I Didn't Know That I Played for Sheffield United
What do I remember from my collegiate soccer career? And how wrong was I about it?
I think about stats a lot -- not just for descriptive purpose in providing you this newsletter or writing for other places. But I think about what the purpose of numbers-in-sports is, how they can be used nefariously, and how to value them while also not destroying the wonder and the humanity that made anyone who loves a sport love that sport in the first place.
Numbers are still only crawling their way into the highest levels of European soccer, and most of what’s publicly available still only describes a minority of what happens over a given 90-minute match. But as I wrote about after the U.S. won the World Cup over the summer, numbers provide the most value to me in how they reveal the things my eyes didn’t pick up on. Perhaps your brain is more powerful than mine, but I can’t accurately process and then contextualize the thousands of actions that happen in a single soccer game. I can have some intuitions and I can certainly provide context to the numbers, but I get distracted by mini-biases every time I watch; some midfielder might make a clever pass and that’ll put a positive tint on whatever else he does the rest of match. It’s only me, of course. This happens to everyone; it’s why some of the most successful franchises in sports are actively encouraging their scouts ... to watch fewer games. When it comes to analysis, watching a game without numbers is like looking through fog. In soccer, the clouds still remain, but the numbers at least can give you a flashlight.
So, I wanna try something today. I played four-years of Division One soccer at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The coach who recruited me and then coached me for the first three was banned by the NCAA for recruiting violations and failing to "promote an atmosphere of rules compliance". (A subject for another time.) I played on and off those first three years, but then became a starter my senior year under a new coach.
This is me. And you are wrong. This is a good look:
Our team was all right: one regular-season conference championship, one conference-final appearance in four years. One of my teammates plays for the Bolivian national team, while another one got invited to the MLS Combine. My personal highlight: scoring in overtime on the road against Boston College. Their star player, Alejandro Bedoya, would go on to play for the US at the 2014 World Cup. Also, he was maybe, like, the 30th-best guy I played against in college, but that’s also a subject for another time.
Anyway, I’m gonna run through all of the games from my senior year. First, I’ll provide you with what I remember from the game and how I thought it went. Then, I’m gonna compare it to the basic stats I’ve been able to find for each match. The memory-decay of time -- this was all in 2009 -- is another factor here, but I’ve thought more about each of these 16 games than any other 16 soccer games ever played. We’ll do the first eight today , and then the next eight in Friday’s premium-subscriber ‘letter. Let’s get to it.
9/5: @ Providence
Memory: This was my first official start as a college player -- a winger my first three years, but became a holding midfielder as a senior. In other words, I am an Irish-American Bastian Schweinsteiger. Providence have become one of the better programs in the country over the past decade, but when I played, they were basically an NCAA-tournament bubble team every year. Still: pretty good! They won, 1-0, and my guess is that possession was something like 60-40 in their favor. They controlled the game from what I remember, but were able to generate a couple chances. The 1-0, though, felt like a deserved result.
Reality: They outshot us, 11-8, but the shot-on-target count was even at 6-6. Given their relative standing and the fact that the match was on the road, this should’ve been encouraging! Didn’t feel that way at the time, though.
9/8: Bryant
Memory: Bryant had just recently become a D-1 program, and all I knew about them was that they had this kid named Neil (“sic”, potentially) who I played against growing up. He was an average keeper ... and yet somehow he’d become a field player for a D-1 team. We totally ran them off the field, but just couldn’t score. Guess what? Fucking Neil -- NEIL! -- scored against us with one of their only chances. The scoreline was the same, but this felt like the polar opposite of the Providence game.
Reality: It wasn’t quite as lopsided as I thought, and shame on the Holy Cross Sports Information Department for not having their own xG model, which would allow us to dig a little deeper into the quality of the chances. But we should’ve won. My buddy Jon took seven shots; Bryant’s team took seven shots. I took one, and overall, we had 13 -- four on target to their three. One number that might back up my feeling: They fouled us 14 times, and we only committed three. Probably because we always had the ball.
