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Nerdball is ushering in a new era at resurgent San Francisco
By Brian Bennett Nov 15, 2018
Something wasn’t adding up for San Francisco coach Kyle Smith.
Point guard Frankie Ferrari and young 7-footer Jimbo Lull consistently graded out as strong individual defenders last season. They looked like they were doing all the right things. Yet every time Ferrari and Lull were on the floor together, the Dons couldn’t stop anybody.
Eventually, the team’s analytics isolated the problem: ball-screen coverage. The 5-foot-11 Ferrari was getting pushed aside on pick-and-rolls, and Lull was too inexperienced to pick up the slack. Smith shifted Ferrari off the ball in those situations, Ferrari moved into the starting lineup en route to an all-conference season and the team’s defense tightened.
“It was a little analytic glitch that took us about a third of the season to figure out,” Smith says. “The numbers helped us out there.”
At San Francisco, the numbers always win out for Smith, just maybe the most analytics-savvy coach in Division I. He and his staff attempt to measure and value everything, dictating lineups, minutes, recruiting, scouting and even scheduling.
“They must be doing more [with analytics] than just about everybody in college basketball,” Richmond coach Chris Mooney says.
The Dons track more than 50 statistical categories for each player, breaking down every possession of five-on-five practice drills. They have 12 unique stats for rebounding alone — having two feet in the paint on a rebound attempt is a big one of late. Smith assigns each category a numerical value. On defense, for example, players are scored on blow-bys (when a ballhandler beats you off the dribble) and fly-bys (when you leave your feet to allow a ballhandler to streak past) from different parts of the court. Fly-bys are obviously the worst, while blow-bys carry more punitive weight from the middle of the floor (minus-4 points) than they do on the baseline (minus-3) because of defensive help rotations.
Over time, Smith hopes the formula paints a complete, objective picture of each player and lineup. The stats get posted in the locker room every day; a player knows how he compares weekly and annually to himself and teammates. He knows exactly where he needs to improve on to earn more run.
The system is both egalitarian and more than a little esoteric. And Smith even coined a catchy nickname for it: Nerdball.
“We might as well be putting our guys out there in bifocals,” Smith says with a laugh.
Here’s something else the numbers spit out: At a long-dormant program, Nerdball is working wonders.
Smith and his assistants refrain from praising or criticizing players immediately after any practice. They don’t feel they really know what happened until they get stats.
Until they make the stats, that is. Three assistants split the offensive, defensive and rebounding calculations from practice film. An hour-long five-on-five practice session equates to about 90 minutes’ worth of data entry for each assistant. Smith serves as the final arbiter, deciding perhaps if a defender used a hard hand on a closeout or a made a pedestrian effort.
None of this, in itself, is particularly unusual. Every team reviews practice film. Every staff grades its players’ performances. The difference at San Francisco is that the numbers have the final say, and everybody knows it. Those with the best stats play the most, regardless of recruiting ranking or reputation. Smith’s staff must fight its own biases toward more physically gifted players. Trust the numbers.
“It’s the buy-in that separates us from other people,” says assistant coach Todd Golden says. “It’s a true meritocracy.”
Players know all this before they enter the program. In what he calls “the nerdiest recruiting pitch of all time,” Smith often appeals to a player’s intellect when explaining his concept. “They break it down like a PowerPoint presentation on your recruiting visit,” says Ferrari, a senior whom Smith re-recruited to USF after Ferrari spent 2015-16 (the last season before Smith’s arrival) at a community college. “Your head is spinning a little bit. I was definitely a bit confused at first.”
That sales pitch might not appeal to everyone, especially highly rated prospects who believe they should play no matter what. Those guys probably weren’t coming to San Francisco anyway. Like the Oakland A’s of “Moneyball” hero Billy Beane, Smith seeks out the outliers — guys whom the numbers love more than talent evaluators.
