There is something special about sports statistics. Almost anyone can argue a point based on personal passion or intricate knowledge of a team or player. But it takes time, precision, and cleverness to find the numbers that elegantly back a conclusion. Those numbers add heft and depth to what, without them, are often not much more than gut feelings that a set of stats can either prove or disprove.
Feeling as I do about sports statistics, it was not without a little excitement that I discovered the Twitter feed of ESPN Stats Info several weeks ago. The feed offers a steady stream of fascinating, relevant, and often real-time statistical analysis of and perspective on games and players. It's like having a personal phone line to Bill James, but without the pesky long-distance fees.
Noel Nash, a senior director at ESPN, joined "The Worldwide Leader" in 2006 to help create the Stats Analysis Team that now runs the Twitter feed, as well as other ESPN digital outlets that highlight statistics . He was kind enough to answer my questions about how the Stats Info group started, what drives the subject matter of their blog and social media feeds, and what makes sports statistics so compelling to so many fans. My questions and his answers follow.
1. Your Twitter account provides an almost real-time reaction to and perspective on games, while your blog tends to take an after-the-game, analytical view. How did your blog and Twitter account come about? Were you setting out to break the sports media mold? If so, why?
Our aim with the blog and social media sites was to more widely distribute the content we already were generating for our various TV, Digital Media and Mobile partners across ESPN. We were creating more content each day than what could possibly be used on television. An idea bubbled up that we should partner more closely with ESPN.com 's editorial team and publish more of our content online, through our Digital Media platforms. The notes, stats, and trends we generate daily now appear in the notes section of Gamecasts, the ESPN3 player , the Stats Information Group (SIG) blog, SIG Twitter, and SIG Facebook sites, as links in preview and recap stories on ESPN.com, a variety of options via ESPN Mobile, our Samsung-sponsored widgets and apps on iTV and tablets, the ScoreCenter XL app , and more. Of course, our bloggers and on-air reporters utilize our content and often make specific research requests. We know there's a growing audience of passionate fans who want to be more informed about the "why" behind the performance of their favorite players and teams. The information we're deriving from data analysis and deeper research is unique and differentiating, and we're seeing that fans are craving that insight.
2. Describe a typical day at the office for your team. What do you consider when you create content? What drives your writing and research process? Whom do you consider to be your primary audience?
Each day brings a mix of activity, and there are the usual, unscripted news events that force everyone to scramble, re-deploy resources and attack a story. Work that is typical of any day would involve things such as brainstorming, enterprise research, data analysis, moderating the SIG blogs and social media sites, and supporting all TV programming with research and information. One of the primary principles of what we call our Digital Publishing initiative is the drive to publish material that we've already generated. Right now, it's more about reformatting news, notes, and trends that we discover and generate already for TV shows and such, and then editing it into a blog post, a Facebook conversation, or a tweet. That's not to say we don't generate and publish original content on our blog; it's just not the primary way we generate those items right now. Our group is an active member of ESPN's Content Division. We participate in budget meetings with Studio and Digital Media, suggesting and identifying storylines hand-in-hand with Coordinating Producers and Senior Editors. Within SIG, we have "sport teams" that are comprised of people across all job levels, and these teams meet regularly (or chat electronically) about the latest ideas and stories. We have an "Innovation Pipeline" set up on our intranet, a message board where ideas are posted and discussed. Idea generation is a core value, and we're constantly in brainstorming mode about what fans want and how we can make it happen. Our audience, really, is any fan who wants to be the most informed. We're not saying our information exclusively does that, but it's an important piece of the full picture.
3. Where do you generally get your stats from"research with stats databases, through your relationship with Elias , old-school sports encyclopedias?
As you note, our content comes from a variety of sources. We have relationships with major domestic leagues (data is part of the larger rights deals), we work with third-party vendors for current and historical data sets as appropriate, and we handle live data entry for some sports right from our newsrooms in Bristol [Conn., where ESPN's headquarters is located]. We also use all the traditional research tools, a number of sports analytics websites, and we certainly have plenty of hard-copy encyclopedias and media guides. What we don't do is scrape data from other sites. We have a close business relationship with the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician for the MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL. In fact, ESPN.com is the only place online you can find the official stats of all four major sports in a single place.
4. How do you see yourselves growing and developing with changes in online technology and media? How do you think ESPN will grow your department in the future?
This group has so many avenues for growth. We're a team that is working on the cutting edge of data and technology, and we get to work in this space"with sports data. We honestly couldn't be in a better position right now. What's next for our group? Expanding our enterprise research operation, acquiring more granular data, developing more analytics around quantifying and predicting performance, expanded video analysis across all sports, and more. There are opportunities almost daily to better leverage technology, too. Our company is dynamic, and we have to move quickly. When we started this group in 2007, video analysis was a distant thought. Now it's an important component of our business for multiple sports.
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