Useless “stats” (continued)

Let’s talk some golf…

First of all, a little background.  I grew up in Augusta.  When you grow up in Augusta (the “mecca” of golf) you play golf.  Actually I was introduced to the game by my grandfather in S. Illinois, but that’s a story for another day.  The net, net is that I’ve played golf and followed it closely since the age of 7.  The game fascinates me and I find the traditions, history, etc just as exciting today as ever.  In fact, I’m a big fan of Tim Finchim even if others are not.  I think he’s acting as a great caretaker for the “greatest game ever invented”.  I also think that the Masters is not only golf’s greatest spectacle, but probably the greatest spectacle in sports and certainly the hardest ticket in sports to acquire.  I’ve been fortunate enough to attend roughly 30 Masters golf tournaments and I still get the “goose bumps” up and down my body when I step on the premises.  For those of you who are wondering, I play once every 6 weeks or so, but still maintain a solid 12 index.

So yesterday was not only the conclusion of the English Premier League (which was completely crazy and awesome by the way), but it was also the final round of the players championship at the TPC Sawgrass.  Commonly known as golf’s “fifth major” and broadcast around the world just as a major, it is a great tournament to watch.

Just as I admire Mr. Finchim and his leadership of the PGA I absolutely hate to watch any tournament where Johnny Miller is commentating.  I have the pleasure to know several club pros and a few golf course superintendents and Johnny, NO the ball does not break “away from the setting sun”.  Maybe your early exit from the world of professional golf involved watching the setting sun and focusing on “grass” too much (“yips” anyone?).

Mr. Miller aside, today let’s talk about some of the “useless” stats related to golf.  Let’s start with one of Mr. Miller’s favorites is number of putts per round.  Golf is an easy game, you hit your drive to the fairway (on par 4s and 5s) hit one or two other shots, hit two putts (no more) and you’re going to shoot par or somewhere thereabouts.  On the par 3s you hit one shot, two putt and repeat.  Nonetheless, 36 putts for 18 holes is considered excessive (except maybe for a US Open) and anything around 20 putts is viewed as pretty good.  Now, why does this NOT make sense?  Let’s have a short story…

A few years ago I attended a friend’s wedding in Chicago.  It was bitterly cold, but he insisted on playing golf so out we went (with some liquid antifreeze in tow of course).  The “game” we were playing that day involved a deck of cards.  Essentially, if you one putt a green you got a card, two putts nothing and three or more putts you had to throw $5 into the kitty.  At the end of the round, you took the earned number of random cards from a standard deck and played straight poker for the money in the pot.  In our case it was around $200.

What I observed during this game is that the really good golfers would NOT play for the flag.  In fact, they would try to pick a nice landing surface just off the green, play to that, chip up close and try to make their one putt (for a card in the poker game).  Guys like me that were trying to hit to the center of the green and two putt ended up with only a couple of cards.

See my point?

Who cares how many putts you had?  You could have 18 putts, have missed every single green, some of those putts might’ve been for par, many might’ve been for bogey (or worse), but you had a great putts per round stat!  Johnny will love you if you average 18 putts per round!  (even if you shoot 82)

How about another short game statistic – greens in regulation (GIR).  My problem with GIR is that some of these greens are HUGE.  You could be just off the green and 10 ft. from the hole (collar) and NOT have a GIR or you could have a GIR but 70 feet from the hole on the wrong side of the green (a.k.a. three putt city).  GIR is supposed to be a metric to show how well a golfer is hitting his irons into the green.  In my opinion it is anything but.

I can say the same thing for driving distance.  Who cares?  If driving distance really mattered then Zach Johnson, Mike Weir and Fred Funk wouldn’t even be on tour!

Here’s two that I do like. (let’s try to end on a positive note)  I do like driving accuracy, you obviously need to hit the fairway to win tournaments (most of the time).  I also like how “putt feet” is starting to be analyzed to show how well someone is making putts.  (It’s taking the measurement of all the putts made and adding that number up over the round – obviously the higher the number the better the putter).  I’d like to see more of “average distance away from the hole for birdie” – that would be a pretty cool stat.