It’s why the Dons signed freshman Trevante Anderson, a 6-foot-nothing, 170-pound guard. Anderson was lightly recruited despite averaging 21 points and seven assists as a senior for Seattle prep powerhouse Rainier Beach. The numbers suggested he’d been overlooked because of his frame.
“We won’t ever pass the eye test,” Smith says. “We’ve got good players. They just look a little funny.”
Smith, 49, fell in love with analytics before he knew what analytics were. His first college coaching job came in 1992 as an assistant at San Diego, where he worked alongside Randy Bennett. Bennett’s father, a community college coach, used to chart detailed stats with a legal pad and a ruler. Smith’s high school coach in Texas did something similar. Hustle stats, they were called back then.
Smith and Bennett began diving into how advanced statistics could help them at the college level. They formulated their own system, which Bennett took to Saint Mary’s in 2001, with Smith as his top lieutenant. Inheriting a no-name program coming off a 2-27 season, they felt free to experiment. They drank Ken Pomeroy’s site from a firehose. They dog-eared pages of “Moneyball.” They found that the numbers led to some unexpected developments. Like the career of Todd Golden.
Golden walked on at Saint Mary’s and turned into a three-year starting guard and team captain. “Those stats are what got me into the starting lineup,” says Golden. “Otherwise, by the eye test, I wouldn’t have been a guy they were dying to have out there on the court.”
The Gaels became a perennial West Coast Conference and NCAA Tournament contender. Bennett’s well-known Australian recruiting pipeline often gets the credit, while his penchant for number-crunching goes unnoticed.
“Randy was doing the same things as Brad Stevens,” Smith says. “But nobody ever talked about it.”
When Smith got his head coaching shot, it fittingly came in the Ivy League, at Columbia in 2010. Smith, who earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from San Diego, fit the culture with his intellect and curiosity.
Mooney, who worked with Smith at Air Force, once called his friend “the smartest man in college basketball.” Not just at math. “He’s really very intuitive and a very good evaluator of players,” Mooney says. “He also has a unique understanding of people and situations. Kyle would probably come to the same conclusions as his numbers, because he’s so intuitive.”
Smith expanded his Nerdball system at Columbia, adding more statistical categories then he’d employed at Saint Mary’s. The Lions had finished with losing seasons in 15 of their previous 16 years but posted three winning seasons in his six at Morningside Heights, including a 25-10 record in 2015-16.
Then another program in dire need of a resurrection came calling.
Led by Bill Russell, San Francisco claimed back-to-back NCAA titles in 1955 and ’56. The Dons made a pair of Elite Eight appearances in the early ’70s and were ranked No. 1 in the country for several weeks of the 1976-77 season. But the school shut down basketball from 1982 to ’85 after a series of rules violations. USF last appeared in the NCAA Tournament in 1998 and had managed 20 victories only once in the first 31 seasons since it resumed play.
The Dons have won at least 20 games in each of Smith’s first two seasons at the Jesuit school just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Last year’s 22-17 team upset Nevada and Saint Mary’s and made the finals of the CBI tournament. USF is 3-0 this season and hosts Arizona State on Friday night.
It’s still a Lombard Street-esque journey to catch up with Gonzaga, and to a lesser stint Saint Mary’s and BYU, in the WCC. But at least San Francisco is relevant for the first time in decades.
“There are some teams in this league that have had some outrageous success,” Smith says. “So we’ve got to be more outrageous and really believe in what we’re doing.”
That’s where the numbers come in. They never take a day off. So neither can the players. They know that a turnover in practice will cost them six points (while an assist rewards them only four) and that a missed 3-pointer means three docked points. No time for loafing. Everything counts.
“I’ve become a fan of it because it keeps you honest in how you play every day and keeps your effort level high in practice,” Ferrari says. “It’s hard to say [if the stat system] has translated to wins. But it has helped us develop strong everyday habits, and I know that translates to good things.”
Smith doesn’t mind sharing specifics of his system, because he doubts other schools would commit so much of its finite resources to it. Sure, every NBA team has an analytics director and a quantitative staff. At a program like USF, though, it’s just Smith, his three assistants and a staff member or two doing all the grunt work.
