The Jets have bolstered their analytics department, hiring Matt Sheldon as director of football research and strategy. (This was a quiet move; the team made no announcement.) He held the same title with the Dolphins in 2017-2018 — his connection to Adam Gase. Prior to that, he spent three seasons with the Bears in a similar role, crossing paths with Joe Douglas. Sheldon has a coaching background, but he got involved in analytics in recent years.
If Douglas and Gase green light this guy, then I'm behind it. Maybe he's a diamond in the rough regarding analytics and could give us the extra edge finding those under the radar guys that help a team.
I am 10000% against analyzing sports with a calculator. The NFL seems to have a good balance so I'm not at all worried about analytics hires... baseball and basketball have gotten absurd though. A bunch of nerds who couldn't hit a jumper if they tried are ranking players based off their "KJKDSAFALKAJSDF per 100 possessions" rating and then acting like you're an idiot that doesn't get it if you disagree.
I'm all for it. Analytics will never replace scouting. It's a tool to evaluate players, but not the end all be all.
ho hum........only thing this generational trend of analytics tells me is that one of my kids should major in mathematical variables and statistics. the jobs are out there. LOL.
Analytics is great but if they have just hired this one dude and are considering that a success, they have a TON of work to do just to catch up to others in the league. you want to get a competitive edge? hire a team of 20 analysts with Ph.D's or Ivy leaguers, both engineers and data scientists.
It's going to change the NFL like it changed every other sport. just watch --- from an injury standpoint, imagine every player wearing a haptic wearable device for every practice or game... and a team of nerds upstairs monitoring their every move. today at practice they notice Teddy Bridgewater's legs are getting less blood flow than normal. Maybe he went out partying and is dragging ass a little? we've been there. Or maybe he is just overworked? having a bad day? who knows. They radio down to the coach who pulls Bridgewater aside and tells him to sit today's reps out. Bridgewater never ends up tearing his knee and destroying his career after all. those days are coming. and that's just health monitoring, I'm not even getting into strategy
Football will never be as analytically dependent as baseball and basketball are. There’s just too many variables and too many moving parts to make it work.
there are MORE variables and moving parts but the "too many" part is a challenge to overcome, not a definitive statement. what is "too many" in 2019, is not going to be "too many" in 2029
It's always amusing to me to see people denounce data-based decision-making, whether it's CEOs who "use their gut" to make business decisions or coaches who ridicule people who never played the game for making player recommendations, and then watch as they are inevitably beaten by people who embrace it. No one has ever suggested that analytics is everything, but analytics haters have already lost the battle and the war on this - every team uses analytics nowadays, far more than the vast majority of people realize. This is not open to debate. I personally know several statistics PhDs who left the top tier academic life to go work in sports analytics, and their hunger for masters-level data science people is absolutely voracious. The only question is going to be what the mix is going to be of in-house people employed by the teams and outside consulting firms with the teams as clients. I would also caution those who think analytics has / will have less impact on football than, for example, on baseball. There is no question that baseball is the easiest game to analyze, being broken up into discrete events typically involving only 3 or 4 people (pitcher, batter, and a fielder or two). It is also by far the most random sport, with perfectly executed pitches turning into game-winning dribblers through the hole and perfectly executed at bats turning into line drive double plays. That is why analytics encourages focusing on strikeouts and home runs, because those are the events least affected by randomness. It's also why baseball analytics are about the long run, not the short run, as the Oakland A's and Tampa Bay Rays have repeatedly shown (you can thank the Law of Large Numbers for that). Football is of course far more complex than baseball, but it's also far more predictable - a well-executed back shoulder pass or wheel route is pretty much unstoppable. Football has been compared to war, and that is apropos here - the army (or navy) that wins the battle is often not the most powerful one, but rather the one with the best intelligence about what is going on before and during the battle. The course of the war in the Pacific during World War II is remarkably illustrative on that, on both the Japanese and Allied sides - the side that had the intelligence advantage almost always won, even when faced with a stronger enemy force. That is all about data, and the same is true in football - it's all about having a better understanding of what is going on on the field (assuming, of course, that the teams are at least reasonably well-matched). I actually think the sport where analytics will have the biggest effect (and is already having a profound effect) is basketball. It's a combination of being relatively simple while also being highly predictable. The difficulty has always been that players are constantly moving around, but now every player has wearable technology on their uniforms, which means it's possible for every team to know exactly where everyone on the floor is, and is going, at any time. Basketball analytics departments are investing heavily in experts in spatio-temporal modeling to uncover when players are in the most favorable offensive or defensive positions, and when they're in the least favorable ones, and this is going to have a profound effect on the game. Setting Klay Thompson up for an open 3-pointer is easy stuff - think defensive shifts and launch angles on steroids. That's what's coming.
If analytics does to football what it did to baseball that will be the end of football. Not sure it can but, all the strategy and excitement has been sucked away. There is absolutely no action in the game anymore. Basketball is heading there too, turning into a 3 point contest. Basically, analytics seems to be showing us the best way to win at the expense of the sport itself.
If teams were rewarded for being entertaining analytics would focus on quantifying the best ways to be entertaining, but they're not; they're rewarded for winning. When you happen to get a team like the Warriors you can get both, but that is very much the exception, not the rule.
I understand, and that’s part of why baseball is struggling with the younger demographics and eventually the other sports will start losing viewers too. Football will be somewhat protected because there is so much chaos involved in each snap, but , at some point between number crunching and the emphasis on less collisions the game will stop being entertaining and will be just relevant to draft kings users trying to make a profit by crunching the same numbers.
Baseball was struggling with the younger demographic long before analytics came along I disagree strongly that it takes strategy out of the game. It adds more strategic elements
