Because I know Glenn and SBN both love cross-pollination, I'll link to this excellent article by Bill Connelly on the big site regarding how college coaches have applied statistics to overcome difficult situations with their football teams. If you haven't read Michael Lewis's first book (and I just started it last night), it's about how the Oakland A's defied conventional baseball wisdom and started using measurable statistics to determine whether a player was any good or not, most notably OBP and, later, OPS. It's a good read, and I highly recommend it.

Hal Mumme used a different kind of approach, but his aim was to make an opposing defense defend more of the field than just the middle, i.e. the exact opposite of what Bill Curry and hundreds before him tried to do at UK: jam a square peg into a round hole that closed up wayyyyy too fast. Scouting high school football players is obviously more difficult than scouting college baseball players because of what is bound to be a lack of measurable statistics. However, it would seem that, given the ever-increasing exposure and scouting data on high school athletes, it would be possible for a coach, or even AD, to find some way to evaluate talent on more than height, weight, and a 40 time. I don't know what those are, but I bet there's a way to do it.

Think someone at Nutter Fieldhouse might think this is interesting?