NIU Football Staff Calendar

hello everybody i'm dan wolf i'm the director of football operations with the niu huskies i just finished my 24th season of football 17 years working football and seven years of playing enjoy it i love the career i love what i do i don't actually go to work i actually go to football so when i'm talking to my kids um generally that's how i'll talk about it with my wife my family you know i i get i'm lucky enough to actually get to go work at a game which is pretty cool so i worked with the the university of iowa hawkeye football team for seven years i worked for the san francisco 49ers i worked for the bucknell bison in louisburg pennsylvania for three years and i've been an niu now for eight total i want to talk to you guys today about how i use math in my career it's an everyday all the time thing math and english are probably the two subjects that i use the most as far as what i learned in high school and in college that helps me in my career now you know from a player's side you know we teach our football players that blocking is all about angles and truly about the the degree that you're stepping with each step the the angle that you're taking with your body to meet somebody else's body to make the blocks the angle that you're going to get the best opportunity to have a long play the best angle to make a tackle if you want to be a good football player you have to understand you know the not just the angles of your body but the trajectory of the ball as you throw it and the trajectory of where it's coming from and those is all math it might just seem like it's feel but the more you can understand it the better you can see it happening the more better likelihood you have of catching the ball or throwing a completion or running for a long game you know if we we tell a receiver uh he has to run a seven yard route and you're at the 23 yard line it's easy you know you're going to the 30 yard line what happens if you're at the 2 5 yard route seven yard route 10 yard route these guys have to be able to think on their feet every time they get a call and they know how long they're gonna how long they need to run for that happens at the line of scrimmage often so you have about two seconds to figure out where you're going how many steps it's going to take what yard line you're going to turn to get open so it's all math it doesn't seem like it when you're playing a game but it definitely is still math from a coaching perspective so we train our guys and we pick our plays that we use offensively and defensively we pick those plays based on the probability of what the other team will do in those situations probabilities obviously are the percentage the chance that somebody's going to do a specific thing so if we know that a team is going to run the ball 78 percent of the time on first and 10 then we're going to prepare for them hopefully probability wise it's a better likelihood 78 that they are going to run the ball we're going to put out the players that are better suited to stop or run play okay so it's all probabilities and i'll try to figure out how and what is going to work best um you know we'll put more defensive linemen or linebackers in the game if they know they're going to run it but the only way for us to know that is to watch their film to watch what they've done in past games in those situations and then mathematically compute what probability they're going to have giving us a better likelihood to pick the right play against what they're going to do after each game that we play we do statistical analysis on ourselves and what we do in each situation during a game to try to figure out what other teams will see from us as well as try to figure out what what will work best against the team we're going to play so after every game is over we go through every single play and we put down roughly 50 columns of data and these data then go into formulas that we create to make sure that we have the best probability to make a play successful right so if we uh we find out what teams do by which plays they do so if it's first down and they have a higher likelihood of running we're going to try to stop the run if it's that the ball's at the 50-yard line maybe there's a higher probability they're gonna throw the ball if the ball's on the left hash or the right hash sometimes teams do different things depending on which side of the ball they like to run the ball on or which which way they'll run the ball or which way they'll throw the pass if it's raining we have statistics that say if it if it's raining a team is more likely to run it therefore we're going to try to prepare to stop the run right so in football this statistical analysis is a huge part of the game and it's what we're constantly making our decisions based off of so obviously this is all coming from math another big aspect of my job is recruiting high school players to come play for us there's roughly 10 000 high school football players that we will take a look at and we'll get an idea of and we're only going to take 25 guys in one year to come play for our team all right so when we are trying to determine which player is going to be the best fit for us a lot of statistics come into play right so we want to know how many rushing yards a player has in the game as a running back so how many yards rushing per carry and you're taking how many yards they had in that game divided by how many carries they had how many times the ball was in their hands and that equals how many yards per rush they have and we want a guy who can rush usually for four to five yards per carry so we're doing stats every time we get these guys information in okay another one would be how many rushing yards after you make contact a lot of schools don't give out that information so we will figure that on our own okay so how many rushing yards when a guy cat when a guy has the ball in his hands and he gets hit he's he the first guy touches him how many yards does he go past that does he break that tackle often or does he often go down on the first time he gets hit does he make on average another 10 yards if