Sports
CIAC Hires Analytics Department To Process Stats That Fit On A Permission Slip
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
HARTFORD, CT. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference released its Week 3 football statistics package Tuesday, a document running several pages and described in the subject line as "Fun Facts, Figures." It is neither fun nor a fact that this required a subject line.
The report covers Week 3 of the 2026 Connecticut high school football season, which is a sentence that should sound much smaller than the packaging around it.
For context: these are children. Some of them are driving themselves to practice for the first time. One of them, according to a parent interviewed in the parking lot of a Chili's in Glastonbury, "just figured out how to set an alarm."
None of that stopped the CIAC from producing a statistical summary formatted with the same institutional confidence as a congressional budget memo. The document includes week-over-week comparisons. It has been described, by the people who wrote it, as containing "notable trends."
Dave Colangelo, athletic director at a mid-sized school in Fairfield County who asked to remain anonymous before immediately saying his name, called the release "a real step forward for transparency in scholastic athletics."
"When you look at the aggregate data across all the programs," Colangelo said, "you start to see patterns that frankly tell a story that the eye test alone simply cannot capture." He said this about a game where one team's offensive line has three kids who also do chorus.
The CIAC's analytics operation, such as it is, appears to be one woman named Deborah who works out of an office next to the trophy case and has a laminator she is very protective of. Deborah did not respond to requests for comment, which is the most professional thing anyone did this week.
Connecticut coaches, for their part, received the statistical package with the enthusiasm of men who already had a whiteboard and a gut feeling and did not need either of those challenged by a PDF.
"I mean, I appreciate the numbers," said one head coach who has been running the same two plays since 2011 and has won more games than anyone in his conference. "But at the end of the day this is about execution. Heart. And making sure Tyler doesn't line up on the wrong side again."
Tyler, reached after practice, said he was aware of the issue.
The most-discussed figure in Week 3, among the three people who discussed it, was a punting statistic so specific it implies somebody stood on a soggy field in Meriden with a measuring tape and a sense of purpose that the rest of their week did not reflect.
The CIAC has not confirmed whether it employs a statistician, a statistics enthusiast, or simply a dad who downloaded Excel and cannot be stopped now.
Week 4 kicks off Friday. The analytics package is expected Thursday. Deborah is already laminating.
The story we are making fun of: https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/ciac-football-week-3-numbers-101500336.html