By now, everyone is aware of the impact of Moneyball (statistics!) on the MLB. Due to the media firestorm surrounding Moneyball (aided by the catchy name), the perception seems to be that baseball GMs are the brainiest employees in professional sports. Occasionally, I'll hear a story about an NFL or NBA GM who breaks the mold by applying analytics to improve their team's performance, but this isn't very common (although I imagine all pro teams are now employing at least a few data analysts).
But I've NEVER heard a story about a college athletic director credited for improving/influencing his school's performance beyond the hiring of a high-profile coach ... until I read the above story. I imagine that the main reason for this is because it is extremely rare. You only hear about from the AD when its time to hire/fire a coach, respond to NCAA investigations, or build a new state-of-the-art athletic facility. This really doesn't make much sense, especially considering that all of the top universities have many great PhD-level statisticians on their payrolls. While not all statisticians do sports-related research, all a university needs to do is simply buy out one of a professor's courses to get his/her expertise on how to apply a Moneyball-style approach to give their athletic teams as many advantages as possible ("buying out a course" = allow a professor to dedicate the time he/she would normally spend teaching a course to do some other research activity).
I realize that this may ruffle some feathers, as many head coaches don't want to take advice from some academic wizard. One option is to hire an AD who can do these sorts of analyses himself, and only try to change "off the field" decisions, such as scheduling, which is what the linked story above explains. And as probably all coaches have bonuses built into their contracts for post-season appearances, what coach wouldn't want to do all he can to increase his likelihood that his team makes it into the playoffs (or bowl game)?
If any university wants to take a chance and hire a statistician as their next AD to get an advantage over their competition, I'll be more than happy to interview :)
No comments:
Post a Comment