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Can you Position Analyze American Football Games?

As you can see in Phil Simborg's position analyses, backgammon pros are assisted and guided by computer programs (such as Snowie and GNU). Use of programs and bots is also common among chess masters. Yet, it is hardly ever used in sports such as American football. Why not actually?

ZEUS, developed by backgammon masters Chuck Bower and Frank Frigo, aspires to changed American football the way Snowie had changed backgammon (or at least assist the coaching staff). Using real NFL game statistics and simulating actual field situation, the software can tell which play by which player has the largest chances to win.

backgammon checkers with helmets

Skeptic David Goldberg of Gelf Magazine talked with one of ZEUS procreates and former World Backgammon Champion Frank Frigo about ZEUS vision, the development of backgammon games analyses and the incomprehensible relation between backgammon and American football.

Why Football?

Like backgammon, football is a multivariable, positional game. If in backgammon, a player finds himself having doubts on whether he should accept or refuse a double while taking in consideration the type of game played (match or money play), the position on both sides of the board, the pip count and so on, in football, it might be something like should a player punt or kick a field goal considering the ball position, the number of timeouts, the score differential, etc.

Accept today's backgammon players no longer deal with these dilemmas; they simply run the given position on Snowie, and let the backgammon computer evaluate the winning chances in case they accept, refuse, or choose any other play giving the given circumstances. The computer revolution the backgammon game had experienced throughout the last 30 decades, marked with the first victory of a neural-net program, TD-Gammon, on a champion level human player, had:

Cut short the path to the championship division, or in Frigo's words: "Nowadays, somebody who gets a really good bot like Snowie 4 and locks themselves in a room for two years and studies like crazy can become a very, very good player."
Enabled players to challenge conventional backgammon guidelines, simply by providing a reliable, statistical tool that test their validity by eliminating aspects such as "skill differentials and emotion and momentum".

With the realization that "these human subtleties of the game, the psychology of the game, were highly overrated…the models could perform every bit as good or better than a human, and we could test it.", Frigo and Bower approached football. They found a virgin field, with hardly any statistical recording accept Peter Palmer's The Hidden Game of Football.

They also discovered that football is far more complicated than backgammon and that generally, American football is less ready to move on to the computer age. Maybe because backgammon is a game of individuals; backgammon players who make unconventional decisions guided by the backgammon bot, are less likely to lose their fan base or worse, their job than football coaches who earn $1.5 million a season.