Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UNDER THE DOME site FootballOutsiders.com in 2007. He has since shared his work on ESPN.com and this year started a weekly blog for Notre Dame's official website. He joined Blue & Gold Illustrated last week to talk about the Irish. made you decide to invest so much time in looking at stats the way you do? Fremeau: "I think my instinct early Blue & Gold Illustrated: What 1999 and soon after started to look, via statistics, for answers to his alma mater's problems on the field. Fremeau developed a system to rate teams on a drive-by-drive basis rather than by wins and losses. He started writing for the statistical analysis web- Brian Fremeau graduated from Notre Dame in STATISTICAL ANALYST BRIAN FREMEAU Five Questions With … COLLEGE FOOTBALL player. If I'm talking about a passing game, we're not just talking about the quarterback." cus far more on success on the defensive end. Part of that is because of the SEC's dominance. … I think Ala- bama this year, for instance, is far and away bet- ter than perhaps even the second-best team in college football. It all comes down to defense in that regard. I think that's something I'm really excited about for Notre Dame this year." stats, is there any particular number that stands out to you as an indicator of how to win games? Fremeau: "I think what I've traced recently is to fo- Blue & Gold Illustrated: In your decade of tracking fensively limits the number of game possessions to maybe only eight or nine a game. So scoring is at a premium. A 28-point game against Navy might actu- ally be equivalent to something like the offensive outbursts we see from West Virginia if you put it on a per possession basis." on was that things needed to be put into context in a couple of ways. One was let's put tempo into context. Tempo doesn't just mean how fast you operate in the no huddle, but also how many possessions are there in a game. "A team like Navy when they're at their best of- a baseball game and isolated to individual players. I think that's the key difference with football. "The context for when I'm writing about, the stats they often think baseball and sabermetrics. Are stats as effective for football fans? Fremeau: "There's much more data available in Blue & Gold Illustrated: When people think stats, that I collect, always needs to be packaged around the impact of a unit on the field. It isn't a single FREMEAU years have trained me as a Notre Dame fan to not get too excited or optimistic, but this year the data that I'm collecting is definitely a huge step forward. … Notre Dame is off to a great start, and my numbers think they are off to an incredible start and are on their way to a run at a BCS championship game." is Notre Dame as good as its early record would indicate? Fremeau: "So far yes, I think so. I'm always hesitant. Maybe it's just because the last 20 are you tracking this year? Fremeau: "One thing I'm paying closer attention Blue & Gold Illustrated: What type of new trends to — and I was inspired a bit by Notre Dame's perfor- mance last year with turnovers — is to look at those special circumstances. … In 17 percent of [all college football] games the turnovers were the difference. Eight percent of the time the difference in the scor- ing margin came down to some special teams value. Field position is in the middle of those two at about 12 percent." Blue & Gold Illustrated: Based on your stats, — Dan Murphy