Football Analytics – Way Over-Hyped

Sports decision-making.  Once dominated by coaching judgments, but now increasingly the captive of mathematicians.  Teams of self-styled math gurus scrub data of every conceivable sort searching for heretofore obscured “insights”.  Subjective decision-making replaced by rules-based decision making. The goal of analytics?  Extract insights from prior events to guide future decisions and increase the probability of desired future outcomes.  A tool that, where “insights” are generated, is assumed will enhance outcome-probabilities.  Mathematical analysis will improve outcomes.  But is this assumption in sports, particularly football, correct?  How useful are football analytics? Continue reading “Football Analytics – Way Over-Hyped”