Inside The Star
If you avoided the Black Friday madness and stayed home to watch football, you are not only a person of high intelligence, you also saw a prime example of why “Analytics” has no place in football.
You also saw why this abomination and its supporters need to be sacked and thrown out of the game.
Yes, if you are a proponent of Analytics, that means you might be a dumbass.
I personally blame “Moneyball” for this madness as much as I do any idiot who supports its use in football. That system might work for a candy-ass game like baseball. But the game of football is an alpha man’s game.
No matter how good-looking Brad Pitt might be, baseball is a dumbass beta guy’s game.
Football is not a game that can be defined strictly by cold, hard numbers. It is a game of physicality, of raw emotion, of players digging down deep to rise up and meet a challenge.
A football contest is played in driving rain, in snow, in heat, and in bitter cold, but a light sprinkle brings a baseball game to an immediate halt.
Football players slam into one another violently. Baseball players get their feelings hurt if a pitch comes within a foot of hitting them.
Football is a game of momentum. A change in momentum can bring a team all the way back from, say, 25 points down to win a Super Bowl.
Football is a game of dozens of intangibles that Analytics simply cannot accurately compute, like:
And that is just the top five.
There are so many other intangibles in the mix that a computer program simply cannot account for accurately.
The introduction of Analytics into football is the worst thing to happen to the game since the introduction of artificial turf and fully-enclosed domed stadiums.
A coach who heavily relies on it, and anyone who swears by this hell-spawned system, might be a dumbass.
On Friday, down 24-15 after scoring a touchdown, Philadelphia took to analytics. That idiotic system of cold, hard numbers said to go for the two-point try.
Yes, if successful, the Eagles just need another touchdown and would then have the option to tie the game or go for the win.
However, miss the two-pointer, and you’re down two possessions instead of just one with three minutes left.
The Eagles went for two and missed. They got the ball back with 1:10 left on the clock.
They now needed to score either a field goal or a touchdown, recover an onside kick – a near impossibility these days – and then score a second time.
And they would need to do all of that in 70 seconds.
Scoring a touchdown in the conditions that existed Friday in 70 seconds was doable....
