiver. PFF is moving backward in time, too. It recently analyzed the 2007 NFL season and plans to continue in that direction.

In perhaps its most ambitious move yet, PFF has started to grade college players. By the time the Super Bowl is played Feb. 1, Hornsby said, his company will have broken down 867 Football Bowl Subdivision games. (This data is meant for schools only, not for consumers.) Next year PFF hopes to deliver reports on every college game before the next weekend rolls around.

Despite his hundreds of hours in front of screens, Drummond says he hasn’t lost his passion for watching football.

“I probably enjoy it more now because of the (NFL) connections,” he said. “It’s real now.”

At the same time, Drummond can’t simply appreciate a football game as a fan anymore. Most of us tend to follow the ball, starting with the quarterback. Drummond finds himself wanting to know where the pressure came from, or who let a receiver get open.

He was reminded of this personal evolution recently while watching a friend’s son play in a Pee Wee game at El Molino High.

“Even that game, I was watching differently,” Drummond said. “Usually you can anticipate the movement of the players. It’s predictable. But they all ran their own ways!”

Drummond laughed at the memory. But he can probably appreciate people who choose to run in a different direction.

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter @Skinny_Post.