Following the numbers also means giving up control, which many coaches loathe to do. The numbers by themselves are useless without the ability to decipher them or the discipline to trust them.
Smith says his system is more reactive than proactive; after five weeks of preseason practice, he usually knows his rotation. But the numbers are heavily weighted toward practice performance, so coaches can be slow to spot an in-season tweak like last year’s ball-screen issue. The Dons didn’t have enough physical guards on their roster to hurt Ferrari’s pick-and-roll rating in practice. Measuring individual pick-and-roll defense from video isn’t an exact science either, though it’s an area Smith’s staff emphasizes.
The numbers can drown you if you sink too far into them. Smith instructs his secretary to clear papers off his desk, lest he spend all day staring at stat sheets. He chides his assistants when he finds them combing through piles of data. Stop that and call some recruits! “We can’t lose ourselves in the weeds,” Smith says.
They also can’t afford to lose their players mentally or emotionally. Smith isn’t moving future 10-year NBA vets around his chessboard. Just try explaining to a college kid, his parents and his grassroots basketball coach why an algorithm is making him sing the blues.
“You can’t treat them like pieces of meat or like robots,” Smith says. “In certain situations, I’ll hook a guy who just can’t play in a particular game, and that’s earth-shattering to some 19-year-olds. You’ve got to win the hearts and minds of these guys too.”
San Francisco recently installed SportVU cameras in its home gym. That’s the same system NBA teams use to track player movement at 25 times per second, allowing for granular data collection. Smith hasn’t toyed with it much yet. He’d like to save that time investment for when his program is on the cusp of being really good and needs one last push to get over the top.
Can Nerdball take the Dons that far? They’re certainly in the right place at the right time, with Silicon Valley tech bros, Billy Beane’s lab and the NBA-crushing Golden State Warriors all at their doorstep. Smith sells the common culture in a three-word recruiting pitch: “Smart guys wanted.” Preferably ones who are good with numbers.
By Brian Bennett Nov 15, 2018
Something wasn’t adding up for San Francisco coach Kyle Smith.
Point guard Frankie Ferrari and young 7-footer Jimbo Lull consistently graded out as strong individual defenders last season. They looked like they were doing all the right things. Yet every time Ferrari and Lull were on the floor together, the Dons couldn’t stop anybody.
Eventually, the team’s analytics isolated the problem: ball-screen coverage. The 5-foot-11 Ferrari was getting pushed aside on pick-and-rolls, and Lull was too inexperienced to pick up the slack. Smith shifted Ferrari off the ball in those situations, Ferrari moved into the starting lineup en route to an all-conference season and the team’s defense tightened.
“It was a little analytic glitch that took us about a third of the season to figure out,” Smith says. “The numbers helped us out there.”
At San Francisco, the numbers always win out for Smith, just maybe the most analytics-savvy coach in Division I. He and his staff attempt to measure and value everything, dictating lineups, minutes, recruiting, scouting and even scheduling.
“They must be doing more [with analytics] than just about everybody in college basketball,” Richmond coach Chris Mooney says.
The Dons track more than 50 statistical categories for each player, breaking down every possession of five-on-five practice drills. They have 12 unique stats for rebounding alone — having two feet in the paint on a rebound attempt is a big one of late. Smith assigns each category a numerical value. On defense, for example, players are scored on blow-bys (when a ballhandler beats you off the dribble) and fly-bys (when you leave your feet to allow a ballhandler to streak past) from different parts of the court. Fly-bys are obviously the worst, while blow-bys carry more punitive weight from the middle of the floor (minus-4 points) than they do on the baseline (minus-3) because of defensive help rotations.
Over time, Smith hopes the formula paints a complete, objective picture of each player and lineup. The stats get posted in the locker room every day; a player knows how he compares weekly and annually to himself and teammates. He knows exactly where he needs to improve on to earn more run.
