Plankton
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Long, but very good read.
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/27/...ndencies-player-tracking-injuries-chip-kelly#
Paraag Marathe arrived in San Francisco with a very clear directive from the 49ers, to reimagine the Jimmy Johnson draft chart. And after a couple months work, the senior associate from the Boston consulting firm Bain readied to show team president Bill Walsh and GM Terry Donahue his findings, in disbelief at the results being spit back at him.
It was uncanny.
“I tried to use historical trends and true value,” says Marathe, now the Niners’ chief strategy officer and EVP of football operations. “And it wasn’t like Coach Walsh was telling me, ‘Hey, a third rounder has more value than it says here, and a second rounder has lower value.’ It was meant to be totally independent. And once I was finished, I looked at all of Coach Walsh’s trades over the years. And it was a total match with all of Coach Walsh’s trades.”
All that work, and all that was proven was what some guy on his couch down the street in Santa Clara could’ve told them: Walsh was a savant.
That was 2001. Moneyball—the best-selling book based on the baseball team across the Bay from the Niners, which would shed light on the coming numbers craze—was still two years from release. The idea of using advanced statistics to drive decision-making in baseball was still in a nascent stage, at least publicly. And that, of course, implies the truth about the NFL then, which is that few in football had even given that concept a thought.
It’s a different time now. Analytics in the NFL have moved well beyond the point where a team hiring a consulting firm to run numbers constitutes outside-the-box thinking. Yet, there remains resistance, a battleground of thought, and a general cloudiness on how far you can take numbers, and how far numbers can take you.
And just the same as 16 years ago, you can place a genius in the center of it.
Perception holds that the Patriots are among the league’s most progressive teams, but there’s precious little evidence of their investment. They have people who are responsible for advanced statistics, but coaches and scouts are largely charged with integrating data gathered into their work. The “analytics guy” there is 64-year-old Ernie Adams, a former Wall Street trader and prep school buddy of Bill Belichick’s.
So why are people so convinced that the five-time champions are knee-deep in the numbers? As one informed long-time NFL exec explains it, “It’s because they’re completely consistent with what sophisticated analytics would tell you to do.”
“[Belichick] does it with intuition,” says one AFC executive. “You know because you’ve been coaching for so long, how you match these 11 guys against those 11 guys. It all makes sense to you. At some point, maybe we can all come to those conclusions without having Bill Belichick’s brain. We’re still a long way from that.”
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/27/...ndencies-player-tracking-injuries-chip-kelly#
Paraag Marathe arrived in San Francisco with a very clear directive from the 49ers, to reimagine the Jimmy Johnson draft chart. And after a couple months work, the senior associate from the Boston consulting firm Bain readied to show team president Bill Walsh and GM Terry Donahue his findings, in disbelief at the results being spit back at him.
It was uncanny.
“I tried to use historical trends and true value,” says Marathe, now the Niners’ chief strategy officer and EVP of football operations. “And it wasn’t like Coach Walsh was telling me, ‘Hey, a third rounder has more value than it says here, and a second rounder has lower value.’ It was meant to be totally independent. And once I was finished, I looked at all of Coach Walsh’s trades over the years. And it was a total match with all of Coach Walsh’s trades.”
All that work, and all that was proven was what some guy on his couch down the street in Santa Clara could’ve told them: Walsh was a savant.
That was 2001. Moneyball—the best-selling book based on the baseball team across the Bay from the Niners, which would shed light on the coming numbers craze—was still two years from release. The idea of using advanced statistics to drive decision-making in baseball was still in a nascent stage, at least publicly. And that, of course, implies the truth about the NFL then, which is that few in football had even given that concept a thought.
It’s a different time now. Analytics in the NFL have moved well beyond the point where a team hiring a consulting firm to run numbers constitutes outside-the-box thinking. Yet, there remains resistance, a battleground of thought, and a general cloudiness on how far you can take numbers, and how far numbers can take you.
And just the same as 16 years ago, you can place a genius in the center of it.
Perception holds that the Patriots are among the league’s most progressive teams, but there’s precious little evidence of their investment. They have people who are responsible for advanced statistics, but coaches and scouts are largely charged with integrating data gathered into their work. The “analytics guy” there is 64-year-old Ernie Adams, a former Wall Street trader and prep school buddy of Bill Belichick’s.
So why are people so convinced that the five-time champions are knee-deep in the numbers? As one informed long-time NFL exec explains it, “It’s because they’re completely consistent with what sophisticated analytics would tell you to do.”
“[Belichick] does it with intuition,” says one AFC executive. “You know because you’ve been coaching for so long, how you match these 11 guys against those 11 guys. It all makes sense to you. At some point, maybe we can all come to those conclusions without having Bill Belichick’s brain. We’re still a long way from that.”
