Dec 14, 2021
The data gene lurks everywhere, including deep in the heart of Texas High School Football! Enter Coach Chase Hargis, Defensive coach of the Magnolia High School Football team in Texas and also a data guy, who asked P3 Adaptive to help with a very specific data problem...how to visualize football data so as to give an edge to his players? The solution is CoverHawk and has introduced Power BI to an unusual audience in high school football players and coaches!
References in this episode:
CoverHawk-A Football Visualization Tool
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00):
Hello friends. Today's guest is Coach Hargis. It's not his actual
first name. We often talk about how the data gene lurks everywhere
and today's conversation is just further proof of something that we
already believe fervently anyway. Because of Coach Hargis this past
fall in Texas High School Football, there's been nearly a 100 high
school football players unknowingly using Power BI. So right now,
pause this intro, pause this podcast, open up a browser and go to
www.coverhawk.app. Go take a quick look around that homepage and
I'll wait. Coverhawk is a 100% Power BI embedded site in public
eye. You only have access to the homepage. So the real guts of it
is behind the scenes, but it's truly an example of the versatility
of Power BI. And it's actually really Power BI being used almost
100% in that visualization role.
Rob Collie (00:56):
And that's a role that most of us Power BI people tend to bristle
at like when Power BI gets pigeonholed by some unknowing character
as a visualization tool, we all know it's much, much more than
that, but CoverHawk is almost the textbook case for the power of
visualization. But it's as simple as this, thousands of data points
produced by dozens and dozens of hours of film review by coaches.
Before CoverHawk really didn't go anywhere. You really couldn't get
any traction with these high school kids, with CoverHawk though,
the adoption and uptake of all of this information, all of this
data has become so much fun and so unconscious that they all now
refer to it as the Hawk. So file this episode under the headings of
unexpected places to find the data gene and unexpected applications
of Power BI. I hope you enjoy it. We've certainly enjoyed our time
working with Coach Hargis, looking forward to next season. So let's
get into it.
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Announcer (01:58):
This is the raw data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host, Rob
Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your
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data with the human element.
Rob Collie (02:18):
Welcome to the show Coach Hargis. Is that your first name coach? Is
that actually your given first name that was under birth
certificate.
Coach Chase Hargis (02:24):
A lot of people call me that, but no, my original name is Chase
Hargis.
Rob Collie (02:29):
I liked seeing how everybody just greet each other as coach at the
convention. Hey coach. Hey. Hi. How you doing coach? Hey coach.
Everybody used exactly the same name.
Coach Chase Hargis (02:37):
You can't miss.
Rob Collie (02:38):
That'd be amazing for someone like me that has trouble remembering
names. Just walk around, calling everybody the same thing. It'd be
awesome.
Coach Chase Hargis (02:46):
Even if you don't coach, I still call you coach, just because it's
just a habit.
Rob Collie (02:50):
Yeah, it just becomes muscle memory after a while. How about you
tell us in your own words how you and I met. That'll bring us right
into the thick of the data.
Coach Chase Hargis (03:00):
I was actually scrolling through some pictures today of how me and
you met. I was looking for a scatter plot visual for my football
kids on how to see where opposing quarterbacks are throwing the
football. And I just was Googling all kinds of stuffs quarterback
spray chart, quarterback scatter plot, 3D visual, this and that and
the other. I actually had a couple of pictures saved on my phone. I
stumbled across today, but I clicked on this one picture I believe
it was your fantasy football deal and it took me to a webpage that
said, if you would like further information type in your email
address. And I unfortunately the go getter type and I'm not afraid
for people to tell me no so I typed it in and away we went.
Rob Collie (03:47):
So you got on the phone with some people from our team and they
were like trying to treat you as a potential normal business
client. And that didn't really fit your budget, but let's go back
just really briefly. So you're defensive coordinator, defensive
coach at a high school in Texas. Yes?
Coach Chase Hargis (04:04):
Yes sir. I am the defensive coordinator at Magnolia high school in
North Houston.
Rob Collie (04:10):
North Houston. Yes, indeed. And you're out on Google. You've got
this thought in your head. There's got to be a better way to show
these players on my team what to expect from the team we're going
to play next week, right?
Coach Chase Hargis (04:24):
Yes, sir. Our season was over so I was just going forward looking
for something that I could give my kids to help us do better. And I
knew something had to be out there. I just didn't know how I was
going to use it or get it to my kids.
