Stat Update

When TigerBlog first started at Princeton, all stats were kept by hand.

In football, this was a particularly arduous process. There were different charts and spreadsheets (the real kind, not the Excel kind), and lots of different colored pencils.

When the game was over, TigerBlog had to go into the office of the late Marge DeFrank, a longtime departmental secretary, and use her somewhat state-of-the-art computer to manually enter the stats into a program that totaled up season cumulative numbers. 

It was a huge pain.

There was also a form that had to be filled out to submit to the NCAA (via fax machine) to have Princeton's stats included in the national leaders. Of course, back then, those national leaders would be available through a service called "Fax On Demand." 

There was a time when Fax On Demand - sort of a primitive way of downloading information - was a really, really important part of college athletic communications. 

The NCAA football form made no sense at all. Every player was assigned a code number, and these numbers were somewhat random. They weren't uniform numbers. They weren't by position. They didn't correspond to alphabetical order. 

Filling out the NCAA football form took forever. Then you had to fax it to the NCAA, only you were doing this at the same time that everyone else around the country was also trying to do this, so you often got something that was known as a busy signal. If you're under 30, do you ever know what that is? 

And, of course, you couldn't leave after the game until you got your little confirmation fax back saying it had been received. It's not like you could do something like, oh, scan it and send it electronically from the laptop you had with you at all times.

Ah, how things have changed. These days, the NCAA form is something that hardly anyone remembers. The NCAA gets its stats automatically when the XML file from a game is generated and uploaded to the goprincetontigers.com website. 

The NCAA provides great team-by-team stats on its webpage. It's easy to find national leaders, where your own players stand, everything that used to be next to impossible to find years ago. And it's all updated pretty much daily. 

By the way, also back then, the two worst stats kept were tackles in football and face-offs in men's lacrosse. Today, if you add up the number of face-off wins and face-off losses for everyone in college men's lacrosse, it'll come to the same number. Every face-off has one winner and one loser. 

The home team is responsible for keeping official stats. Back then, each team did their own stats, so both teams could record a face-off win on the same face-off if they wanted. TB would guess that if you added up total face-offs won and total face-offs lost for every team in, say, 1995, you'd find out that 55 percent were wins and 45 percent were losses.

Football tackles were even worse. These days, you can only enter two players for tackles on any given play (you can enter zero or one, but not more than two). Even on one of those plays were it seems like seven guys converge on the ball carrier, only two can get credit.

Back when TB first started, tackles during the game weren't official. Instead, the coaches would review the film and give you the tackle stats on Monday, and then it was back to the computer to reenter them.

Of course, coaches could give as many tackles per play as they wanted to, and many often did. TB once saw an unnamed opponent's coaches tackle sheet from the game against Princeton the previous week, and it had more than three times as many tackles as Princeton had run plays. For its part, the NCAA didn't even count tackles as an official stat until 2000.

Anyway, the whole point of this is to call your attention to THIS page. You can find so much information there that it'll keep you busy all day. It has current stats, national leaders, active career leaders, pretty much everything. You can select the year, the sport, whatever you want.

Are you as into this as TB, or is he just a bit different when it comes to stats?