The surprising thing in all of this is that there are people doing golf broadcasts that I really like and who really know the game (Nick Faldo, Kelly Tilghman, Roger Maltbie, Gary Koch) – why don’t these guys think of this?  With systems like “shotlink” in existence it’s extremely easy to get the measurements of where the ball is all of the time.  Define where the ball “should be” on the different holes and measure how well the players hit those targets.

I’ll happily volunteer my services to help by the way!  Keep it in the short grass everyone!

Soccer (aka “Football”)

I’ve been thinking about writing a blog entry for football (yes, I’m going to call it football for the purposes of this blog) for some time now.  Previous to 2006 I never, ever watched soccer.  I know that my high school had a soccer team, but it was during track season (and prom season) and I just didn’t pay that much attention to it.  I also attended the gold medal match during the 1996 Olympic games, but I was really just there for the party (and it WAS a lot of fun).  But before 2006 I just really didn’t pay too much attention to football.  Why 2006?  That’s the year my son turned 5 and started playing.  Yes Virginia, you may have heard of “soccer moms”, but in 2006 I became a fully fledged “soccer dad”.

Even though I would go to the weekend soccer games and cheer on my son I still didn’t consider myself a “fan” and certainly not a student of the game.  That all changed a couple of years ago during a Saturday with nothing to look forward except yard work and a “honey do” list a mile long.  The Super Bowl was two weeks in the past and the doldrums of spring and summer were upon me with the prospect of no football.

While sulking and channel surfing past the bowling, figure skating, basket weaving, etc I ran across an EPL match.  I don’t even recall what the match was, but it was riveting.  That 110 minutes or so was enlightening, a football fan was born….  Finally!  A sport that I could watch in the long (American) football off-season that was just as intense and just as intriguing to follow!  My wife was overjoyed that I had found a sport that glued myself to the TV for the remaining 6 months of the year.

The “long and short of it” is really that even though I didn’t grow up around the sport I have become a great fan of the game.

So today I would like to discuss two of the metrics that I see that seem to be at the heart of most discussions for football.  Just as Kirwin pointed out in his book (“Take Your Eye Off The Ball”) I’d like to ask soccer fans everywhere to pull their attention away from these useless stats that they’ve always been fed and ask the most important question of all (So WHAT?!?!).

First, distance run.  Well, where to start?  For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept, several companies in the past few years have developed technology that allows the physical tracking of players as they move around the field.  This feeds x/y coordinates of the players on the field, their average speed and the total distance (typically reported in kilometers or meters) that the player has covered during the course of the game.  It’s really fascinating stuff.

So what?

What does distance covered really tell you about the performance of a player during the game?  Absolutely nothing.  A couple of years ago at the sports analytics conference in Boston one of the EPL staff members using this technology actually lamented the meaningless data it produced.  In this particular case a keeper was augmenting his “distance run” metric (after being cajoled by some coaches) by running back and forth across the box while the ball was on the other end of the pitch.  Not making any plays, not doing anything productive for the outcome of the game and certainly not doing anything to help his team (aside from some extra conditioning), just trying to get that particular STAT better and get the coaches off his back.

I won’t even go into why I think average speed is idiotic.  Based on what I’ve just said I think it’s obvious…

#2, passing %.  Basically Player A passes the ball to Player B X number of times.  Y number of times the pass was successfully received by Player B, therefore the percentage is simply Y divided by X.  Now you ask, what fault could I find in a perfectly good statistic that represents teamwork between two players on the same team?  Well, football is definitely a team sport.  It’s definitely helpful to have your players working together.  But, it’s also a sport of speed and continuity.  If Player A passes to Player B while in a full run about to blow by a flat-footed defender and Player B has to completely halt all of his momentum to go back and get the ball (because bone head Player A didn’t lead him enough) then it is considered a successful pass and counts in the Y column.