Rob Collie (04:37):
You hear this Luke he's from Texas he keeps calling me sir. Totally
not warranted. Don't do that. You're not going to be able to resist
again. It's muscle memory.
Coach Chase Hargis (04:48):
That's right.
Rob Collie (04:49):
You'll end up calling me coach here in a moment. To the people who
don't care about or really know anything about American Football.
We hear a lot about the power of visualization in our line of work.
There are professionals in the quote and quote data industry, this
is their entire brand is visualization. That's how they define
themselves as a visualization expert. And I can't think of an
example, other than yours, that's better than what you've got in
terms of the power of visualization. I know this because we've
spent so much time working together on this. Your weekly workflow
during a football season, you spend a lot of time watching film.
It's not film anymore. It's all digital, but we still call it film
because that's cool, right?
Coach Chase Hargis (05:37):
That's right.
Rob Collie (05:37):
So you watch film on your upcoming opponent. You watch a whole
bunch of their games and you've got this, we'll call it an
interface. But basically you've got this Excel like table that's
plugged into the software where you're reviewing plays and you're
manually coding in what happened on each play. So you're doing a
lot of data entry.
Coach Chase Hargis (05:59):
A ton.
Rob Collie (06:00):
How many rows do you think, and I know it's different each week,
because there's more film available on certain opponents than
others. But how many plays will you watch on an opposing
quarterback, opposing offense?
Coach Chase Hargis (06:13):
We just lost in the first round of the playoffs, but an average
High School Football team in Texas runs about 50 to 60 plays of
offense a game. So we had 10 games of this opponent, because this
would be our 11th game. First round of the playoffs and our little
platform records how much film you watch. And so I watched 16 hours
of film that week from Sunday through Thursday. And yeah, I'm
entering play calls and data for 55 plays a game times 10.
Rob Collie (06:45):
So you end up with between 500 and 600 rows at least for this past
game entered into an Excel table. It not really Excel, but it looks
like Excel and it's many columns wide.
Coach Chase Hargis (06:57):
As many as I want it to be.
Rob Collie (06:59):
You can't see it all at once, right? You got to scroll left and
right even.
Coach Chase Hargis (07:02):
Absolutely.
Rob Collie (07:03):
Yeah. So people listening to this can understand 500 plus row
spreadsheet with more columns than fit on your monitor. So then
naturally you just turn around, right? And you give that table of
data to your players in raw form and say, go study this.
Coach Chase Hargis (07:19):
Go get up.
Rob Collie (07:20):
Go ingest it.
Coach Chase Hargis (07:22):
Yeah. I wish it was that easy.
Rob Collie (07:24):
Which is not what you do.
Coach Chase Hargis (07:25):
No, sir.
Rob Collie (07:26):
For example, when you're watching a play, you're writing down
coding into this table, whether it was a pass play or a run play,
who they threw it to, how far they had to throw it, which area of
the field they throw it to, all kinds of things like that, right?
So that's why there's so many columns. There's so many things to
encode from this data. And so by the time you're done with this 16
hours of film review, how much time do you think your players, the
kids on your team, how much time do you think they have to study up
on what you've done? Do they put in 16 hours?
Coach Chase Hargis (08:00):
Definitely not. No. We have to actually teach them how to watch
film, believe it or not. Because they just want to throw on a game
and watch the game. Like they're watching Monday Night Football or
something. So we have to teach them how to watch it. But one of my
linebackers, one of my little mini me on the field as I call him,
he watched about five hours one week, I think was the most this
season. So they've got a lot of other stuff going on.
Rob Collie (08:23):
Yeah, of course, they do. And a lot of life changes going on for
them in high school. It's a busy time. So before you had the
visualization that we built, what were you using to convey your
opponents tendencies to your team?
Coach Chase Hargis (08:40):
The platform that we use that you talked about to watch film has a
literal three by three grid of where a team is throwing the
football.
Rob Collie (08:50):
Like a tic-tac toe visual.
Coach Chase Hargis (08:51):
Absolutely. Yeah. It's like, I don't know if my kids ever looked at
that or got anything off those numbers, but yeah, it just was very
vague. And I know where they're throwing the football by all the
film I watch and what I call the plays and whatnot. But I was
looking for something that could help them further understand where
teams are trying to throw the football on us.
Rob Collie (09:11):
So what we have of course is a Power BI scatter plot. It's a 2D
scatter plat with an image of a football field and we created
something called CoverHawk using Power BI embedded. How many
players on your team on an average week have been logging into
www.coverhawk.app and unknowingly using a Power BI embedded
solution to scout the opponent each week.
