Quaker Meeting House (QMH) was nervous most of last Thursday. And Friday. And he woke up with a start on Saturday.
 
It didn't have anything to do with that day's football game against Columbia, which will be subject to the "homecoming" storyline every time the game is played in Franklin Field as long as Al Bagnoli is the Lions' head coach.
 
It wasn't because of women's soccer, either. The Quakers were at Dartmouth on Saturday, a place where they hadn't won since 2002, and were facing a Big Green squad that was 2-0-1 in Ivy play just like them.
 
It wasn't volleyball, either. The Quakers were coming off their first Ivy win of the season on Friday night, but the 1983 and 2003 Ivy League championship teams were now on campus and planned to be in attendance for Saturday's game. Would the current edition be able to knock off a Cornell squad that entered the weekend tied for first in the league?
 
Nope, none of these events were what had QMH twisted up in knots. You know what it was?
 
On October 13, QMH was nervous about a basketball scrimmage.
 
(Before we get to that: football beat Columbia, 13-10; women's soccer beat Dartmouth, 1-0; and volleyball knocked off Cornell, 3-1. Yeah, pretty much a Quaker Day!)
 
You're probably wondering why QMH might be nervous about a game that isn't even a regular-season game. Well, it had nothing to do with the game itself. You see, the men's basketball team played a closed scrimmage on Saturday morning in The Palestra. Per NCAA rules, "closed" scrimmages are allowed between two NCAA Division 1 teams and it means that the only people allowed in the gym while the scrimmage is going on are the players, the coaches, trainers, student managers, referees, and game personnel. At Penn, "game personnel" means clock operators and official statisticians.
 
Ah yes, statisticians. You see, the statisticians are what had QMH nervous.
 
Not the statisticians themselves, mind you. QMH had a pair of veterans on hand on Saturday, and he knows the work they do. Even if it was their first game of the year, it wasn't going to take long for them to knock the rust off.
 
No, what had QMH nervous was the program they were using to create the stats for Saturday's scrimmage.
 
It's a brand-new program. Like, totally new.
 
You're likely to hear a lot about this during the first few weeks of the college basketball season, if QMH had to guess, but the short version is this: after approximately two decades of using a program made by a company called Stat Crew to keep official stats for basketball, colleges and universities are making the move to a company called Genius Sports for their basketball stats this season.
 
So what is Genius Sports? QMH could not have told you back in May, when the NCAA announced its partnership with them. But it turns out Genius has been around for awhile, and the NCAA joins a list of affiliates that includes the Federation of International Basketball Associations (FIBA) and the Euroleague for basketball, the PGA Tour, and Major League Baseball.
 
In other words, Genius is not some fly-by-night startup that might quickly find itself in over its head.
 
Genius and the NCAA are introducing the partnership this year with basketball. Genius has gone on record saying that the goal is to introduce football and volleyball next fall, and then other sports will fall into place over the next few years.
 
One step at a time.
 
As you might imagine, Genius Sports had a massive presence at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) and College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) conventions, which ran concurrently in June in Washington, D.C. QMH was there, and he spent a lot of time learning about the program and talking with colleagues to figure out what they were going to do. This continued well after the convention.
 
Schools are not required to move from Stat Crew to Genius Sports this year. In a perfect world, the NCAA has told the member schools that they would love this to be a three-year process so that all schools will be using the program by the 2020-21 season.
 
QMH decided not to wait. It was time to rip the band-aid off. On Saturday, the band-aid came off.
 
Why so nervous? Well, when QMH walked into The Palestra on Saturday he literally had not seen the program used in-game. He was relying on the words of one of his statisticians, who said he had been playing around with it at home the previous few days. The other statistician in question also happens to be the lovely Ms. QMH, so QMH had some sense that she knew what was going on—she had done some research of her own at the conventions—but he wasn't completely sure.
 
The world of athletic communications has certainly evolved, and a lot more time and effort these days is spent on messaging and branding. But pretty much every SID and coach will tell you that when a game concludes there's only one thing they care about: The statistics are right. It is the bread-and-butter of the business, and in many ways it's still everything.
 
So here we were on Saturday, QMH watching as his statisticians set up the laptop and connected it to the Palestra printer and put in rosters and just in general, you know, set up a game in a program neither of them had ever used before.
 
Once the game actually got started, things seemed to run pretty smoothly.
 
QMH will tell you that not everything was correct when the scrimmage ended. The score was wrong at the end of each half of play, but only by a point or two. (Even better, the statisticians knew where the mistakes were.) The third period of the scrimmage was played without stats because nobody knew how to add a third period manually. Most importantly, QMH and his statisticians learned the hard way that there's a significant difference between "ending" a game and "finalizing" a game. Turns out when you finalize you can't go back in to fix things.
 
As QMH told the coaches afterward, it was good to learn these things on October 13 and not on November 9 when Rice comes to town and the games, you know, actually count. QMH considers himself lucky; there will be two other closed scrimmages at home before the regular season starts, giving his people that many more opportunities to get comfortable with the program. Penn figures to be all systems go on November 9.
 
One of the things QMH did over the last few months was organize a meeting between the Genius Sports folks, the NCAA, and the SIDs from around the Philadelphia area. That meeting took place on Monday night at Widener. To give you a sense of the seismic change this news has meant in the college athletics world, no fewer than 60 athletic communications and statistician personnel were in the room for Genius' presentation. They came from as far away as Penn State, northern New Jersey and Maryland. It was a productive meeting as the Genius folks walked through steps to set up a game, score a game, and push it to the NCAA afterward.
 
QMH's stat duo did not have that luxury, of course. They had to figure it out on the fly on Saturday. But QMH was able to stand up in front of his colleagues at the end of Monday's meeting and tell them that he was excited about this new program and they should be, too.
 
That said, he knows that there'll be a lot of sleepless nights ahead for his colleagues around the country between now and the start of the basketball season.
 
***
 
QMH'S REQUIRED READING: you might recall that last week QMH talked about growing up on The Boston Globe. Since Sunday, the Boston Globe Spotlight Team—you might remember them from the movie "Spotlight"—has been running a week-long expose on the late Aaron Hernandez, a former standout member of the New England Patriots who was convicted on murder charges and eventually hung himself in his prison cell. The series ran all week, and here are the different chapters.
SUNDAY: Behind the Smile
MONDAY: Lost in "The Swamp"
TUESDAY: Running For His Life
WEDNESDAY: A Killer in The Huddle
THURSDAY: A Room of His Own
FRIDAY: A Terrible Thing to Waste