that's the truth then when he comes here to play he probably is going to be a lot better than the guy who the first time he gets hit falls down all right so we're doing math to figure out who's going to be the best fit for our team for a quarterback we'll look at the completion percentage which is the total number of completions divided by the total number of attempted throws so again just because a guy has a hundred completions as a quarterback doesn't necessarily make him better than the guy who threw the ball only 100 times but had 70 completions 70 completion rate is super high really impressive and is something we're looking for but we have to often compute those statistics to figure out which guy is going to make more completions or have more completions so we can choose the best quarterback to come play for us so we gives us a higher likelihood to win the games as the director of operations a big part of my job is you know working on the budget for the university for the athletic department and making sure that while we are on the road and we travel to an away game like next year we're going to play the university of michigan so when we play at michigan i've got a budget that i have to keep under when we go to a hotel or when we take a flight to a game or when we take buses a big part of my job is making sure that budget stays under the number that they give us so i'm constantly dealing with numbers i'm constantly dealing with the math on that you know if we when we flew to florida state or utah that flight for the team cost a hundred thousand dollars or just over a hundred thousand dollars for just the team to fly there and back right that doesn't include staying at a hotel when we've got 130 guys you know we will sometimes have 80 some rooms counting the support staff and the coaches and everybody else so 84 rooms you know a hundred dollars a night we're doing the math on these things constantly to try to make sure that i'm not going over budget and i've got enough budget money allocated so that when we get to a game that i'm my credit card doesn't run out i chose this career because i always wanted to be in athletics whether it was to play or to work in athletics and work with students has always been my goal you know i originally wanted to be a teacher and when i got the opportunity to work in sports full-time i've taken that opportunity and made it the best of it i've had some really cool experiences lived all over the country worked with some really good athletes some really good teams and won a bunch of rings so it's been a fun career um really enjoy it the best part of the job is definitely getting to see my guys graduate come in as 18 year old boys and leave as you know 23 year old men going on to become good people in society i've become really successful football players some of them still playing in the nfl like kenny galladay and max sharping you know some hall of fame guys i've worked with some really great players with the 49ers got to have some really cool experiences you know but the best part still to me is watching those guys graduate go on and become good dads good people have good careers outside of football as well my advice to students to all students obviously is to take school seriously you can't be an athlete in college if you don't have the grades you know a lot of our recruiting has to do with not only the best athlete but also the best students because it's really important to us for our guys to come in and graduate you know we're not going to put a lot of time and effort and energy into people and money into people you know for the the opportunity to play in this league in this level if they can't take care of their business off the field you know in the classroom and be a good student so it's really important to us that guys take that seriously i think guys and girls no matter what sport it is besides sports um even if you want to have a career in athletics you have to graduate you have to graduate college um to really work in athletics like the we do you know take all courses seriously even the ones that you struggle in take them all seriously because you never know when you'll be using them i wasn't a great i wasn't great with communication as you can tell in my videos but i've really worked on a lot as i've gotten older as i went through school in high school middle school high school into college i become a better speaker i used to be terrified of it and now i'm talking to 110 guys every day and telling them what to do and where to go some of you may not be good with math that's okay too but you'll be surprised when as you get older and you find a career and as you're living your life how often math is used in ways that you never thought it would have and even just the idea of math in general to get you to think um you know in different ways it's not not always just a straight line understanding how different things can play into each other it's kind of the thinking in math it teaches you how to think i think it's probably one of the most important things about math to think outside the box and learn different ways of doing things so it's not just about being able to add you know the seven plus three yards to equal to ten it's also about you know bigger things in life and being able to think exponentially and think in bigger ways a big part of my career a big part of my job is doing math whether that's with a calculator on the fly on excel creating formulas mathematical equations to make sure that i keep my budget in line that we are getting the best talented athlete to come play with us as well as in the game making sure that our players understand how the math is affecting what they do on the field to give them the best probability to win whether that's play calling on the coaches or a player being able to quickly do the math in his head to know exactly where he needs to go at what angle he needs to make his turns at what angle he needs to go to make a tackle you know there's math everywhere in football there's math everywhere in life and so a big part of a career even in athletics has to do with math go huskies