Buffalo Bills Going the Moneyball Route With Analytics

Ok, I can see it for baseball. There is close to no interplay between players (even on the pitching team, coordination is restricted to whether you can catch what someone throws at you), and strategy is restricted to positioning players where a batter tends to hit and to how aggressively you go after a pitcher or batter. You're also playing 162 games a year - you can get some pretty good numbers in that time. Basketball is a bit harder, but with only four other teammates on the floor and a fairly static match-up (guards don't face centers much, you have zone or man-defense, and strategy revolves around how much you go for inside battles versus outside shots), the possible factors that influence whether a shot is made or not is still pretty small. You're also playing 82 games and taking a significant number of shots in a game. Again, you have a decent data set to work with.

But football? There are 10 teammates on the field, quite a few of which get switched out every other snap. You have 52 people on the roster, with many of them active during every game (especially on defense). Strategic decisions can take specific players completely out of the game for long stretches (simplest example: you're behind in the game, and start throwing - does that mean your running backs now suck?). And finally: there's only 16 games in a season. Some people may see action only 2-3 times a game or see action in trivial circumstances (see: kicker, long snapper). So not only do you have a huge amount of variables influencing a single player's success, you will also have a hard time creating a metric for success (touchdowns and sacks are rare outcomes of a long string of events), and on top of that, you're frequently dealing with a data set that maybe consists of 100 data points for an entire year, and maybe of 10 points for some lower-rung players. And it's exactly in the lower rungs of the players where moneyball was so wildly successful. Everybody knows an Adrian Peterson and Derek Jeter when they see one, but what about the journey players who switch teams once a year? Moneyball pretty much addressed that problem in baseball, but I don't see it working in football.

The Bills might prove me wrong, but I see this instead turning into the problem Girardi had with the Yankees: making player decisions based on stats that are calculated with 5 data points leads to decisions that will come back to bite you in the long run. You might as well save the money and just flip a coin.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/-MvBIRuILxI/story01.htm

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