Vince Freeh, North Carolina State University

Abstract

Objective analysis of baseball (called Sabermetrics) has a long and successful history. More recently people have started to apply advanced scientific methods to analyzing football. Compared to baseball, football is much more difficult to analyze because there are many more game situations and far fewer events. On the other hand, football consists of a series of moves, not unlike a game of chess, that provide added depth to the analysis.
This talk presents the basic theory behind the GridIronMine.com Victory Forecast system. It discusses general results that show that the system works. Using the Victory Forecast system, as well as other data, this talk makes several observations about specific game situations, some that are counter-intuitive. While this talk will show the 2006 Irish victory over the Spartans, there is (by design) no prepared material on the 2007 campaign.

Bio

Vincent W. Freeh is an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University. He is the President and co-founder of the GridIronMine.com, a private venture that provides expert analysis of the game of football. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. His research focus is high-performance system software, with concentrations in filesystems, parallel and distributed systems, and power-aware computing. Prof. Freeh received an NSF CAREER Award and an IBM Faculty Development Award. He was a captain in the US Army Corps of Engineers before entering graduate school for his MS. He worked at IBM in the Storage System Division until he returned to school to earn his PhD. Prof. Freeh was on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame prior to coming to NCSU. He lives in Holly Springs, NC with his wife, four children, and dog.