About a month ago, I sat down with Jeff Williams and J.D. Hamilton of the NCAA statistics staff and asked them to share some insight into their daily responsibilities. I don’t think most people understand what the staff does and why they do it, so this seemed like an appropriate forum for us all to receive an education. The statistics staff will offer recurring posts on the Double-A Zone, even contributing “wacky stats” from time to time.

When Josh first asked the statistics staff to provide a guest blog on the Double-A Zone, the first thought was, “where do we begin?”

After all, while many people use the weekly and final statistical compilations and possibly just take for granted the statistics are there each week, few may realize there is a small staff (eight total staff members) compiling and editing these statistics for posting. And, while the statistics are a key component to our job each day, there is much more that the NCAA statistics staff does.

Still we decided, instead of using our first Double-A Zone posting to provide several pages of rambling about what we do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, we thought we’d give you some background on our staff.

When most people hear “statistics,” I’m sure the thought is that we must be former math majors who took classes in college like differential and integral calculus or applied multivariate analysis. But that’s not really the kind of statistics we keep. All eight members of our staff are former Sports Information Directors at various schools and conferences, we’re all current members of CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America), and we all have journalism backgrounds. In all, we’ve worked or attended school at 14 NCAA member schools and two league offices.

Our staff is an interesting mix of national office veterans and relatively new NCAA employees. Three staff members average more than 24 years at the national office. The other five members of the staff have a total of 15 years at the NCAA but more than 39 years in the membership before joining the staff.

In future postings, we’ll tell you how we compile the statistical rankings each week and at the end of seasons. We’ll talk about all the other things our staff does, including RPI, records books, coaching records, attendance, championship media coordination and more. And we’ll occasionally try to provide rare, record-breaking, or sometimes wacky stats.

It’s our hope that our postings will further highlight some of the less-recognized accomplishments of NCAA student-athletes while also give a glimpse of one small area of the national office.

If you have questions that we can address in this forum or if you just want to submit a stat we may not be aware of, feel free to post it here or send an e-mail to Jeff Williams (jswilliams@ncaa.org) or J.D. Hamilton (jhamilton@ncaa.org).