Weekly Commentary & Review #14

A new podcast that's a must-subscribe for your feed. Plus, draft season is upon us, so I delve into the biases driving the content factory

I’m back to writing these weekly commentaries now that the season is over and I’ll have more time to digest the good, bad and ugly in football discourse out there. Don’t worry, this offseason you’re still going to get all of my free agency analysis, proprietary Improvement Index, the consensus mock drafts, combine breakdowns, pre-draft studies and post-draft analysis.

Please like and share this post if you’re so inclined and want to spread some rational thoughts to those drowning in a sea of takes.

DELAYED BUT EXPONENTIAL RETURNS OF ANALYTICS

“draw headphones with mathematical formulas and american footballs in the background, digital art” - Google Gemini

One issue I’ve found with these commentaries is that I spend too much time complaining about the abjectly awful content from popular producers and not enough focusing on the positive stuff I consume. It’s true that there’s little value in most television and large publications in the football space. But you should always fight against defining yourself only by what you're against, and never what you’re for. I’ll get back to my traditional hating later in this commentary, but begin with stuff I took insights from this week.

Podcasts are one of my favorite mediums for getting the best thoughts out in the world. First, there are lots of highly successful people who will do a podcast interview but won’t write out their thoughts in a publication, mostly because their jobs are on the inside of organizations, not media members.

I’m happy to see that one of my favorite thinkers in sports analytics (and just generally) StatsBomb founder Ted Knutson have started an American football podcast, with coworkers Seth Partnow (former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks) and Matt Edwards (Former Director of Football Analytics).

The StatsBomers talked through a lot of high-level trends in the industry, a couple I’ll highlight and talk through here. I liked Knutson’s framing of analytics adoption having a couple truths: 1) The earlier you start adopting, the longer you have to benefit from the compounding benefits, and 2) Once teams go analytical, they never go back.

Ted Knutson: “Sam Hinkie has an aphorism that I kind of stole: People always overestimate what you can do it a month or even a year, but they underestimate what you can do in a decade…..

“If you're not on the train right now, you're missing the compounding benefits of everybody else. And in certain cases, you can hire people to be able to do that. But if you go into a new team, you're starting from scratch in a lot of ways, if they're not using any sort of data.

“You've got to build the data engineering pipeline, you've got to build this, you've got to build that you've got to have people around the shops, they know how to have the conversation, even engage with the data. But the fact that matter is when these teams do engage with the data they don't ever come back.

“It's not a space where they're, like, ‘Oh yeah, we're going to give it all up.’ That doesn't happen in any sport. What …. we've seen in other sports is that those who invest early tend to get compounding games for quite a long time.”

While laying the correct foundation and hiring the right people might be the most important parts of the process for building analytical capabilities, the tangible benefits and applicable insights of those investments come later - often much later. Even if teams’ investment in analytics grows in a linear manner, or is front-loaded, the growth in value those investments produce is exponential.

ESPN’s Seth Walder’s somewhat-out-of-date listing of analytical staffers on each team shows an analytical staffer on every NFL team, including nine teams with five or more, another three with four and more than one for all but four teams. But going back just to 2021 shows only three teams with at least five staffers, and if you went back further, you’d find only a few teams with more than one dedicated employee to do analytical work, which means the little capacity most teams had was likely spent on reports and other “grunt work”, not generating meaningful and actionable insights.

Ted Knutson: “All this stuff is on the daily. There's always too much work to do. Always, always. You create more time for your coaches and analysts to do smart work as opposed to doing the dumb grunt work and once you do like that's just rolls up and aggregates like magic.”

The Ravens and Browns are probably the leaders among NFL teams because of their larger staffs, but just as importantly hiring in volume a number of years ago. The Browns serious investment in analytics really began when Sashi Brown brought in Paul DePodesta, who built out a collection of analysts and served as a bridge to ownership. The Ravens’ inflection point was probably when they transitioned Corey Krawiec from “analytics assistant” to “manager of player evaluation and analytics”. Both of these events occurred in 2016, giving those teams a ton of time to do the hard-but-fruitless foundation laying well before many other teams began building their capacity.

The day-to-day demands of the NFL can delay even the most intentional teams looking to build out analytical capacity. The Vikings hired the first general manager with a purely analytics background in Kwesi Adofo-Mensah two years ago, but they only really had two quantitative analysts dedicated to the work, before recently hiring a third. At the NFL level, the investment has to be about more than the most recent GM/coaching hire’s desires, since most of the benefits of the work take longer to develop than the average GM/coaching tenure.

As Knutson mentions in the first quote, “you can hire people to be able to do that,” meaning there are now third-party analytical services like Zelus and Sumer Sports that can help expedite the process, but it’s not going from 0-to-100 overnight.

Two teams I’ll be monitoring closely to see if you can jump past the slower development stage to analytical insights are the Cowboys and Chargers. The Cowboys hired John Park from the Colts, and importantly he’s had the ability and backing to go and get experienced analysts like Sarah Mallepalle and William Britt.