The system is both egalitarian and more than a little esoteric. And Smith even coined a catchy nickname for it: Nerdball.
“We might as well be putting our guys out there in bifocals,” Smith says with a laugh.
Here’s something else the numbers spit out: At a long-dormant program, Nerdball is working wonders.
Smith and his assistants refrain from praising or criticizing players immediately after any practice. They don’t feel they really know what happened until they get stats.
Until they make the stats, that is. Three assistants split the offensive, defensive and rebounding calculations from practice film. An hour-long five-on-five practice session equates to about 90 minutes’ worth of data entry for each assistant. Smith serves as the final arbiter, deciding perhaps if a defender used a hard hand on a closeout or a made a pedestrian effort.
None of this, in itself, is particularly unusual. Every team reviews practice film. Every staff grades its players’ performances. The difference at San Francisco is that the numbers have the final say, and everybody knows it. Those with the best stats play the most, regardless of recruiting ranking or reputation. Smith’s staff must fight its own biases toward more physically gifted players. Trust the numbers.
“It’s the buy-in that separates us from other people,” says assistant coach Todd Golden says. “It’s a true meritocracy.”
Players know all this before they enter the program. In what he calls “the nerdiest recruiting pitch of all time,” Smith often appeals to a player’s intellect when explaining his concept. “They break it down like a PowerPoint presentation on your recruiting visit,” says Ferrari, a senior whom Smith re-recruited to USF after Ferrari spent 2015-16 (the last season before Smith’s arrival) at a community college. “Your head is spinning a little bit. I was definitely a bit confused at first.”
That sales pitch might not appeal to everyone, especially highly rated prospects who believe they should play no matter what. Those guys probably weren’t coming to San Francisco anyway. Like the Oakland A’s of “Moneyball” hero Billy Beane, Smith seeks out the outliers — guys whom the numbers love more than talent evaluators.
It’s why the Dons signed freshman Trevante Anderson, a 6-foot-nothing, 170-pound guard. Anderson was lightly recruited despite averaging 21 points and seven assists as a senior for Seattle prep powerhouse Rainier Beach. The numbers suggested he’d been overlooked because of his frame.
“We won’t ever pass the eye test,” Smith says. “We’ve got good players. They just look a little funny.”
Smith, 49, fell in love with analytics before he knew what analytics were. His first college coaching job came in 1992 as an assistant at San Diego, where he worked alongside Randy Bennett. Bennett’s father, a community college coach, used to chart detailed stats with a legal pad and a ruler. Smith’s high school coach in Texas did something similar. Hustle stats, they were called back then.
Smith and Bennett began diving into how advanced statistics could help them at the college level. They formulated their own system, which Bennett took to Saint Mary’s in 2001, with Smith as his top lieutenant. Inheriting a no-name program coming off a 2-27 season, they felt free to experiment. They drank Ken Pomeroy’s site from a firehose. They dog-eared pages of “Moneyball.” They found that the numbers led to some unexpected developments. Like the career of Todd Golden.
Golden walked on at Saint Mary’s and turned into a three-year starting guard and team captain. “Those stats are what got me into the starting lineup,” says Golden. “Otherwise, by the eye test, I wouldn’t have been a guy they were dying to have out there on the court.”
The Gaels became a perennial West Coast Conference and NCAA Tournament contender. Bennett’s well-known Australian recruiting pipeline often gets the credit, while his penchant for number-crunching goes unnoticed.
“Randy was doing the same things as Brad Stevens,” Smith says. “But nobody ever talked about it.”
When Smith got his head coaching shot, it fittingly came in the Ivy League, at Columbia in 2010. Smith, who earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from San Diego, fit the culture with his intellect and curiosity.
Mooney, who worked with Smith at Air Force, once called his friend “the smartest man in college basketball.” Not just at math. “He’s really very intuitive and a very good evaluator of players,” Mooney says. “He also has a unique understanding of people and situations. Kyle would probably come to the same conclusions as his numbers, because he’s so intuitive.”
