Getting Football Wrong

There may be spaces that are more traditionally male than the National Football League, but there aren’t many. As with any truly male space, it is full of people who think they’re good at STRATEGY. I live in Washington DC, so I see this all the time in the form of bros with graduate degrees in policy and steadfastly believe in their own ability to strategy any global problem into submission. And though your specific regional strategy-bro may differ by degree, I think we can all recognize them pretty easily.  Over the past decade, this type of bro has made his way into leadership roles for NFL teams. Before, there were ol’ ball coaches whose vision of football was simple. They had an all you gotta do is mentality. The belief that whoever won would be the team most able to impose their will. Nowadays, after this influx of MBAs into the league’s managerial class, we talk about trade market inefficiencies and surplus value. None of this is to say that old-school, Mountain Dew bottle as a dip spit cup, mentality is right. It was pure, but dumb (and as a dummy, I mean absolutely no disrespect by that). The quarter-zipped, McKinsey rejects running some teams across the league are probably less wrong in their approach, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. And as we’re going to talk about here, the mentality that you could be right, that all of this is knowable, might be just as limiting to long-term success as is a team coached by a guy named Rocky or Don.

Any generation’s apocalypse story is going to be governed by the dominant fears and technologies of its day and history will likely prove that version of apocalypse to be quaint and out-of-touch. The contemporary consensus around how to build NFL teams is likewise based on our current cultural and political landscape. And as has been shown over and over again, future generations will look back on it with a kind of wry derision. To put a fine point on it, I think that the current paradigm of NFL teambuilding is best described as a kind of vague gumbo made up of Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell books. It claims the world is actually made up rational markets that have inefficiencies you can exploit if you know where to look. The things other people think are important actually aren’t important, and if you can find the truly important thing, you will have discovered El Dorado. There are obviously a few major problems with this. One: the kind of hilarious notion that anything in the football sphere is governed by cool logic instead of emotion. Two: the thing you think led to your success is probably not actually what led to your success.  Exactly none of this is to say that I have the right way of doing things. Instead, it’s to suggest that there is no right way, that the world is too complex and our tools are too simple to hope to understand anything. Instead, I’d like to propose a different way to think about things.

A while ago I read a book and half-understood it, and it led me to believe we should think about foot ball more like we do quantum mechanics. It suggests a view of the universe where 85% of what we’re trying to see is just missing. Where we can understand either where something is or how fast it’s going, but never both. Where particles can become enmeshed with one another and affect each other across all of time and space. Where being an observer of something means that you will never actually be able to see what you’re looking for because the act of looking at it will have fundamentally altered it. To my mind, all of those things feel truer to the experience of watching and understanding football than anything else. No matter how much I try to understand. No matter how many podcasts I listen to or books I read, I can't help but feel like I'm standing at the foot of this unfathomable abyss. And if that's even a little bit true, any theory of the sport that says you can plumb those depths has to be wrong.

I first started thinking about this over the summer when there was a lot of discussion about how the Rams challenged traditional notions all the way to a Super Bowl, about how they eschewed the non-essential in favor of modern thinking. Now as a fan of a team that spent the past several years eschewing not just traditional knowledge, but any form of knowledge (#keeppounding), I went into this article a little saltier than I maybe should have, but I still couldn’t kick the notion that there was some unearned smugness on the part of the Rams. I was skeptical they had actually discovered some secret. What was more likely, that they were uniquely smart, or that they had Aaron Donald, himself a market inefficiency?

The fact that the Rams have turned into the second half of the me reaping/me sowing meme this season I think suggests that maybe it’s more fair to say that they employed a pretty high-variance strategy that paid off in the short-term with some pretty long-term negative implications. In a vacuum, that’s fine, but there are major unintended consequences of this that all the rest of us are dealing with. Primarily, the idea that winning a Super Bowl justifies any step you took to get there reduces all of this unnecessarily into a binary. I’ve never rooted for a team that won a championship, so maybe I’d take all this back in a heartbeat if they did, but I think there’s room in football for more than just a list of who won the Lombardi Trophy.

The rise of this mindset coupled with the expansion of the NFL media has also created a class of “smart fans” who are conversant in EPA, DVOA, and any other numbers of advanced analytics. Again, in a vacuum, that’s fine. But these metrics don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist on the internet where people have unsubtle conversations about highly subtle things. Advanced analytics create a sense of false precision for things that are incredibly imprecise. They also drain the joy out of everything. The sense that these games where impossibly large humans move with an incredible and awe-inspiring combination of grace and speed are treated as features of an algorithm instead of what they actually are is a galactic bummer. More to the point, it’s a wrong-headed view of the world.

Advanced analytics are an attempt to use statistics to help us better understand the world. They are a tool that can help us interpret the thing we are seeing, but it’s folly to mistake them for the thing they seek to describe. To think that we could use numbers to describe this

The fact that this pass had something like an eleven percent chance of being completed seems to both undersell the accomplishment it is and distract from the thing itself. One of the lessons in When We Cease to Understand the World*is that our understanding of our world is filtered through the stories we tell about it. Shouldn’t we talk about the NFL in a way that’s more appropriate to what it is? Shouldn’t we recognize it as the motion of objects whose laws and behavior exist just beyond the limit of our understanding?