Coach Chase Hargis (09:38):
We had 36 players on our varsity defense this year and it better
have been all 36 of them, but I got a feeling it was most of
them.
Rob Collie (09:46):
Unlike the usual Power BI solution where there's calculations
involved and there's cross referencing, the average business data
model and DAX and formulas that go with it are performing a lot of
digestion of the data before that data is fed to the visual canvas.
But in our case, in this CoverHawk solution, we don't really do any
calculation at all. It's more about just every single row gets
displayed. I taught you how to take your exports from the film
system. You're exporting to Excel, which by the way puts you in the
same boat as everyone in business everywhere.
Rob Collie (10:29):
That's what they do. They've got some line of business system that
they work with and they press Excel export and then their real work
begins there. So you're exporting to Excel and importing that into
your Power BI workbook, your PBIX file. And then you're publishing
it to our P3 Adaptive Power BI tenant. But the players aren't
logging into the P3 Adaptive Power BI tenant. They're logging into
www.coverhawk.app or .app is the top level domain instead of.com.
So CoverHawk is the name of the solution and they log in there.
That's when we're using Power BI embedded. And do any of them know
that it's Power BI?
Coach Chase Hargis (11:13):
Not at all? No.
Rob Collie (11:14):
Has anyone even asked you?
Coach Chase Hargis (11:16):
Grownups have asked me.
Rob Collie (11:17):
You haven't had any kids come up to you going, Hey, how'd you do
this?
Coach Chase Hargis (11:20):
No couple of dads are interested. They've seen it.
Rob Collie (11:24):
Really. That's cool. Spoiler alert. I'm sure this is going to shock
you. I did not play organized football at any level past like
second grade flag. But if I had been on your team, I would've
probably been asking you how you did this.
Coach Chase Hargis (11:37):
We're not at that level on our defense.
Rob Collie (11:40):
I actually think that's great. When technology is at its best, you
really don't even notice it. You don't wonder about the why, you
don't wonder about how the sausage was made. You're just like, this
is good sausage. How much interaction have you gotten over their
shoulder? Did you hold a training session to show them how to use
it? How did you do all that?
Coach Chase Hargis (11:58):
So yeah, we started off with a training session. I mean, we have a
film room which I'm sitting in right now and made them bring all
their laptops and Chromebooks or whatever they had and Hey, we're
going to go to www.coverhawk.app. Here's our login, and here we go.
I'm going to show you guys everything you can do in it. And as far
as that, when I haven't really looked over any shoulders, but they
come up to me a lot at practice, even they'll tell me like, yeah, I
saw he's throwing it right here a lot to this receiver that makes
it worthwhile for me. It's like, yes, they are using it.
Rob Collie (12:29):
Has anyone even come up to you and said, I'm not getting it. Has
anyone volunteered that they're struggling with it?
Coach Chase Hargis (12:33):
No. A couple of kids came up to me and said, I can't get back to
the original. They wouldn't know how to reset their filters or
whatever. That was one problem we ran into. They're like, I've
gotten all the way down to three dots and I can't get back to the
whole picture. So we had to go back over. There's a Reset Filters
button to take you back to start and then you can dive in from
there.
Rob Collie (12:53):
That's good. That's a really good question. That is a really good
sign when someone is asking you a question like that. A, it shows
that they're willing to be vulnerable, right? They're willing to
show you that they can't figure something out. It also very clearly
signals that they're using it and they're actually using it in an
advanced way. We didn't mess around with this thing we allowed I
don't know how many different kinds of interactive visuals. It's at
least double digit places is in this report that you can click.
Rob Collie (13:17):
And I messed up even right there when you told me about that
problem, the fact that I named it the Reset Filters button, is a
mistake. That word filter doesn't appear anywhere else does it? As
they're clicking around they're not thinking about that as filters.
I am. So in CoverHawk V3, let's call this year's version V2. In V3
of CoverHawk Start Over would probably be a better label for that
button. Clear All or something. I don't know, but the word filters
shouldn't be in there. My fault, your high school Magnolia used
CoverHawk this year made it to the state playoffs. Not all teams
make the playoffs it's an achievement just to even be there, right?
You're very disappointed that you lost in the first round as I'm I,
but there is one other team in the state of Texas that is also
using CoverHawk right now with your assistance and they are still
in it.
