Much more to the article at the link below. I catch up with Warren Sharp's articles 5-6 times a year. Brilliant mind.
"The smartest teams are getting significantly smarter, the average teams are trying to get better, and the dumbest teams are going to be very dumb if they don’t act soon."
The new information can also help teams simplify play-calling, like going for it on fourth down more often. The Eagles won the Super Bowl in part because of their aggressiveness in such situations—and in part because they went for two-point conversions when it was mathematically smart to do so. Analytics are not new to football, but this depth of knowledge is. The Eagles have had an analytics department for nearly two decades. “We confirmed,” said Joe Banner, the former Eagles president who helped set up the department, “that there’s a competitive advantage in analytics in a league that is structured to prevent you from having a competitive advantage.”
The Patriots have incorporated some level of analytics for years. (Multiple people joked to me that the movement would have taken hold sooner if the Patriots ever discussed their efforts publicly.)
It is amazing,” Warren Sharp said, “how many teams follow me on Twitter.” Sharp is an engineer with his own analytics site and has been playing around with football statistics for about 20 years. He is among the top minds in football not working full time for a team. In fact, when you talk to people inside the league, some think he might be the top mind, period. Though he’s been writing on the internet for many years, he said it wasn’t until 2018 that teams started reaching out to him to discuss analytics. He says he’s heard from at least five and has done work as a consultant.
It makes sense that teams have become interested in outsiders like Sharp. Unlike other sports, which have staffed up their analytics departments over the past decade or so, football doesn’t employ many of the best analytics minds studying the game. (One team decision-maker sarcastically said this is because analytics employees insideNFL buildings are too beaten down from having their ideas ignored by old-school coaches.) Sharp is in high demand because he can help answer a question vexing front offices: Which stats matter? He became interested in how teams win games when he was in college and became convinced of two things, both of which would foreshadow the modern NFL. The first is that an offensive emphasis on passing correlated to wins. The second is more complicated than it sounds. Sharp found that third-down efficiency, long the obsession of announcers and old-school coaches, was not the key to an effective offense. He found that it was better for teams to scrap third downs entirely and move the chains by gaining the necessary yardage on first and second down.
In 2005, University of Pennsylvania professor Cade Massey and University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler (who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize) published a paper called “Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League,” which argued that top draft picks are overrated and that trading back for more picks is almost always the right decision. The instant reaction to their findings was not positive, Massey told me: “I met an NFL owner at a cocktail thing, he was all with me, and as soon as I started talking about trading back, he thought I was a complete idiot.”
The idea of trading back has since become widely accepted. Bill Belichick is credited with popularizing the idea in the NFL, and the Browns have recently used it to help stockpile the assets needed to build one of the best young rosters in the league. Similarly, sites like Football Outsiders have popularized dozens of influential stats—among them DVOA—that are now widely accepted in the NFL. One NFL decision-maker mentioned “speed score,” which Bill Barnwell, now with ESPN, developed at Football Outsiders.
Schatz said analytics will be fully accepted only once owners start going along for the ride, when a coach can go for it on fourth down because the numbers say it’s advantageous without fear of getting fired. Hornsby said that he can tell analytics is being embraced more because people are starting to separate the decision from the execution of that decision. The example he brings up comes from Super Bowl XLIX: Malcolm Butler’s game-sealing interception. “It wasn’t the pass, it was the type of pass,” Hornsby said. “[The Seahawks] had run that exact play six times during that year and it had been totally unsuccessful each time; the best they got out of it was a 2-yard outlet on a third-and-5 against Carolina.”
The decision to pass was sound. The pass itself was not.
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/12/19/18148153/nfl-analytics-revolution
Rapid and continuous improvement through understanding all that analytics can provide. Yeah, I'm a believer that anything you can measure can be made better or utilized better in some other way.
"The smartest teams are getting significantly smarter, the average teams are trying to get better, and the dumbest teams are going to be very dumb if they don’t act soon."
The new information can also help teams simplify play-calling, like going for it on fourth down more often. The Eagles won the Super Bowl in part because of their aggressiveness in such situations—and in part because they went for two-point conversions when it was mathematically smart to do so. Analytics are not new to football, but this depth of knowledge is. The Eagles have had an analytics department for nearly two decades. “We confirmed,” said Joe Banner, the former Eagles president who helped set up the department, “that there’s a competitive advantage in analytics in a league that is structured to prevent you from having a competitive advantage.”
The Patriots have incorporated some level of analytics for years. (Multiple people joked to me that the movement would have taken hold sooner if the Patriots ever discussed their efforts publicly.)
It is amazing,” Warren Sharp said, “how many teams follow me on Twitter.” Sharp is an engineer with his own analytics site and has been playing around with football statistics for about 20 years. He is among the top minds in football not working full time for a team. In fact, when you talk to people inside the league, some think he might be the top mind, period. Though he’s been writing on the internet for many years, he said it wasn’t until 2018 that teams started reaching out to him to discuss analytics. He says he’s heard from at least five and has done work as a consultant.
It makes sense that teams have become interested in outsiders like Sharp. Unlike other sports, which have staffed up their analytics departments over the past decade or so, football doesn’t employ many of the best analytics minds studying the game. (One team decision-maker sarcastically said this is because analytics employees insideNFL buildings are too beaten down from having their ideas ignored by old-school coaches.) Sharp is in high demand because he can help answer a question vexing front offices: Which stats matter? He became interested in how teams win games when he was in college and became convinced of two things, both of which would foreshadow the modern NFL. The first is that an offensive emphasis on passing correlated to wins. The second is more complicated than it sounds. Sharp found that third-down efficiency, long the obsession of announcers and old-school coaches, was not the key to an effective offense. He found that it was better for teams to scrap third downs entirely and move the chains by gaining the necessary yardage on first and second down.
In 2005, University of Pennsylvania professor Cade Massey and University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler (who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize) published a paper called “Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League,” which argued that top draft picks are overrated and that trading back for more picks is almost always the right decision. The instant reaction to their findings was not positive, Massey told me: “I met an NFL owner at a cocktail thing, he was all with me, and as soon as I started talking about trading back, he thought I was a complete idiot.”
The idea of trading back has since become widely accepted. Bill Belichick is credited with popularizing the idea in the NFL, and the Browns have recently used it to help stockpile the assets needed to build one of the best young rosters in the league. Similarly, sites like Football Outsiders have popularized dozens of influential stats—among them DVOA—that are now widely accepted in the NFL. One NFL decision-maker mentioned “speed score,” which Bill Barnwell, now with ESPN, developed at Football Outsiders.
Schatz said analytics will be fully accepted only once owners start going along for the ride, when a coach can go for it on fourth down because the numbers say it’s advantageous without fear of getting fired. Hornsby said that he can tell analytics is being embraced more because people are starting to separate the decision from the execution of that decision. The example he brings up comes from Super Bowl XLIX: Malcolm Butler’s game-sealing interception. “It wasn’t the pass, it was the type of pass,” Hornsby said. “[The Seahawks] had run that exact play six times during that year and it had been totally unsuccessful each time; the best they got out of it was a 2-yard outlet on a third-and-5 against Carolina.”
The decision to pass was sound. The pass itself was not.
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/12/19/18148153/nfl-analytics-revolution
Rapid and continuous improvement through understanding all that analytics can provide. Yeah, I'm a believer that anything you can measure can be made better or utilized better in some other way.
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