Backgammon Pros Release Zeus™ For NFL

by Michael Strato
14 February 2006

Frank Frigo

Two well-known Backgammon players are involved in the release of new software that can accurately help NFL football coaches assess critical play-calling decisions in a second! Certain concepts from backgammon were considered in its development.

Zeus(TM) named after the mightiest of the Greek Gods and representing power and omniscience, is an extremely powerful analytical tool developed by EndGame Technologies whose team consists of Frank Frigo, Chuck Bower, Bo Durickovic and Bob Garvey.

Information about Zeus(TM) can be found at the company's website - www.PigskinRevolution.com - don't forget to check out the commentary with Zeus' analysis from a selection of past NFL games, including the recent Super Bowl XL, on this page.

The Team is Frank Frigo, 1994 World Champion of Backgammon; Dr. Chuck Bower, 2002 Champion of the Michigan Summer Backgammon Championships; Bo Durickovic handles software development and recently began to play backgammon; and Bob Garvey, who is the Editorial Advisor. Bios and more background on all four can be read here.

Frank and Chuck devote time to promote backgammon and help others to play better. Frank has submitted matches to GammonVillage and supports the Louisville Backgammon Club in Kentucky while Chuck is an avid contributor to the discussion board at Kit Woolsey's GammOnLine (membership required).

Getting back to Zeus(TM), not only can it answer binary queries such as "go for the touchdown or kick?" but it also provides insight into any play of any NFL game, past or present. (Fewer than 13,000 games have been played in the history of the National Football League.)

However, unlike interactive football simulations that require approximately the same time as a real game, Zeus(TM) can perform the equivalent of the entire history of the NFL in seconds on an off-the-shelf laptop computer. Zeus adjusts quantitatively for the strengths and weaknesses of the two teams, both for the average tendencies and the extreme short timescale variations.

"We want to revolutionize football in the way plays are called," Chuck Bower told GammonVillage Sunday from his home in Bloomington, Indiana. "As in Backgammon, Zeus can help football coaches maximize their game winning chances with the play that gives the most equity - and not only the right play, but the one to win the game."

According to Frank Frigo, statistics produced by Zeus on past NFL games show that teams consistently fall from 0.6 of a game to 1.25 games short of their potential per season due to their sub-optimal play-calling decisions in critical binary situations such as fourth downs, extra points, and kickoffs. "That's a lot when you consider NFL teams play a 16-game season," Frank said.

With this kind of value up for grabs, EndGame Technologies says that the game of football is ripe for an information revolution, "With the help of a tool like Zeus, the game will never be played the same again... it will be played better."

Similar to Backgammon, Football is a game of risk management and winning strategies that are accompanied by the possibility of a negative outcome. These risks are frequently apparent on the surface but sporadically lie just beneath our grasp.

Many football coaches and fans will certainly recognize the impact of a loss of downs when a critical 4th down attempt fails but the subtleties surrounding field position and clock are not quite as easy to capture. But, in the "eyes" of the computer model no variable goes unnoticed.

When Zeus examines a critical play, each and every relevant variable is considered, and similar to what backgammon software such as Snowie can do, a value in percentage, in plus or minus, will be displayed in the form of GWC (Game Winning Chances).

In a telephone conversation, Frank says, "Certain concepts from backgammon were considered when developing this program. The first thing Chuck and I recognized when we were kicking around the idea of Zeus was that games like Football and Baseball have a very situational nature to them."

"When you look at games like Hockey or Basketball, there's sort of a constant motion going on, but Football and Baseball have these incremental situations where you get a snapshot, with multiple variables, and you say okay, I have a decision to make here. We paid specific attention to what we call critical or binary play choices, which typically don't really have much of a surprise element to them.

"In these forks in the road, where it's very transparent, the team is lining up and they are making a conscious choice to go down one path or the other, and that, I thought, was very similar to backgammon. It is sort of like a doubling or checkerplay decision in backgammon. You got a situation with multi-variables - in football you might be considering ball position and score differential like you would be considering score differential in a backgammon match and the ball position would be like a pip count. And there's some other sort of aspects to the structure such as yards to first down and so forth, and then even skill comparisons of the opponents. So there are a lot of similarities in terms of how you set up the problem solving with this as you do in backgammon.

"I think this was a huge part in Chuck and I taking a stab at this probably in a way that nobody had previously."

Frank said the model could also be developed for Baseball, "which might even be the most natural one, even a better fit, and using another backgammon analogy, the difference with Baseball is that it is a lot more like money game play in backgammon while Football is more like match or tournament play in backgammon.

EndGame Technologies has worked on the Zeus project for more than four years, though mostly part-time, and have now presented it to some seven pro football teams.

In an article published online at the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, Bo Durickovic of EndGame Technologies remarks that the reaction from media people, such as those at Fox and Direct TV, was "This is amazing!" and "You guys are... geniuses!"

Meanwhile, the feedback from NFL offices, while not negative at all, is that it needs to be contemplated further as politics do exist between the management and coaching sides of a team.

"When we present this to NFL teams, we make it a point to stress that Zeus is not a substitute for a human coach but an aide," Chuck Bower said recently on the GammOnLine discussion board. "It doesn't tell the coach: you have no options but to do what Zeus tells you...".

Chuck went on to say: "Suppose Joe Backgammon (no, I'm not referring to Joe Sylvester although some might have called him that :) is a great player at all aspects of the game but one: races. His attitude is 'people say backgammon is related to mathematics, but I will show them! I never count a race or anything like that. I can win without it.'

"Then he tosses away equity when getting into races. So, wouldn't he be an even better player if he added a sophisticated (or even unsophisticated) racing algorithm to his reportoire?

"Further, if he's competing with other players who have similar skills (and lack of racing skills) wouldn't he gain an edge over the competition by improving his game in this way? That is what the NFL teams are being offered -- a way of improving what they already have and gaining an edge over their competition."

Frank says that currently there are no such similar tools or programs that NFL coaches use, "We designed Zeus originally as a real-time application for the very purpose of having it up in the booth. First of all there are NFL restrictions around being able to process information on the field and spit it back out to the coach. Some people tell us it is black and white, it's pretty much an NFL rule, but it's got a grey area, depending on how they use the application. But there are no restrictions to having an analytical tool off the field.

"And the bottom line is that (to use another backgammon analogy) just because you can't use Snowie during a match, it doesn't mean that it's not a really useful tool to do post-analysis of your games and to learn concepts and strategies."

Good luck to the Zeus Team from the GV Team, we hope that it will be licensed soon. It sure would be nice to see, at the bottom of your TV screen, just before a crucial play, "Zeus says go for the field goal" and know it was made by two of the best guys from the Backgammon world.