Smith expanded his Nerdball system at Columbia, adding more statistical categories then he’d employed at Saint Mary’s. The Lions had finished with losing seasons in 15 of their previous 16 years but posted three winning seasons in his six at Morningside Heights, including a 25-10 record in 2015-16.
Then another program in dire need of a resurrection came calling.
Led by Bill Russell, San Francisco claimed back-to-back NCAA titles in 1955 and ’56. The Dons made a pair of Elite Eight appearances in the early ’70s and were ranked No. 1 in the country for several weeks of the 1976-77 season. But the school shut down basketball from 1982 to ’85 after a series of rules violations. USF last appeared in the NCAA Tournament in 1998 and had managed 20 victories only once in the first 31 seasons since it resumed play.
The Dons have won at least 20 games in each of Smith’s first two seasons at the Jesuit school just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Last year’s 22-17 team upset Nevada and Saint Mary’s and made the finals of the CBI tournament. USF is 3-0 this season and hosts Arizona State on Friday night.
It’s still a Lombard Street-esque journey to catch up with Gonzaga, and to a lesser stint Saint Mary’s and BYU, in the WCC. But at least San Francisco is relevant for the first time in decades.
“There are some teams in this league that have had some outrageous success,” Smith says. “So we’ve got to be more outrageous and really believe in what we’re doing.”
That’s where the numbers come in. They never take a day off. So neither can the players. They know that a turnover in practice will cost them six points (while an assist rewards them only four) and that a missed 3-pointer means three docked points. No time for loafing. Everything counts.
“I’ve become a fan of it because it keeps you honest in how you play every day and keeps your effort level high in practice,” Ferrari says. “It’s hard to say [if the stat system] has translated to wins. But it has helped us develop strong everyday habits, and I know that translates to good things.”
Smith doesn’t mind sharing specifics of his system, because he doubts other schools would commit so much of its finite resources to it. Sure, every NBA team has an analytics director and a quantitative staff. At a program like USF, though, it’s just Smith, his three assistants and a staff member or two doing all the grunt work.
Following the numbers also means giving up control, which many coaches loathe to do. The numbers by themselves are useless without the ability to decipher them or the discipline to trust them.
Smith says his system is more reactive than proactive; after five weeks of preseason practice, he usually knows his rotation. But the numbers are heavily weighted toward practice performance, so coaches can be slow to spot an in-season tweak like last year’s ball-screen issue. The Dons didn’t have enough physical guards on their roster to hurt Ferrari’s pick-and-roll rating in practice. Measuring individual pick-and-roll defense from video isn’t an exact science either, though it’s an area Smith’s staff emphasizes.
The numbers can drown you if you sink too far into them. Smith instructs his secretary to clear papers off his desk, lest he spend all day staring at stat sheets. He chides his assistants when he finds them combing through piles of data. Stop that and call some recruits! “We can’t lose ourselves in the weeds,” Smith says.
They also can’t afford to lose their players mentally or emotionally. Smith isn’t moving future 10-year NBA vets around his chessboard. Just try explaining to a college kid, his parents and his grassroots basketball coach why an algorithm is making him sing the blues.
“You can’t treat them like pieces of meat or like robots,” Smith says. “In certain situations, I’ll hook a guy who just can’t play in a particular game, and that’s earth-shattering to some 19-year-olds. You’ve got to win the hearts and minds of these guys too.”
San Francisco recently installed SportVU cameras in its home gym. That’s the same system NBA teams use to track player movement at 25 times per second, allowing for granular data collection. Smith hasn’t toyed with it much yet. He’d like to save that time investment for when his program is on the cusp of being really good and needs one last push to get over the top.
Can Nerdball take the Dons that far? They’re certainly in the right place at the right time, with Silicon Valley tech bros, Billy Beane’s lab and the NBA-crushing Golden State Warriors all at their doorstep. Smith sells the common culture in a three-word recruiting pitch: “Smart guys wanted.” Preferably ones who are good with numbers.