Coach Chase Hargis (14:10):
It is my Alma mater, the Southlake Carroll Dragons. They are
undefeated once again, and in the state semi-finals for the State
Championship of Texas High School Football. So they are one of four
teams remaining in their division.
Rob Collie (14:23):
And what division is this that they're in? There's different size
schools, right?
Coach Chase Hargis (14:28):
Yeah. We go all the way up to 6A and there's a 6A division one,
which is your bigger schools and a 6A division two. They are 6A
division one. They are the biggest classification.
Rob Collie (14:38):
They're in the final four of the big leagues which would sound like
it would mean a lot until you realize just how casual the State of
Texas is about their High School Football. I mean, it's really not
that big a deal.
Coach Chase Hargis (14:49):
Yeah. We don't care about it at all.
Rob Collie (14:50):
Yeah. It's not a religion or anything.
Coach Chase Hargis (14:54):
Nobody just watches 16 hours for no reason.
Rob Collie (14:58):
They don't make TV shows about it.
Coach Chase Hargis (15:02):
Movies...
Rob Collie (15:03):
Friday Night Lights was based in like what? Delaware?
Coach Chase Hargis (15:06):
That's right. Rhode Island Football.
Rob Collie (15:08):
I'm pretty sure it was Texas. So it's a pretty high intensity
thing. So CoverHawk, power BI embedded is in the final four of
division one 6A.
Coach Chase Hargis (15:18):
That's right. We are doing it.
Rob Collie (15:21):
End of podcast. Mike dropped. Walk off. Yeah. Southlake Carroll is
a name that even I recognized from my high school years, because
back when USA today used to rank, I guess they still probably do
that rank. It's just one of the funniest things ever in my opinion,
which is a national newspaper ranking high school football teams,
like having a national ranking when there's so few common opponents
probably not even playing the same rules necessarily everywhere.
I've heard about them for a long time. This is a storied football
team. You say it's your alma mater. So you played for them, didn't
you?
Coach Chase Hargis (15:52):
I did. Coming up on 20 years ago.
Rob Collie (15:55):
So you have two levels of user now don't you? The players on your
team and you have the players on Southlake Carroll, but they don't
really talk to you I wouldn't think.
Coach Chase Hargis (16:06):
The players do not talk to me. Yes, sir.
Rob Collie (16:09):
That'd be a little too much, right?
Coach Chase Hargis (16:10):
Absolutely.
Rob Collie (16:11):
That second level that I'm talking about is you've got a coach or
coaches at Southlake Carroll that you're supporting. Has that been
a lot of fun?
Coach Chase Hargis (16:19):
It has because my good, good friend is their defensive coordinator.
I mean, I was in his wedding and we lived together for four years
and the guy that is running their spreadsheets for CoverHawk is my
principal's son. And I actually helped get him the job at Southlake
Carroll. So it has been a pleasure working with those guys.
Rob Collie (16:38):
I've told you numerous times how impressed I've been at your
ability to keep your spreadsheet clean. There's nothing in this
interface on this website called Huddle that does anything
resembling data validation. So you can fat finger all kinds of
garbage into that 500 row by 40 column absolute mess of a grid. And
then of course, when you feed it into Power BI and a power query,
heaven help you. The power query for that thing was almost a 100%
written by me. So you get all these incredibly mysterious refresh
errors and every now and then you've had to come back to me and ask
me like, Hey, what's going on here? And I go track it down. And
when I go track it down, I'm like, yeah, there's no way Coach
Hargis could have tracked this down on his own.
Rob Collie (17:25):
I'm assuming that I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg, that you
are catching data quality issues, refresh issues that you have been
diagnosing and fixing on your own without asking me, because you
don't seem like the kind of person who asked me to help you until
you've wasted eight hours of your own time trying to fix it
yourself. Am I right?
Coach Chase Hargis (17:43):
You are right. I mean, until I'm about to pull my hair out is when
I come to you, but I scour those things constantly looking for
anything. And at least I know the kid that's working with him at
Southlake so I can get onto him and like, gosh, you put this here
and you're not supposed to put that there.
Rob Collie (17:58):
A future production version of CoverHawk would have much better
data validation on the data entry side and or not just data
validation. Because the problem is we don't control the Huddle
website. The most convenient place to be entering the data is not
one that we control. So we can't add data validation there. We
can't catch them when they accidentally have the shift key down
when they press one and they get an exclamation point, which
happens to look awfully lot like a one when you're scanning that
huge grid of numbers with your eyeballs, right?
