Andrew Smith, Assistant Head of Programs at Explo at Yale, attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, a forum dedicated to industry professionals to discuss the increasing role of analytics in the global sports industry. These are his top 5 takeaways.
Originating 10 years ago as a small series of meetings at MIT, Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has grown annually such that this year attracted 3,900 attendees, 320 academic institutions, and representatives from 130 different professional sports teams. Explo has attended for the past several years in order to glean insights from professionals that inform our Sports Management Focus Program, as well as the Business of Sports course at Explo at Wellesley.
Analytics can be a Great Tool, If You Let Them
The marquee panel, Moneyball Reunion, featured the people who put sports analytics on the map. Top billing was Bill James, the American baseball writer and statistician whose work has been widely influential in challenging some of the fundamental assumptions made by players, coaches, and front-offices on how best to win baseball games. Also on the panel was Michael Lewis, author of the 2003 book, Moneyball, which was the basis for the 2011 movie starring Brad Pitt. Paul DePodesta, who’s worked widely through major league baseball and the NFL, rounded out the panel, as he served as the Assistant General Manager for the Oakland Athletics (A’s) in 2002, the team on which Moneyball in based.
Lewis summed up the applicability of sports analytics by simply stating, “Really, what you want is a willingness to learn.” Analytics can help teams see the patterns of what’s happening on the field from an entirely new perspective. He elaborated that those players, coaches, and managers who were not just willing to learn but eager to embrace these new forms of statistics, like the 2002 A’s, often translated these insights to sustained improbable success. This theme rang through the entire two-day conference, especially as it has borne out, a decade later, that analytics are at the core of almost every major franchise in the major sports.
The team being heralded as the contemporary equivalent to the 2002 Oakland A’s is the Golden State Warriors, an NBA team that won the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference “Best Analytics Organization” award for this year. The team also won the 2015 NBA Championship and are heavy favorites to repeat this June. The debate about whether analytics are here to stay was officially put to bed at this year’s conference, and the race toward finding as many creative applications of analytics — in fan experience, wearable technology, coaching strategy, and marketing — has begun.
Be Curious
With so many students in the audience interested in breaking into the sports marketing industry, conference organizer Jessica Gelman from Kraft Sports took a few minutes to share her thoughts on what students can do now to jump start their career aspirations. Her primary message: “Be curious!” She went on to say that if you are interested in marketing, go do it! Find a club on campus that needs you and help them.
This was a second major theme echoed throughout SSAC — to figure out what interests you and to make it happen by taking action. In a Q&A session following the Basketball Analytics panel, Boston Celtics Assistant General Manager Michael Zarren echoed this sentiment, suggesting students be creative in demonstrating their skills. If you want to one day be a writer for ESPN, then start a blog now. If you want to be an analyst for a sports team, then compile stats you think are useful and send them to a team. More than networking or getting perfect grades, the best thing you can do as a student is figure out creative ways to express your skills and passions.
Entrepreneurship is a Team Sport
With rapidly emerging technology and the pace of change within the sports industry, an entire panel was dedicated to asking the question, “Where’s the industry going?” The resounding response was simple — in essence, we’re not sure, but we know we need some new perspectives and creative people to get us there.
MIT Sloan School of Business Professor Bill Aulet put it most plainly, saying, “Entrepreneurship is a team sport.” Whether it’s the revolutionary next piece of equipment or just a better way to watch the game, the entrepreneurial groups who will shape the industry in the coming years will be diverse. Groups will need an array of skills — from marketing to writing to coding to researching — and these folks will have to come from all kinds of different backgrounds. In fact, the panel contended, many of the best sports entrepreneurs are not sports fans themselves and it’s their outsider’s perspective that gives them their edge within the marketplace. The panel also identified previous failures as a hallmark of successful entrepreneurs. If someone can tell me about an idea or product that failed, and how they learned and grew from it, then that’s a person I can get behind.
Wearable Tech is Coming
Small, wearable, biometric trackers are a big part of the future of sports — they’re near ubiquitous at the professional level, becoming so at colleges, and are well on the way in high schools, too. Closely tracking a player’s biometric indicators can help prevent injury, tailor and personalize training regimens, and make better predictions about performance. The clearest example came from Boston Celtics GM Zarren, who shared an anecdote from 2010 when Point Guard Rajon Rondo first used a biometric chip to determine how far he ran in a game. At the end of the game, Rondo guessed he’d ran 8 miles and in reality he ran the most of anyone on the team, but only 4.2 miles. Zarren’s point being: you would train differently for a 4-mile race than an 8-mile one and wearable technology may be the best way to catch these kinds of training oversights.
Panelist Andrew Hawkins, Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver and Sports Management Student at Columbia University, also posited that he hopes wearable technology could be a part of dealing with the NFL’s concussion problem — if not in prevention, then at least in optimizing recovery though biometric feedback and monitoring. Hawkins also gave the players’ perspective, saying that wearable technology, and analytics in general, can be helpful feedback for players, prompting them to make meaningful adjustments to their style of play, with the aim of maximizing production, minimizing injuries, and extending careers.
Sports Media is Evolving
The landscape of sports media is changing. The new paradigm is extensive fan access. The panel, comprised of journalists from ESPN, Golf Week, the Player’s Tribune, and 538, grappled with the idea that fans have just about as much access to players and teams as the journalists do, through platforms like social media and up-to-the-second statistic tracking mobile apps. To that end, the group universally felt their profession had left behind their traditional charge of bringing fans who weren’t at the game up to speed on the night’s action. Instead, the contemporary sports journalist is an analyst, a storyteller, and even sometimes an arm-chair psychologist. Many described their approach as figuring out the most creative ways to tell the story of a game, rather than the facts of that game.
ESPN Staff Writer Ethan Sherwood Strauss, who covers the near-flawless Golden State Warriors, shared the interesting challenge of finding new and interesting ways to cover a team that’s been in the national spotlight for over a year and whose hallmark is consistent, solidly fundamental, team play. In short, he said, there are only so many ways he can tell the story of Steph Curry nailing 30-foot three pointers and the team playing unselfishly around him. To meet this challenge, Strauss uses analytics to find the story within the numbers, the one that no one could have seen, even if they actually did tune in for the game.
Sports Media newcomers 538 and the Player’s Tribune, represented on the panel by Carl Balik and Jaymee Messler respectively, represented the new paradigm of putting the story first. Like the approach described by Strauss, Balik’s 538 digs deep into the statistics and finds their stories in the numbers, translating them to articles that give the casual fan analytical insights they’d never take away from a team broadcast or a Twitter feed. Player’s Tribune, on the other hand, helps players tell their own stories in long format articles that give fan unparalleled access to their favorite sports figures, like Paul Pierce, Dorothy Hamill, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. One thing was wholly agreed upon by the panel, though, which was the idea that good writing and authentic storytelling still are and would always be the foundation of their work.
Lisa Merlini