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.
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