the dumb smart trade

A few days ago I sat down with a plan to write about the Marcus Smart trade. It seemed like a straightforward task. I had spent the prior couple of days digesting the deal, which sent Smart to Memphis in exchange for Kristaps Porzingis, and I had reached my conclusions. Sometimes with TOA I've found that writing is more like transcribing, particularly in cases like this one where the topic had been on my mind, so I thought I'd have something written and posted within an hour. Naturally, I got stuck about as soon as I started writing.

Where to begin? The logical starting point felt like examining the trade from a tactical perspective. I'm admittedly not the city's most dedicated Celtics fan, tuning in pretty much exclusively during the playoffs, but combining my experience as a college basketball player with the forty or so games I've seen over the past couple of years gives me enough of a foundation to offer reasonable insights. It struck me that last season the Celtics seemed to have three main areas for improvement - offensive consistency, passing, and late-game defense against elite perimeter players. This trade doesn't seem to help the team in any of those areas. But the problem with this approach is that such analysis is, for the most part, nonsense. There's no real way to prove your point. The best you can do is put your bets down now, so to speak, on what you think will happen, then see the results during the season. But even then, whatever happens next spring will just be one outcome out of many possibilities, and luck often plays enough of a factor to render most analysis inconclusive. There is also the more basic reality that so many things could still change between now and then (such as another trade). In other words, to write about this trade means I'll have to write knowingly about what I don't know (a definition I'm sure will be familiar to longtime readers). I'll leave this esteemed task to the paid professionals.

I guess this means I should write about what I do know. I know that when you are leading a team there are certain qualities you just can't teach, and that the only way to build them into the team is to have team members set the example for others. Smart's toughness, hustle, and intelligence are hardly unique qualities but the combination of these in one player might be a different story. These are also qualities that represent areas for improvement at a team level. Crucially, losing these qualities in a team is hard to notice until they deteriorate beyond the point of repair, so I worry that the team may now be on a trajectory for these qualities to become significant enough weaknesses such that they offset any technical improvement from making the trade. I also know that teams require a certain unity to overcome obstacles, and although this is an intangible quality I think from observation the Celtics had the right level of togetherness in these past two seasons. Due to their extended playoff runs, the Celtics have basically played an extra half-season of basketball over the past two years (and sacrificed two months of off-season rest to do so). Therefore, one obvious consideration for this year is burnout. Does this trade strengthen the team's ability to stick together throughout the long grind of making another attempt at a championship? Something tells me that Smart's leadership as a proven veteran leader in the team will be missed in the exact moment when it's needed the most.

But the thing I can't get past is how back when I used to play basketball it was a nightmare to play against a guy like Smart. When I lined up against an opponent like Smart, I knew he was going to make the game as difficult for me as possible, and that it would take everything I had to compete against him. I don't know enough about Porzingis to say if he's the same type of opponent but my suspicion is that rival players would prefer to play against Porzingis rather than Smart. What I am talking about here regards NBA players so I understand a comparison to my modest experience is a bit of a stretch. It's possible that being a professional basketball player means these kinds of considerations are left for those like me, the obnoxious combination of Division 3 never-was and internet "writer". And yet, if I'm reminded of anything during the NBA playoffs it's that elite performance is as much mental as it is physical. In the playoffs, athletes who might hit one hundred shots in a row during practice suddenly find themselves unable to string together consecutive baskets. Others who are comfortable taking the initiative during the regular season start passing it to the next guy when the consequence of defeat is elimination. There is a certain mental edge that a player needs to have in order to thrive under pressure and you often don't know if they have it until you put them into these games. If my goal was to win the championship, I would collect as many guys as possible who had the mental edge, then do everything in my power to keep those players. Smart, for all his shortcomings, had the mental edge, so it worries me that the Celtics traded him for a player with no history of the same. 