Coach Chase Hargis (18:31):
Sure it does.
Rob Collie (18:32):
Or you've entered a code for a team that doesn't match the list of
teams and the other table. In a environment that we controlled end
to end, we could do much better, but we could also instead add a
pre-checker, a tool that looks at your data before it gets ingested
into Power BI and scans for these 10 and most frequent mistakes and
identifying them specifically, that would be a really helpful thing
to write, but we didn't have time to do that this year so we just
made that you.
Rob Collie (18:58):
You really took to this and I have tried to explain, for example,
the power query settings like that aim the folder to a different
place, because I'll build this thing and it's pointing to a Rob
folder on the Rob hard drive and then I send it to you and you've
got to change it and point it to, I haven't even been nice to you.
I haven't even done the thing where if it has the back slash at the
end of the path, it won't double it up. But if it isn't there, I
could have been nice and done that handling but no, I make you
leave the back slash off or put it, I forget which you either have
too few or many back slashes, right? Like it's a very sensitive
thing that I've given you. We were just playing around at the time,
like back...
Coach Chase Hargis (19:37):
That's right.
Rob Collie (19:37):
When it was the No Checkdown site, I didn't really worry about any
of this stuff. So we went to this conference in, what was it
July?
Coach Chase Hargis (19:44):
Mid-July.
Rob Collie (19:46):
Yeah, we did a booth. It's my first time being an exhibitor at a
trade show, except for when I worked for Microsoft. And it's
definitely the first time I've ever been to a trade show and spent
any amount of time there that wasn't software. It's so funny. Like
it was the same cafeteria lunch experience. Everything's the same,
the way you walk into the trade show, it could be exposition hall,
all of it's the same. It's just that most of the booths that you go
to actually have physical things you can touch. There were racks of
weights and remote control tackling dummies and most famously for
me, these gigantic inflatable tunnels that you can buy for your
team to run on out of at the beginning of the game. We were there a
day early, right? During setup day and the tunnels were inflated.
And so you didn't even really hardly knew me at all at that point
and I'm handing you my phone saying, Hey, will you do me a favor
and record me just running out of this tunnel.
Coach Chase Hargis (20:48):
That's right. We were about 25 minutes into person to person
contact.
Rob Collie (20:53):
So I take my flip flops off and then I went back to my hotel and
set it to the Rocky theme and put some slow mo in it to hide the
fact that I was running so slowly. And yeah, it's a treasured
keepsake for me now. But what were you thinking at that moment when
this guy hands you his phone and said, come on, let's do this?
Coach Chase Hargis (21:12):
It was a great blow up. You couldn't miss the opportunity. It was
one of the biggest I've ever seen. I thought, at least he's
embracing what we're doing here and he's not just totally laughing
the whole time.
Rob Collie (21:21):
No, I was immersed. I wish we could have had more time when it had
like a real camera crew we could have gone around and filmed, nerd
goes to the football conference type of skit where we go back we
need to bring a crew.
Coach Chase Hargis (21:34):
It'd be a great documentary.
Rob Collie (21:35):
Three of us that went were me, you and Molly from here at P3. And
at one point, Molly asked me when you weren't around, Rob, would
you hire someone like Chase to work at P3? I'm like, heck yeah,
totally. And so this comes back to this notion of the data gene. I
think for most people listening, this just makes so much sense. Of
course, you've got this big grid of data and of course you need a
better visualization than the three by three ugly tells you nothing
grid.
Rob Collie (22:06):
But I know better because the population of football coaches at any
level, not just high school, but at any level who have come through
our lead submission system, that population is one. It's you.
You're the only one who has done that. And we didn't make any
effort to advertise the old No Checkdown site. The one that you
found before we created CoverHawk, we certainly didn't put keywords
in there, like high school defensive coordinators. We weren't even
thinking about it from the defensive side of the ball. So you found
our visualization solution in spite of all of our efforts, as
opposed to because of. I got to think you are working really hard
to find this.