Really?  There was an opportunity for a breakthrough on the defense, possibly a good, quality shot on goal, but the pass was poor.  But wait!  Even though the pass was poor and completely killed the opportunity, the pass was “received” and therefore it counts in this statistic.

(One of the many reasons I hate dumb, automated statistics like these.)

Neither of these pass the “So What?” test.

Look at statistics like this and ask yourself “So What?”.  Who cares how much distance a guy ran?  Maybe he was having a horrible day and giving up the ball every chance he got and spent his 8 km chasing the guy who just stole the ball from him?  As an example, Messi’s distance stat during a game is not impressive – have you ever watched a game and really focused on him?  He puts himself in the right place at the right time and he’s fresh for the entire 90 minutes.  (see this article from a couple of years ago, sorry Bleacher Report, but you guys were WAY off on this one).  You don’t get that running 10 or 12 km per game, you get that by playing SMART.  The same can be said for Rooney – who’s always back there heckling the keeper to hurry up his kicks?  Why is he back there?  He typically sets himself up just onside - you hardly ever see this guy on the defensive half of the pitch…

The same for passing accuracy.  If the pass isn’t a quality pass and actually prevents the receiving player from doing something “good” then it shouldn’t be counted as a positive event in the course of the game!

Those x/y coordinates produced by these technologies are good for one thing though.  You can “virtualize” the game where all of the players on the field are represented by circles and squares.  It’s really cool to watch all of those little shapes move around the field, it’s almost like WATCHING THE GAME.  A huge amount of money is spent on these technologies and all they’re getting for that money is something that I spend $12/month to receive (no, this isn’t a DirecTV commercial).

The bottom line?  You are smart, you’re on the internet and you’re reading a blog.  Question these stats and demand more.  Ask the “So What?” question as often as possible and don’t stop until you’re satisfied with the answer.  If you want to know more about what I think are “real” metrics that measure the “real” performance of these fantastic athletes, let me know.

The circus is in town!

At least if you live in Indianapolis that is.

Today marks the opening of the 2012 NFL combine and it also represents the day that I typically publish my annual rant on the “circus” also known as the NFL combine.

Gosh, where to start…

Let’s begin “at the beginning”.  Those wonderfully straight lines are drawn for the 40 yard dash.  The pickets are up for the vertical leap.  The cones are laid on the field for the shuffle.  And the pens and pencils are all prepared for the Wonderlic test.

With the exception of that last point if you didn’t know any better you would think that a track meet was about to take place in Indianapolis.

Let’s start with those wonderfully straight 40 yard dashes.  First of all, these guys will NEVER, EVER run 40 yards in a straight line wearing nothing but shorts, a t-shirt and running shoes.  They will always be pursued by others trying to bring them down and (hopefully) NOT running in a straight line.  They will always be wearing at least 15 lbs of gear including a helmet.  And why, oh why is this only a 40 yard dash?  Last time I checked the football field was 100 yards from goal line to goal line.  Why not let them run 100, 80, 60 and then 40 and time them?  After all these guys are world class athletes right?  They will sometimes have the opportunities to run THOSE, more appropriate distances.

Now, the vertical jump.  Very, very rarely will a player who tests out on this be able to jump freely (again without wearing any equipment) for a goal.  My only recollection of a player doing any sort of jump like this is the Saint’s Jimmy Graham!  Almost always there will be two, three or maybe even four guys going up for a ball at the same time.  Put some pads and a helmet on these guys and then have a couple of cornerback prospects attempt to grab the “goal” at the same time and then you might have something more realistic.

My favorite is the bench press.  I saw a video the other day where someone was trying to justify the bench press as a good measure of “endurance”.  Really?  How many times have you seen a guy pump out 25 reps in the middle of the field at the end of the 4th quarter to prove his endurance?  It’s similar in motion to a push up, maybe this is in case they do something on the field really, really dumb and their (ex-military) coach orders them to “drop and give me 50!”.  Ok, that I can buy, sort of….