The title of this post hints at how I feel but it's actually not a great representation - the puns write themselves on TOA and as usual I couldn't help myself. The people who made this decision have forgotten more about basketball than I'll ever know so I don't raise my objections with full conviction. I mostly wanted to write them down just so I have something to look back on a year from now. But the reality is that mistakes are made all the time. In the case of this trade there is the obvious point that Memphis, a championship contender just like the Celtics, identified Smart as a way to help them reach their goal. Around here the talk is about how the trade impacts the Celtics but in terms of evaluating the trade it might help to think about what Memphis got in the deal. What I think is that Memphis prioritized certain qualities at the expense of others, then identified Smart as one player who fit their priorities. On the other hand, the Celtics prioritized different qualities and acquired them in the trade. My hunch is that Memphis acquired the qualities that matter far more in determining a championship team. These are the qualities that can override the technical advantages of basketball skill or team tactics that the Celtics gained from the trade. Time will offer its own verdict on the trade so perhaps the only thing left to do now is to wait and see, but as far as my reaction is concerned I'm less optimistic today than I was two weeks ago regarding the Celtics winning next year's championship.

toa rewind, world cup edition - goooool

As I'm sure many readers have suspected, I've spent the past few weeks battling an unrelenting case of World Cup Fever. My temperature has come down a few degrees today, the first day without games since the start of the tournament. What better way to fill the void than with a repost from October 2020, where I briefly mused on the tradition of Spanish-speaking commentators yelling "GOL" after the ball finds its way into the back of the net?

My hunch is that this practice is related to how fans react to goals. I noticed early on in my viewing career that Spanish-speaking crowds sounded different after a goal relative to their English-speaking counterparts. (My best but likely unhelpful attempt to explain the difference is that the Spanish-speaking crowds sounded lower, not in volume but in pitch, than the English-speaking ones.) It took a few more years before I connected the dots - in the former, fans yell "GOAL" (or "GOOOL", I suppose) while in the latter fans tend to just make all kinds of otherwise unintelligible noise. What I'm not sure about is how this might fit into the commentator's tendency, leading to a sort of pollo and huevo conundrum - do announcers yell GOL because that's what the crowds do, or do crowds yell GOL because that's what the announcers do? And of course, all of the preceding speculation comes with the caveat that I might have misunderstood something along the way, which would wipe out all of this paragraph.

Let's focus instead, then, on what I do know. In this tournament I've watched games with commentary in both languages at a roughly even split. The experience has reinforced a feeling I explained in the 2020 post linked above - those who attempt to make some sort of insightful commentary in the moments after a goal are almost certainly doomed to failure. When a goal is scored, there is simply nothing to say. What words could resonate better than just taking in the explosion of joy, excitement, and hope that comes in the moments after a goal? What is better than just becoming part of the noise for a few seconds? I think the Spanish commentator's practice of yelling "GOOOOOL" until the celebrations start to wane reveals a deep-rooted wisdom about communication - if it's not the right time to say something, maintain the connection until it becomes appropriate to resume speaking.

the bronze medal of life

I suppose it's not appropriate for me to comment on the Olympics, which I've watched for a grand total of around two hours so far (and not on my TV, not in my apartment). It wasn't my plan, but that's where I was one night last week, so I watched it for a little while. I don't think two hours of viewing is enough to have a qualified opinion, except maybe for this idea that with a tweak or two it could make for more compelling viewing. I mean, if these games had more interesting events, there would be more interest, right? I would be more interested. The best part is that it just so happens I know about something that has interesting events - the Summer Olympics! Since the summer games are a bit busy, maybe we can move a few sports from summer to winter, and get a better mix of events? It seems promising, but as any Olympian knows to get to the end you have to go to the start, so let's approach this idea in the form of a question about origins - how did they decide which sports go into which Olympics?

One possibility is the simple answer - the sports played in the summer go to the summer games. Easy, right? The challenge for me is that simple examples such as basketball, a winter sport played in the summer games, suggest it's not so simple. Also, what about the ones that sit comfortably in two minds, played in either spring or fall, where the distinction could be almost arbitrary? It seems easy enough to say "summer sports in the summer", but there could be challenges to this method once we get into the details. I suppose an alternate version of this idea would suggest that climate plays the key role, with events that could reasonably be held outdoors on a warm day falling under the jurisdiction of the summer games. I mean, this is what basketball is, right, an asphalt court down at the park? But what do we do for sports such as volleyball or ping-pong (excuse me, table tennis), which basically could happen at any time thanks to their indoor venues? This climate-based thinking could also lead to a potential (eventual?) problem when global warming gets to the point that ALL sports are summer sports, since it'll always be summer (but let's ignore this angle, at least today).