Rob Collie (22:53):
And then to follow that up again, I have tried to teach multiple
people over the years, how to customize the settings in power query
so that it can hydrate files from their hard drive instead. If it's
a technical person I'm working with, they already know what they're
doing. I don't have to tell them anything. I showed you once and
you were off and running. I mean, you are the lowest maintenance
data refreshing I have ever seen in this process. So yeah, you're
one of those hybrids. You're up to your eyeballs in football,
that's your subject matter. But you're thinking about it from a
what's the better way perspective. How can we address this problem
better? Which is real how most of the people who work at P3 started
out. They're in Excel. They're discovering ways to solve problems
and they're looking around the organization going, I can't believe
we still do it this way. There's got to be something better. And
then they find their way into Power BI and all of that.
Rob Collie (23:46):
That's just a long soliloquy saying, I think you're exceptional and
I've really enjoyed crossing paths. We've enjoyed cooperating with
you. One of the things that really struck me when we were at that
conference was how I won't say that all of the high school coaches
that I met, I wouldn't say that all of them were like this, but a
large percentage of them really talked about themselves as
educators even more than they talked about themselves as coaches.
Wasn't about this obsession with football so much the thing that
powers a lot of people in your profession that I met there is the
improvement that they see in their team, in their individual
players even over the course of a year or two, that developmental
aspect. Was I getting an impression there that was correct?
Coach Chase Hargis (24:32):
Absolutely. I think a lot of guys that get into this profession,
it's not that they were really good at football or played football
at this college or anything like that. I mean, there is a lot of
that, but I think there just invested in kids. And at the end of
the day, I've got a bunch of friends in the business world that
make a lot of money. And I obviously don't, they don't get why I'm
doing what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, I get to play
around with kids all day. And you guys are sitting in offices,
dealing with grownups all day that don't care about you. So these
kids look up to me and care about me. And at the end of the day, I
get to mess around with them and help them get better at something
they like doing and teach them a little something along the
way.
Rob Collie (25:08):
Basically, infinitely small percentage of the players that come
through your program are going to ultimately wind up in the pros,
right? They're not going to go pro in football.
Coach Chase Hargis (25:18):
Absolutely not.
Rob Collie (25:19):
I'm sure that there are examples that have, so you're not directly
preparing these kids for a career, not directly, but in hindsight,
neither was my calculus teacher.
Coach Chase Hargis (25:31):
Mine either.
Rob Collie (25:32):
But overcoming adversity, learning to build new neural pathways.
People don't really appreciate this I don't think most of the time.
How much information processing goes into being an effective
football player. It is insane. You're having in your team study.
What was it? 500 to 600 data points.
Coach Chase Hargis (25:50):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (25:51):
I don't care how well visualized it is. The fact that this solution
we've built needs to be interactive. You need to be able to see
what they do on third down. You need to be able to see specifically
how often they throw to this particular player and where. This is
an enormous amount of data. And then these players have to go out
there and in split second real time, diagnose things. This is an
information processing game as old and as creaky as I am now in my
middle age, if I could go out onto a football field, not an NFL
football field, I'm talking about maybe like your football field,
right?
Rob Collie (26:30):
If I could process information perfectly instantaneously, even a
creaky body like mine would be an amazing asset on a football
field, but my brain can't do that. My body can't do it and my brain
can't do it. So I'm not close to being valuable on a football
field, but I just think it is a really, really incredible how much
data and information processing, whether you want call it data,
whether you want to call it analytics it doesn't matter. Even the
most old school football mentality still involves a tremendous
amount of diagnosis, well, actually both sides of the ball. It's a
tremendous amount of information processing, maybe more information
processing in the game of American Football than any other
sport.
Coach Chase Hargis (27:12):
Absolutely.
Rob Collie (27:13):
So you're a data instructor, man. You're an analytics decision
support. You're a lot more closely related to the BI industry than
when I even thought going into this.
Coach Chase Hargis (27:22):
I appreciate that, but you could call it what you want, but it's
fun. I know that much. Did you see the Charles Barkley quote on
analytics recently?
Rob Collie (27:30):
Charles Barkley, Charles Barkley on analytics. Here we go.
Coach Chase Hargis (27:33):
"They made it up because all these rich dudes who own these teams
want to get their son-in-law a job. They are just stats, like yoga.
Yoga's nothing but stretching. I tell people yoga's just
stretching. They gave it a different name and now they can charge
you for it."
Rob Collie (27:48):
He's acknowledging that it's important. Stretching is important
while he's reserving his right to think of yoga as silly. And he's
saying the same thing about analytics.
Coach Chase Hargis (28:00):
Says they're statistics, they just changed the name. We're going to
charge you for analytics now, but they just raise the price. It's
nothing but statistics and stats.