And last, but not least we have the cones.  Yes boys and girls even though these guys have spent the last 3 or 4 years running away and between 6ft 250lb guys the ultimate test of their AGILITY will be to run between 12 inch stationary cones.  Heck, if you only had to take on 12 inch cones I might’ve had a shot at the NFL!  In a multi-billion dollar industry this is the best you can come up with to attempt to measure one of the most important facets of the game?  Really?  C’mon man.  (the link is one of my favorites from last season by the way)

So what are we really trying to accomplish here?  I mean, how did this get so convoluted after all?  If you answer “the media” I think that’s partially the answer.  Fans are SO HUNGRY for anything in the off-season even remotely related to football, they are going to watch the combine coverage – no doubt.

Another point to ponder is do NFL franchises really look at the NFL combine to make any sort of decisions?  Yeah, they send guys there (junket?) and they carry clip boards and sit in the stands and LOOK like they’re paying attention.  But, how much do they really put on this?

But, back to the first question – what are we trying to really MEASURE within this circus?  I think we’re trying to evaluate (predict?) how well a player is going to perform in the NFL.  (In actuality I think we’re measuring how well these guys would do in a track meet.)

So how do you measure how well someone performs on a football field?  Well, I think you would watch them during a game, on a football field.  (At least the combine IS taking place on a football field, mostly…)  Then, when watching them on the football field, how would you measure them?

Well dear reader, like anyone who’s ever been to Disney will know – when the ride ends, you end up in the gift shop.

Evaluating REAL performance in REAL situations with REAL players in REAL games is what REAL SPORTS ANALYTICS is all about.

Enjoy the entertainment this week coming from Indianapolis!

A couple of changes

Well, after much encouragement from some of my co-workers and friends I have signed up for Twitter.  If you enjoy being bored and hopefully (from time to time) entertained 140 words at at time feel free to start following me at http://twitter.com/#RSA_Bryan.  I am planning on attending the MIT conference again next spring and will be “tweeting” from there.  Last year’s conference featured attendees tweets on the big screen in between sessions and provided some nice entertainment on the breaks.

There is a lot to talk about in football.  Some early guys who were grading out very well (Josh Freeman for example) are fading.  I’m not sure where to begin on grading Tebow - we may need to develop special grading metrics just for him (maybe “Wildcat” or “TE playing QB”?).  And of course, the old reliables (Brady, Rogers, Manning2) are confidently making their way through their respective schedules en route to leading their teams to another playoff appearance.  Brady’s game yesterday against the Eagles was one of the most dominating performance by a QB that I’ve seen in a long time.  It reminded me of watching Montana during his prime in that awesome Bill Walsh offense.

Unfortunately, I can’t provide much as far as insight for the later part of the season except for a big “I TOLD YOU SO”.  The Patriots juggernaut, sans a few defensive hiccups, is rolling along again and most of their problems there can be traced back to the injury bug (did you see they had a wide receiver playing defense yesterday???).  The last team to handily defeat the Patriots (Green Bay) is rolling as well.  Everything that I just said above about Tom Brady can also be said about Aaron Rodgers.  They both are just playing great with Green Bay’s defense getting the edge on overall team ratings.

In my last post I revealed that Real Sports Analytics “LIVE” is now available and a few of you have signed up and provided some excellent scores.  I was taking a look at the model this morning and I hate to ask, but I need more!  We really only have a handful of players scored so nothing can really be published on overall team strengths at this point (except for the obvious ones mentioned above).  Please sign up, even if you can only provide 10-20 observations for the games you are watching it really does help.  I can take those 10-20 and mix them in with others and we get some really good information.  I will be publishing those results to my members in the very near future.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and (as Mark Cuban tweeted) that you recover quickly from your food coma (me included).

And now the time has come to get serious

Recently I was speaking to a colleague in the analytics business. He had just finished reading “Moneyball” and was questioning me about Real Sports Analytics. During the conversation he referred to me as the “Billy Bean” of professional football. First of all, that’s quite an honor. To be compared with anyone with that much intelligence and perseverance is something I value tremendously. Secondly, I’m hoping that the underlying statement there isn’t about fighting an uphill battle or how desperate the situation may look sometimes. I’ve always been a believer in “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” so maybe that 2^nd part isn’t such a bad thing after all. I can only hope to have ½ the success that Billy has had pursuing his goals.