A deeper dive into the event list suggests some other shared characteristics that could determine these distinctions. For example, I notice an odd feature of many winter sports - you start at the top, then race to the bottom. This is bobsled, this is skiing, this is most of the games! It makes me wonder if the Winter Olympics started when some drunk bloke fell on his ass and slid down a hill. But if I'm honest with myself, this is just a cheap joke, a cute suggestion at best, my hypothesis refuted with easy examples like curling or figure skating, which could take place in my flat if the building froze. In fact, this really represents an example of a special type of remark: the kind of thing you say when you feel like you should say something, maybe at some sort of meet and greet type of deal, but you have nothing to say. What do you do in these moments? I usually go for a quick laugh premised more on everyone being able to explain the joke rather than anyone finding it funny, just so they all know that I fit in, that I belong, that I get it. This might sound sad, but it's the exact feeling I have at the moment, where we are wrapping up the third paragraph of a post I'm writing solely because there is nothing on TV (except, well, the Winter Olympics). 

Anyway, having ruled out all my brilliant ideas and given that I have nothing to say, I guess I'm left with the usual explanation - this is all, most likely, a problem of admin, specifically the problem of admin enthusiastically yet poorly executed. One thing I learned "researching" this post (in other words, five minutes ago on Wikipedia) was that ice hockey and figure skating were first contested at a Summer Olympics (Antwerp 1920). They invented the Winter Olympics four years later, so off went those two events to the new games. And did basketball go with them? No, basketball actually wasn't officially contested until 1936, and it happened outdoors (should I revisit my earlier point?). It implies that moving the sport indoors would have seen it given the same shift to the Winter Olympics as hockey, but the next games in 1948 just saw it return as an indoor summer event, where it has remained for the next seventy-plus years. I guess they just didn't think moving basketball would make either Olympics better, so they kept it in the summer.

I'm not going to detail the history of how each event ended up in its respective Olympics. And honestly, it's probably just whether the event is on snow or ice, right? So if that settles it for you, go ahead and leave now - go watch the snow games, before the ice melts! But for those still unconvinced, I offer a final suggestion - maybe each event, through some combination of accidents, opportunities, and arbitrary decisions, just ended up where it is now, so that's where it is, and that's the story. The fact that ice or snow happens to demarcate the two versions is nothing more than a happy coincidence, or an invented standard applied in hindsight to fit a neat narrative onto the mess of process, the mess of life. It may seem odd that this could explain the organizing principle for one of the most logistically complex events in human history, but I feel this isn't strange at all. A set of happy coincidences resulting from trying to make things better... isn't this, really, what life is? The only thing we really do is, having accepted the situation, we just try to make things a little better, whether it means dividing events in the games, making choices about our paths, or dealing with the biggest feelings. If we (or someone) knew what was best for us, there would be instructions written on the back of every birth certificate, but I don't plan to check mine. It's not so much that I had no idea I would be writing this sentence two paragraphs ago, it's more that if I did know, it wouldn't be worth writing it at all. 

I think this thought that maybe, just maybe, the Olympics are organized the same way we organize most of our lives, well, maybe this explains the popularity of these games. What's more interesting than seeing ourselves? There are so many situations where, if you think more than ten seconds about it, suddenly seem full of impossible contradictions, but I think we forget how little control we have over our outcomes. Don't we all know the nature lover who lives in the middle of a city? You would never suspect such a person planned for life to work out that way, but I think a lot of us do end up just like this in a certain respect, and to be honest I don't think it's necessarily a bad result. The problem with life stories is that events always happen in order, so it seems implausible that the order had no bearing on events. I can look back on my years and tell you exactly how each moment led to the next. But what can I say now, about how this moment will lead to tomorrow? I don't even know how this paragraph will flow into the next one, but there's really only one way to find out.

