LAS VEGAS

During one of the first Grey Cups, in or around 1911, a carrier pigeon was used to send half time stats to The Globe and Mail in downtown Toronto.

More than a century later the CFL’s stats system, and the way the information is disseminated, hasn’t moved much past carrier pigeon level. Until three days ago, for instance, you couldn’t go to the CFL website and find out how many games Peter Dyakowski played in 2012. That is astounding in this day and age.

Thankfully for fans of the three-down game — not to mention sports reporters who don’t mind using interesting facts every once in a while — that is all about to change.

“I joined the league in 2008,” CFL head statistician Steve Daniel says, “and to my horror found that we had not captured even a moment of our history in any way that was usable, organized or consistent.”

Thanks to Daniel’s tireless efforts over the last eight years, every statistical piece of information that is out there has been found. Daniel now knows exactly how many players have ever suited up in the CFL (prior to the 2015 campaign it was 9,593), and he has first and last names for all but about 50 of them. He also has the basic numbers of every scoring play in league history.

In recent years Daniel has included some of that information into the game notes packages that are created for each regular season and playoff game.

“Yet we still lacked the platform to share all this information,” Daniel says.

You might as well not even exist these days if you don’t have a strong digital presence, which is why the CFL hired Vanessa Morbi in early 2014 to be its broadcast and media assets product development director. It’s a big title, because she has the big task of taking the league’s digital presence to a place it has never been before.

“There’s not an area of this business this doesn’t touch on,” Morbi says. “... The first goal is near real-time stats,” Morbi says. “We need to get our stats out to our fans. The fact that people are waiting five, 10 minutes — sometimes a lot longer than that — to get their stats is just unacceptable. The expectation cost, in terms of digital, is huge these days. We’re just not there. We have to get there quickly.”

The CFL and its nine teams rolled out their new websites on Monday, but there is only a slight improvement when it comes to statistical information available. The league is targeting February for the rollout of its vast historical data, and starting next season Daniel and his volunteer stats crews across the country will add what he calls “texture” to the numbers. To which quadrant the quarterback throws the ball — short left, medium middle or long right, for example — is one such addition.

“A couple games into the season with this new stats system I’ll be able to tell you that Nick Moore caught this many of his passes in this part of the field,” Daniel says. “That information will be available to all the coaches in advance, and they can say, ‘OK, let’s look at what Nick Moore’s tendencies are.’

“Hopefully that vision comes through.”

Daniel and Morbi asked the NFL for direction when it came to improving the CFL’s stats system, and that league’s vice president of football technology, John Cave, directed them to SharpHat, a creative application firm that came up with the NFL’s software system. After educating SharpHat’s developers about the nuances of the Canadian game, Daniel and Morbi were convinced the company could come up with something great.

“Being able to create additional stats based on the metrics that we’re capturing is gonna be huge,” Morbi says.

Daniel and Morbi are in Vegas this week to give a presentation to the league’s presidents and GMs about the new system.

Daniel is also working on a new quarterback efficiency rating formula that he feels would be more indicative of a passer’s worth, he hopes to be able to do snap counts for each player as soon as possible, and he would like, for instance, to one day be able to track how many sacks each offensive lineman surrenders.

The possibilities will be endless, so it won’t end there.

“We’re going to have our players tagged one day. We’re going to be doing player tracking,” Morbi says. “We’re going to have a whole bunch of additional data from different data points. So creating a system that’s going to grow with us, live with us for a long time, is a huge, huge part of what we’re doing as well.”

Morbi says the new stats system will also allow developers to come up with new programs related to the CFL game, which should attract the next generation of fans the league is desperately seeking. That includes a video game, whose absence has long been a bone of contention among some fans but could finally be on the verge of becoming a reality.

kirk.penton@sunmedia.ca

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