Several clicks off the front page of Duke’s official athletic website resides a men’s basketball database with team and player statistics going back to the program’s origin in 1905.
The presentation is fairly nondescript with facts stacked upon facts, complemented with little to no art, photos or video. Within all of those numbers, SAP and another technology firm, NTT Data, saw an opportunity.
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Duke installed cameras to track player and ball movement at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Duke, SAP and NTT are trying to bring all of this statistical information to life in a new analytics microsite that will be an extension off GoDuke.com. It will present graphics, charts, photos, video and interactive tools that compare current and past players and teams.
SAP produces a similar page for the NBA at stats.nba.com. The work at Duke represents the firm’s first venture into college athletics.
Duke will launch the new men’s basketball analytics microsite, with all of the historical team and player stats, in the coming weeks, just in time for the start of the season. The school will use social media to market the site. Mentions of the analytics page will be accompanied by #DukeMBBstats.
SAP and NTT intend to seek more college clients for this type of interactive stats presentation that updates in real time and provides historical data.
“This is a first-of-its-kind fan engagement in the college space,” said Frank Wheeler, SAP’s global vice president for strategic sales. “It really brings this kind of data, both current and historical, to life.”
SAP’s NBA page features statistical leaders, shot charts and other intuitive sections on player movement and ball movement. The presentation of Duke’s stats and historical data will grow as more information is added. The Blue Devils installed cameras in the ceiling of Cameron Indoor Stadium last season to track player and ball movement during a game.
That type of analytics will be presented in later phases of the project, but at launch the microsite will enable users to instantly compare historical data with current trends to track stats such as most consecutive double-doubles or the percentage of made 3-pointers compared to 2-point field goals, as examples.
Users also will be able to bring up profiles on past players and compare the likes of Bobby Hurley with Jim Spanarkel or Christian Laettner with Mike Gminski.
“This is going to create a completely unique experience for Duke basketball fans,” said Jeremy Stierwalt, senior director of analytics at NTT.
SAP’s Wheeler said the project has become such a priority that the firm featured it last week in Las Vegas at its TechEd && d-code show.
“Duke’s stats page was pretty flat and not very visually appealing,” SAP’s Wheeler said. “We wanted to take that data, put it into our system and see what comes of it.”
Such a project wouldn’t have been possible without the database, which was compiled over a five-year period by Curtis Snyder, a former Duke athletics employee who worked as the director of Internet operations from 2003-08. Snyder has since gone to work for the University of Colorado.
Before he came along, old Duke box scores were simply compiled in Excel documents. Snyder tirelessly moved that information into the online database. Then he went in search of missing box scores. By searching microfilm of old newspaper accounts going back to the 1930s, Snyder uncovered most of Duke’s team and player stats from that period. Snyder estimated that 15 Duke students helped him compile the data over the course of the five years.
The online database debuted publicly in 2007 and has simply been a stats page ever since.
SAP for years has had a partnership with Duke’s university side, working with the school to provide software for its financials. But this represents SAP’s first venture with Duke athletics.
In an interesting twist, Duke put its MBA students in the Fuqua School of Business in charge of the project. They worked with Ryan Craig, director of digital media, in the athletic department.
“There’s so much passion around Duke basketball,” said Kevin Brilliant, an MBA student and team leader on the project. “It just takes this kind of data visualization to bring the record book to life. We’ve got the most complete set of data anywhere — I mean, Curtis is like the godfather of this project. Now we’re breathing life into this to make it an interactive site.”