So, with that tidbit out of the way, you’re probably wondering about the title of this blog post. Well, this idea is something that I’ve been tossing around for a while and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.

Today I am announcing the availability of the Real Sports Analytics “LIVE” web site. The LIVE web site allows you, the reader and sports aficionado, to actively participate in scoring and seeing the LIVE results of the Real Sports Analytics solution in action. Here’s how it works…

http://www.realsportsanalytics.com/live/login.php

Click on the link above or the one provided below and sign up. The sign up process is short and sweet and basically gives me just a little bit of information about you. Please use the text entry box to tell me a little about yourself and your experience with sports. In return, I promise not to spam you or to share your information with anyone else. I will also send you the one page instructions and the Real Sports Analytics scoring sheets that you will use while watching football over the weekend (these are also available anytime in the “downloads” section of the web site). I’d like you to score the entire game, but I’ll be happy with 20-30 observations per game. Pick one or two players (it’s easiest to pick one on offense and one on defense for example), look at the skills/actions and rate their performance on a scale of 1-10. 1 being a complete “bone-head” play that gave the other team a great advantage to win the game, a 10 being a fantastic play that directly impacted (for the positive) their own team. Scores of 3 through 8 are medium type of plays that should’ve been made anyway and you’re really grading on how well they did them. Again, the lower the score the worse the performance, the higher the score, the better the performance.

E-mail these scoring sheets (Excel documents) to me and I will run them through the current Real Sports Analytics model. As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post, the more data the multi-dimensional model is fed, the smarter it can become. I’m thinking that by the 3^rd or 4^th game of the season we will definitely start to see some real trends emerge that can assist YOU in your fantasy (or other) endeavors and I will also start tuning the metrics and their associated weights to better reflect the actual game results.

I will publish the results on the LIVE web site each Wednesday and will send out a mass e-mail letting you know the results are available. (I’ll probably only do this for the first few weeks, remember, I promised NOT to spam you.)

Now, the two most important things:

1) The first 20 people who sign up and remain active scorers will always have full access to my web site, for free, for-ever.

2) The top scorer each week (that means you) will receive a $100 VISA gift card. The top scorer status is completely arbitrary and up to me – I’m looking for good scores, did you really watch the game and how much your scores match or don’t match with other submitted scores. As an example if most of my scorers score out Tom Brady at around an 8 and you’re results point to a 2, I’m probably going to question if you were watching the right game/player.

So please sign up and tell your friends! It’s time for some football!

Who's right?

If you’re anything like me you’ve been watching very carefully the NFL situation.  I’m not the world’s biggest NFL fan (prefer NCAA football really), but I do watch the games for the most part and keep track of what’s going on in the league (for obvious reasons).  I’m not going to go into a lot of detail regarding the current situation, but suffice it to say that it all revolves around money.  I will also make a point here that this is certainly not a “who’s right, who’s wrong” type of situation.  I can actually understand the issues from both sides.

The players want more money.  We always hear about the “top” earners, you know the quarterbacks with the 40 million dollar contracts, the guys that are “holding out” of camp because they want a longer contract with 10 million more guaranteed.  But I feel at the heart of the labor issues are the guys making minimum wage or that seem to roam from one team to the next looking for a roster spot.  Now, financially I’m still not feeling sorry for these guys, last time I checked the league minimum salary was well over $300,000 a year.  But, on the other hand, these are the guys that still have to attend camp, go to every practice, may or may not play special teams and still basically sacrifice their bodies to play the game they love (for a living).  These guys don’t get the 10 million dollar signing bonuses and will probably never see a paycheck over a million bucks, BUT their bodies still are making the payments in sweat/blood equity.  What happens to these guys long term if they never make the big bucks?  What happens if they develop serious physical conditions because of the toll their profession places on their bodies?  And yes, unfortunately (this does happen), what happens when these guys “live large” spend all of their money and end up penniless at the end of their careers?