9/12: @ Central Connecticut State
Memory: CCSU made the Elite 8 in the NCAA Tournament two years prior, and their team-building model was: sign gigantic British dudes who were a couple years older than everyone else. They clowned us in the first half, but we were able to tie the game with one of our first chances. In OT, I cleared a shot off the line after it hit the post, but the ref said it had crossed the line. WHERE IS HAWKEYE TECHNOLOGY WHEN YOU NEED IT? Felt like we grew into this one, but they were the better team.
Reality: I was right. The shot-differential in the first half was 9-0 and this is one of the few times I can remember my coach actually getting a stats printout and showing it to us at halftime. However, over the second half and OT we took 12 shots to their 13. Overall, it was 22-12 in their favor, and they had 10 shots on target to our ... two.
9/15: @ Northeastern
Memory: We played Northeastern even in most of our previous matchups, but like all of the college teams with a turf field, they had a huge advantage at home. These teams were just way more used to playing on a faster surface, and most of ‘em seemed to play up that advantage, even if it was only because the turf forced a certain style. (I have no empirical evidence to back this up, but it certainly felt true!) They smoked us ... but we won, somehow, 2-1. I remember our first goal: I got the ball in midfield, drove forward, played a pass out wide, someone crossed it, and our striker completely whiffed on the ball, spun around on his plant foot, and scored with his second swing-of-the-leg. Our second goal was a missile from Jon from the top of their box.
Reality: I was right. Twenty-one shots for the Huskies, seven for the Artists Formerly Known as the Crusaders. However, we put five on goal to their nine. Your boy (me) took his second shot of the season; it wasn’t on frame.
9/19: Sacred Heart
Memory: The previous year, we didn’t have an assistant coach. D-1 soccer, baby! Our head coach had been ejected from the prior game -- and then, I kid you not, tried to keep coaching by hiding in the bushes behind one of the goals -- so we played Sacred Heart with ... the baseball coach standing in as our coach. We also forgot our uniforms, so we wore Sacred Heart’s road uniforms at their field, and we were coached by a baseball coach ... and we won. The next year, though? It was a Saturday afternoon game -- the hardest ones to get up for -- and I remember the stadium being SILENT during the first half. The game, from what I remember, was relatively even, but they nabbed one in the second half to win 1-0.
Reality: Right again! The shot count was 8-8, and we both put four on net. I took another shot and got yellow carded (for purposefully shoulder-barging this large Scandinavian guy after the play was whistled dead). Sorry to anyone who attended this match. Yikes.
9/23: @ #19 Boston University
Memory: Perhaps wrongly -- given the aggregate of our performances -- our coach decided to shake things up. Two days before this game, we scrimmaged the whole time, and then he picked the theoretical starting XI for the BU game based on who had the best records in these practice games. I was one of ‘em so I didn’t lose my starting spot. But then the next day I blazed a sitter over the bar during a shooting drill, so I was told I would, in fact, be benched against BU. I’m friends with my coach to this day, but c’mon! Jon also didn’t start. We got smoked, gave up two early goals, and then we put in all of the players who’d been starters prior to the game. Another bull-shit turf advtange in this one, too.
Reality: Yep! They scored two goals in the first 17 minutes and outshot us 27 (5) to 5 (1). The guy who scored the opener is now the technical director for a Finnish soccer team.
9/26: Lafayette (Patriot League)
Memory: This was the beginning of conference play. For a team that went 1-5 in the opening games, these were the only games that really mattered. We weren’t getting an at-large bid at this point, so the way into the tournament was to win the conference. Lafayettr, to my mind, were everything wrong with college soccer. They only cared about winning, and so they played this brutally physical style that would not have been out of place in the 1600s had, you know, soccer actually existed in the 1600s. Think Burnley -- but more cynical and significantly less skill. Anyway, most games against Lafayette involved us outshooting them but somehow still not winning. They scored -- really annoying and super-fast dude named BJ -- with like 20 seconds left in the second OT. College soccer games would go to OT if even after regulation. It was golden goal, but if no one scored in either OT, the game ended in a tie.
