“Old School”

“Only a fool trips over what’s behind them” – Albert Einstein

Blogging is great.  As I sat down to write this with an idea in mind I went through several ways of starting this off.  First of all, I’ll try to make this short.

The above quote is really more about not making the same mistakes twice and not dwelling on the mistakes you have made.  I couldn’t agree more.

On the other hand though, we shouldn’t “throw out the baby with the bath water” (I’m probably dating myself with that reference).

What do I mean by this?

Last week I had the opportunity of sitting in the same room with an “old school” football coach that I greatly admire.  I’ve followed his career since I was a kid really (sorry coach, another age reference).

The only “bad” part of the meeting was that I walked away with the impression that this coach was intimidated to some degree with the technology around the ideas I was presenting.  I tried my darnest to get across to coach that what Real Sports Analytics is all about really is just a natural progression of old school thought.

We believe in film study.  We believe in observable metrics.  We believe in coaches just like him watching film and evaluating how well the game is being played (film don’t lie).  We embrace the concept of the “qualified observer”.  And we most certainly want to tap into the incredible knowledge possessed by some of these “old school” coaches.

The technology enables us to do things with this collected information and present it to coaches, players, administrators in an easy to understand manner.  Yeah, that’s great.  But the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies here as well.  We need to be collecting and analyzing good information to optimize what we deliver with Real Sports Analytics.

If that’s not “old school” I don’t know what is.

My next blog post (already working on) will be focused on the current state of sports analytics and how closely its evolution has mirrored the evolution of business intelligence in the business world.