(Just for the record, I don’t entirely feel sorry for this last set of players, yet some of them are only in their 20s and I know I certainly didn’t have the greatest financial planning skills at that age.)

Now, with that said, I would like to see the “particulars” of what these guys are currently negotiating.  Is it really going to help the 3^rd stringer who retires after ten years in the league with a variety of health problems?  Should rookies be signing $40 million dollar contracts when they haven’t played a professional football down yet?  Or, the better question…

As the NFL has grown in popularity over the last 20 or 30 years the owners have taken a larger and larger share of the profits.  You’ve got to understand that these profits not only come from the teams themselves and the sponsorship arrangements they have in place, but it’s also the “big” share of what the NFL gets from TV, advertising, the super bowl and playoff rights, etc.  The owners then are really at fault with two issues in my opinion.  One, they’ve been hesitant for the league minimum wage to raise, but at the same time they’ve been signing unproven players to exorbitant contracts for marketing purposes.  Two, as the revenue has increased over all of the teams these owners have been more likely to pad their own wallets (ex.  the Glazer family in Tampa) instead of giving back to the fans, offering better fan experiences, investing in the team’s infrastructure and facilities and/or offering more to their employees (mainly the players).

So, where am I going with this?  Sorry, for those that read this blog you probably as yourselves this quite a bit…

In my opinion, the REAL heart of the matter is a measure of value.  How much value does a player or a set of players bring to an organization?  I think at the end of each year, much like most major corporations, each team (and probably the league as well) should re-evaluate their performance and the associated compensation to their employees.  I don’t just mean the players by the way.  Should the GM collect a 5 million dollar bonus if the team stank up the field and maybe only stumbled their way to 2 or 3 wins?  Heck no.  Should a player get a million dollar bonus if he injures himself doing something bone-headed like celebrating a touch down?  Absolutely not.  What about the 3^rd string guy who comes in off the bench in a dire game situation and helps the team to a victory and a playoff spot?  There’s a thing in corporate America called a “spot bonus” and that should probably come into play in that situation.

I also think that if the owners make bone-headed decisions and drive the team in the ground they shouldn’t be allowed to bleed them dry and walk away.

So, in an ideal world the owners, staff and players would come together at the end of the year, perform a “post mortem” on the year and establish splits on who gets what (or nothing if the team lost money).  Much like a private partnership, law firm, etc.  These do exist in corporate America and they do work.  (and they typically contain some pretty large egos I might add).

Now the question of “value” comes into play.  How do you establish the value a particular person or set of people brings to the organization?  In corporate America this is typically performed in the planning stage at the beginning of a fiscal year.  Top companies set goals and then monitor the progression towards these goals as the year goes along.  At the end of the year sales people are graded (and compensated) based on their achievement of goals.  Boards of directors establish goals for corporate leadership and then compensate and/or make management changes based on these.  Companies that participate in heavy-duty quality measurement such as six sigma or balanced scorecard do this all the way down to the individual employee level.

If all of these other large revenue corporation do this, why doesn’t the NFL, NBA, etc do this?  Do they think it’s not possible or maybe too difficult?

Well ,this is my point.  Up to now there has not been a way to effectively measure the real value of personnel in a professional sports organization.  To my knowledge it just hasn’t been done.

I always talk about Real Sports Analytics and I think most of the people who read this blog think of it as a technology and it is to some degree.  But the technology doesn’t work without the acceptance of the philosophy and approach that this entails.  Real Sports Analytics is a great piece of software, don’t get me wrong it is.  It’s based on a technology that was voted one of the 10 best in the information age.  BUT, all of this software goes to waste unless there is “buy in” from the company leadership (yes dear reader, these teams really are “companies”) and a commitment to following through on the goals and metrics that are defined.