Reality: They actually outshot us! It was 10-9, but we doubled them up on shots on target, 4-2. Given how physical they were, it seems -- I don’t recall! -- that they got stronger as the game went on. Here’s a spot where data and anecdotal evidence can converge. We outshot them 8 to 6 in regulation, and we put four of our attempts on target while they only tested our keeper once during the opening 90. (Quick pause here to note: outside of yours truly, we were pretty effective, actually, at turning shots into shots on target this season. That’s something you typically associate with counter-attacking teams since there are fewer players behind the ball who can block the shots, but we were a team that tried to hold possession when we had it, even if we weren’t the majority possession team in every match. Maybe there was some kind of strategic advantage to our style that we could’ve pressed on here, or maybe we should’ve just tried to take more shots. Whatever the answer, the point is that we never really looked at these numbers, let alone discussed them. I regret that.) Anyway, Lafayette outshot us 4-1 in OT, and the only SoT ended up in the back of the net. We didn’t know it at the time, but losing rather than drawing here ended up being one of the decisive moments of the season. You can’t tell in the moment, but doors are always sliding.
9/29: Albany
Memory: I grew up in New York, and as a young snob, I never once considered the possibility of going to Albany. I was recruited by Columbia University, and was dead-set on going there ... only for the head coach to get fired during my recruiting process. The new Columbia coach and also the coach at Harvard both told me I had a spot on their teams if I could get into their schools, which wasn’t gonna happen. Most D-1 soccer players aren’t on full rides, but for someone like me, fortunate enough to have parents who could pay for my education, the sport would ideally get me into a school that I wouldn’t have otherwise been admitted to. Most coaches are given a number of slots each year by Admissions. I was looking at the University of Chicago, but then the coach who was recruiting me got hired by the University of Rhode Island. I would’ve likely been a star there -- it was D-3 -- and embarrassing 18-year-old me was mesmerized by the possibility of getting a degree from a school as “prestigious” as the one that produced ol’ market-freedom Milt Friedman. But really, I wanted to play D-1, and so I ended up at Holy Cross. They’d just built a beautiful new stadium and had switched from Kappa -- they were seriously wearing these Body Glove joints right up until my freshman year -- to Nike. This was a serious consideration! I had the grades to get in without soccer, but academia-wise, HC was the best D-1 school recruiting me, so HC it was. The only thing I really remember from this game was my coach yelling at me at halftime. He said: “You look like a midget in a slam dunk contest”. I think we marginally out-played them, won 1-0, and I’m pretty sure that the scorekeeper accidentally rewarded me with an assist.
Reality: I can’t speak to the reality of my assist, but they said I took a shot that got deflected onto the post and then was tapped in by one of my teammates. We’ve already shown that my memory ain’t 100 percent, so I’m not gonna argue it. Gimme the point. As for the overall game flow, we outshot Albany 9-6, and put four on net to their two.
At this point in the season, I remember not feeling too excited about our prospects. Anyone who’s played soccer at level like this one -- or even lower -- understands that the best team often doesn’t win. As a smaller, quicker player who didn’t score much -- one who was actively involved in all the stuff before the goal -- I felt like had a keen awareness of the idea that results were only vaguely descriptive of what actually happened in a given match.
Most of the numbers -- not great either! To start, we were 2-6. Over the first half of the year, we averaged 0.5 goals per game and allowed 1.1. The shot distribution was pretty awful, too: 14 shots allowed, with just 8.9 attempted. We took 39 percent of the shots across our first eight games. For all the shit I have just spoken about Lafayette, were we actually the ones who were Burnley? However, shots on target have more predictive power than just shots, and we were significantly better on that front: 3.75 shots on target per match, and five allowed. That’s about 43 percent of the shots on target for us -- which is right around where Sheffield United are this season. I like that comparison a little better.
More on Friday!