Rob Collie (28:09):
See, this is good. This is progress. So first of all, Barkley is an
American treasure. I think he's a national treasure. So it's always
pained me given how much I like the guy that he has always been so
anti-analytics. Now in his evolution of his attitude towards
analytics, it sounds like he's softening a little bit, right? He's
gone from saying analytics is stupid, it's crap, it's useless to
saying essentially we've always had it, right? It's always been
valuable. Now it's just got a new name. He's very slowly trying to
adjust himself to be on the side of its valuable without saying
he's changed his mind. Very sneaky, sir, Charles, very sneaky, but
we caught you. We see what you're doing. What I think it's really
interesting is that there is no analytics and I hinted at this
earlier. There's zero analytics in what we've done for
CoverHawk.
Coach Chase Hargis (29:02):
I agree.
Rob Collie (29:02):
It is just turning the data that you've already collected into a
form that is visually digestible.
Coach Chase Hargis (29:10):
Yes.
Rob Collie (29:10):
The only parts we start to tow the line of analytics is the fact
that while there is a data model behind it, so you can click on the
Just Show Me Third Down and the visual updates. There's a brain
behind the scenes. It's able to reflect that and revisualize just
that subset of the data. And there are some numerical quantities on
the field or on the report that show the average or the total net
or whatever for that collection of plays. As far as analytics go,
this is really, really, really simple stuff, right? On the far
other side of analytics would be some system that's predicting what
play they're going to call next.
Coach Chase Hargis (29:48):
Yes.
Rob Collie (29:49):
We're not in that ballpark at all. So I think that if Barkley were
a high school football coach today, just like he likes to talk
about the son-in-law of the team owner. If Barkley had a son and he
was in high school right now, you'd be damn sure Barkley be
coaching that football team. Barkley would like CoverHawk.
Coach Chase Hargis (30:08):
He'd love it.
Rob Collie (30:09):
The sin I'm about to describe is one that I have committed many
times and I think less frequently with experience, but more
frequently at the beginning. Which is getting carried away with the
math, getting carried away with the technology. When a nerd gets a
hold of something like this, like me, I did this 15 years ago plus,
there's this arrogance or hubris that you're going to find
something that the coaches didn't know. And you might, you go find
something like that and then you can show it to him and the coaches
is like, this isn't helpful. There's another quote. I think it's
Doc Rivers when he was skewing analytics. And I think rightly so,
he was saying, my analytics team comes up to me and tells me, Hey,
do you know that Rajon Rondo gets 20 miles an hour in the open
floor when he is on a breakaway with a dribble?
Rob Collie (30:56):
And Doc's like, get out of my office with that. And I think
correctly, because it doesn't change anything that Doc Rivers is
going to do, but there's this person in his office who's trying to
present it like it's the coolest thing ever and is really
important. It's not, it doesn't change his decisions. Doesn't
change his coaching decision. Doesn't change anything about how he
operates the team. And so the analytics that first came to the NBA
for instance, probably were a lot of times tone deaf, but there are
other things.
Rob Collie (31:26):
One of our other podcast guests, Wayne Winston and his friend Jeff
Sagarin almost 20 years ago, they were helping Mark Cuban's Dallas
Mavericks optimize their lineups and it was working. And so when
you say analytics, it covers a lot of ground. It includes all the
bad and inexperienced practitioners. It includes all the places
where something really not so helpful was tried and maybe even
trumpeted as amazing, even though it wasn't. And then of course the
really, really helpful things, the ones that are truly, truly
helpful. Well, teams don't typically like to talk about those
secrets. Did you ever use the word analytics with your players?
Would that have gotten their attention? Would that have been
helpful?
Coach Chase Hargis (32:05):
No, absolutely not. Like I said, I leave the football guys be in
the football guys, but I'm fortunate enough that one of my
assistants, my linebackers coach does love data as much or maybe
more than I do. And we like to throw the word around analytics to
make us seem really smart at times.
Rob Collie (32:23):
You got to have the right audience. Don't say it when Barkley is in
the room, but yeah, it's an instructional tool. We have some
decisions to make don't we?
Coach Chase Hargis (32:31):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (32:32):
We have to talk about whether to continue to invest in CoverHawk as
a potential business. I mean, it's certainly been a positive
experience so far. I think for everybody involved, it's paid for
itself. It's paid its bills, right? It's certainly been good for
us. Building a consumer grade high school student proof Power BI
embedded solution has been a really good forcing factor for us in
terms of upping our Power BI embedded game. And it's also set us up
in a place where we can pretty quickly clone that and do all kinds
of other interesting things with it for demonstration sites and
things like that. So we're going to be reusing that tech.