By the way, one of the key elements of the technology is its flexibility.  Are your goals and metrics going to be exactly the same as they were at the end of the year?  No way.  Like any other major corporation the technology that wraps around this approach must be flexible in order to meet the changing demands of the business.

Now, you might say that an NFL team’s business is to win games and you’d be absolutely correct.  But in those terms what amounts to a “changing condition” that might justify some adjustments?  Well injury for one.  Coaching and/or management changes for another.  League restructuring would also necessitate some adjustments.

My point here is that these organizations and all or the labor/money issues that go along with it are exactly running parallel to issues that have faced Fortune 500 companies for decades.

C’mon man, isn’t it time the NFL and NBA “grow up” and embrace management philosophies and technologies that corporate America has been using for almost two decades?

If some of these approaches were adopted I think this labor issue might be a whole heckuva lot clearer and the parties involved could come to the table with cold, hard facts instead of inflated egos.  Third party arbitration and an avoidance of work stoppage would also be more possible if this were the case.

So, do you believe in coincidence?

I’ll make this entry short, but I definitely wanted to comment on the great win by the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA finals.  You might remember my post from a few months ago (see “Not So Dream Teams”) and I was certainly surprised by just how far the Miami Heat progressed into the playoffs.  It was my opinion there were several better teams than the Heat, but it always seemed that when the team was on the ropes Lebron figured out a way (and a big way on more than once occasion) to pull his team through.  Unfortunately his performance in the finals was less than stellar – something that I at least partially attribute to a very effective defensive strategy on the part of the Mavericks.

Mark Cuban, congratulations.  As a long-time supporter of sports analytics and the MIT conference I cannot be happier for you and your organization.  Well done sir, well done.

Now, on to the topic at hand.  Do you believe in coincidence?  I mean, I do to some degree.  For example, if I run into an old high school chum in the Atlanta airport I consider that a coincidence.  My friend and I certainly did not “work” or expend any effort for that meeting to take place, so yes, that instance is a nice coincidence.  I did go to high school and college in the state of Georgia though, so the chances of that happening are probably better than in say Frankfurt’s airport, but nonetheless because of the millions of people that traverse that airport every year I still consider that to be nothing but a random coincidence.

There are two teams in American sports that (based on my experience) that are far and away much more advanced in their use of analytics in their day-to-day decision making.  The first, The New England Patriots.  Although secretive, I have been able to ask a few people (sometimes over certain “adult” beverages) and they have let it slip that Coach Belichick and co. are big-time users of on the field analytics.  They also recently picked up a trick from some NBA teams and are studying referee analytics (the odds involved in how certain referee “teams” call games).  I don’t have to comment on their success over the last 10 years, the word “dynasty” is used enough when describing them so I don’t need to validate my point here.

Now for the coincidence.  It’s also no secret that the NBA is far ahead of the NFL and most other American sports (with the possible exception of baseball) in how they use analytics for on-court performance.  It’s also no secret that Mr. Cuban is a big fan of sports analytics.  Does the Dallas Mavericks have a staff of people doing nothing but analytics?  I can’t prove it, but from most of what I hear the answer is “yes”.  Do any other teams have anything like that?  Possibly Houston, but no others I’ve ever heard of are even close.

So is the success of the Dallas Mavericks and the New England Patriots a “coincidence”?  I think not.  Pound for pound Miami has better talent, but the Mavericks have a far superior “team”.  How did they come by putting together that “team”?  To some degree probably just as other organizations have put together teams, but I suspect (and I would love to get some sort of validation on this point) that the Mavericks have an edge when it comes to identifying talent in individual players and recognizing what talented players will form a better team when put together on the court.

No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Mavericks, Patriots, Yankees, Manchester United, etc are successful teams because of their use of analytics.  In fact, I believe over the coming years we will see the “analytics” vs. “non analytics” teams separate themselves from each other.  Much like the NJ Jets can only make it so far on “gut instinct”; the Miami Heat can only get so far on pure talent alone.  The coaches that refuse to use a computer and go by those “gut” instincts honed in the 60s and 70s?  Dinosaurs – soon to be extinct.