Coach Chase Hargis (33:16):
Right.
Rob Collie (33:18):
But whether or not to attempt to scale it and get a 100 schools
using it. And it's all about adoption. In your case, you were the
coach, you were in charge. So we talk about hostages and volunteers
when it comes to technology, your players, hostages, they didn't
have a choice. Now they could have fought it, sounds like that
didn't happen, but they weren't the ones offering the Google
searches. Like, come on, coach we got to have a better way to do
this. That wasn't how it went down. The Southlake Caroll story is
very, very, very encouraging. However weird you might happen to be,
you've got another big program using this. It's just killing me
that y'all aren't just right down the road. I want to be in some of
these meetings, just watching the breakdowns. I want to field
questions from the players. I won't know thing one about what's
actually going on football wise, but I like their adoption of
it.
Coach Chase Hargis (34:12):
Yeah. We'll have to do it.
Rob Collie (34:14):
And so how do we get players and coaches to adopt something that
wasn't their idea that they weren't looking for?
Coach Chase Hargis (34:21):
That's where you come in as the business side. But no, I think it
would be really cool to get you in front of Southlake Caroll and
for me to do it too, because I bet they've used it in ways that I
don't know how to use it and vice versa. I think it'd be great to
hear feedback from them.
Rob Collie (34:35):
So how awesome is it that they went to the finals last year, they
went to the championship game and lost. They go to the finals this
year and win, what's the only difference that we can point to?
Coach Chase Hargis (34:43):
Www.coverhawk.app.
Rob Collie (34:47):
CoverHawk.
Coach Chase Hargis (34:47):
The Hawk is what we've started calling it.
Rob Collie (34:49):
Really?
Coach Chase Hargis (34:50):
The Hawk is updated is the text that goes back and forth.
Rob Collie (34:53):
Oh my God, that is so cool. The Hawk is updated. It sounds like the
eagle is landed or something.
Coach Chase Hargis (34:59):
The Hawk is updated.
Rob Collie (35:03):
Frog swim in winter. The Hawk is updated. I love it. Are there any
other interesting or funny stories? Things that have happened in
the course of this adventure.
Coach Chase Hargis (35:15):
So Southlake plays a team in their district is my buddies the head
coach and he's an offensive guy. And so Southlake sent me the
spreadsheets for this school that they were playing where my buddy
is the head coach at. And so when I updated the Hawk, I screen
shotted it on my phone and I texted it to him and I go, Hey, if you
wanted to know where you're throwing the football, the last two
weeks here it is. We had talked to him at the convention me and
you. He came by the booth and was interested in it, but he looked
at it and he goes, wow, we're pretty right-handed aren't we? I go,
yeah, you're throwing it to the right a little too much. It was
interesting for us to talk about it when he had no idea that we
were even doing that with his team.
Rob Collie (35:55):
It's just fascinating. I would've expected, and I'm sure that there
are layers and levels at which this impression is still true, but I
would've expected a level of cutthroat competition amongst all
these coaches in this community. That if it's there, it's like
subterranean. It's hidden. When you're coming up on a game against
high school X, high school X actually provides you with a lot of
film from their games and you do the same for them.
Coach Chase Hargis (36:29):
That is correct.
Rob Collie (36:31):
You provide each other with film. That's not happening above the
high school level.
Coach Chase Hargis (36:36):
No, it's not. I sent it to another coach too that was the head
coach of a team in their district. And I go, Hey, here's where
you're throwing the ball the last three games. He goes, what is
that? I go, it's that CoverHawk thing I was telling you about this
summer. He goes, if it's something I have to buy to beat Southlake
I'll buy it. I was like, well, I can't guarantee that, but.
Rob Collie (36:55):
Well, coach, it's been a heck of a ride from that moment that you
sent the email to P3 until now we've gone to a conference together,
my only conference since COVID, which is pretty cool, got a future
with a lot of possibility in it with just with your typical
standard run of the mill Power BI embedded football visualization
called CoverHawk.
Coach Chase Hargis (37:14):
That's right.
Rob Collie (37:15):
We'll be in touch behind the scenes, plotting our next move. But
yeah, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day.
Coach Chase Hargis (37:21):
I appreciate it too. It was fun.
Announcer (37:24):
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