So, you've suddenly looked around, and it didn't work out - you are the proverbial mountain man in the city jungle. What next? I don't know, just try something? You don't win the gold every time, so maybe aim for the silver and settle for the bronze, just to get going. How about putting a few plants in the window, finding a smelly pet or two, and looking at that gravelly park as you drive past it on weekends? These might seem like poor substitutes for an alternate lifetime surrounded by blues and greens, but maybe in the outdoors you'll never find out that your true calling was meant to be among people. So what would be the point of planning out every step, days and months and years in advance, with so much of us unknown even to ourselves? No, a lot of us know a better way, and by observation it seems that we all at least try to do it. We go here, we go there, stopping to say a thing or two and maybe have a laugh, all the while hoping for a sign every so often that validates our methods.

Then one day, we realize four years are gone, wasted even, and our resolve disappears under the cloak of bitter disappointment. We feel like we should have something for all that effort, that we should at least be able to say something, so we look to say something that everyone else can explain to others, and we try to fit in, try to belong, trying because if we get it then we can ignore what was lost. We decide to start planning so we can leave it behind. We pick our mountain, then start to climb. At first, the ground seems to pull us upward like destiny itself, gravity inverted, is the force at the summit. But I think at the end of the day a destiny of reality reveals itself - there is a slip, a fall, and then we are just another bloke sliding away from that promised land, full of fear and despair and that feeling, again, that we'll have to say something, should say something. We are ignorant in such moments, at least at first, but at the bottom once again we might finally understand why we are always being pulled here, when we look around and see all the things we can't leave behind, and realize the only way is to just try to make things better.

the european stupor league

There was a soccer story back in April about the formation of the European Super League (ESL). I want to make something very clear about the ESL - this was not just a huge soccer story, it was a huge story. I figured this out when the people in my life with little to no interest in the sport (this represents 98% of the people in my life) were constantly asking me about the ESL. What do you think about the ESL? What do the fans think about the ESL? Are you going to watch the ESL? Are you going to write about the ESL? It's the most reliable way to know whether a huge soccer story has actually reached the point where it's just a huge story - when people who don't follow the sport ask about it, it's a huge story.

The problem was that I didn't find anything interesting about this huge story. I suppose this could have been due to a number of reasons - the competition itself wasn't due to start right away, the format of the tournament lacked imagination, the ESL had always felt inevitable to soccer fans, and so on. I suppose it's even possible that I was simply exhausted from a year of pandemic life. But as I think about it now, I suspect my disinterest was based on a far simpler explanation. The ESL, in short, was an attempt by the sport's greediest club owners to consolidate their wealth at the expense of everyone else. This is a story that happens every day, every hour, in every industry on the planet, which means the only things I could have said about it were the most predictable responses to the most predictable prompts. What do I think about the wealthiest people on the planet crying poverty as an excuse for reinforcing structural inequality? What do you think I think? 

If talking about the ESL meant dusting off the script ahead of a new version of the same conversation, then it's pretty clear to me why I felt no compulsion to share my views back in April. There is a certain stupor that comes along when you spend too much time reciting the lines instead of expressing yourself. It may have something to do with the way I become so predictable to myself in these conversations that I lose interest in hearing my own voice. It's probably for the best in these sorts of circumstances that I've learned to walk away rather than regurgitate the same canned lines we recycle into our everyday interactions. What do I have to say about the ESL? It's going to be the same thing I thought the last time you asked, weeks or months before the ESL ever existed, because the details of the ESL don't introduce enough novelty to make me consider changing my perspective. It's the same reason why I'm so worn down by having to comment on pop culture, or the weather, or politics - whatever I say I've heard before, and each time I'm reminded that the predictable thing never quite felt worth saying.

leftovers - the polite something to do (polite advice)

The amusing fact of last Sunday's post is how far the final product drifted from the original idea - there is actually no trace of the genesis anywhere in the essay. My starting point was around four months ago when Charles Barkley appeared on The Bill Simmons Podcast. At about the 26:30 mark, Barkley tells a story about Moses Malone, crediting him as "the most important person in my basketball career". He describes a moment in his rookie year when Malone told him that "you're fat and you're lazy... you're lazy because you're fat" and details the way this conversation became a turning point in his career. The catch, which started the thinking that led to Sunday's post, is what Barkley adds at the end of the story - "I'm proud of myself for listening to him... I'm glad I was smart enough to listen to Moses." He then finishes with a point that a lot of athletes in a similar position to him failed because even though they heard the same advice, they ignored it. 

There is an obvious trace of last week's thoughts in this story - throughout his rookie year, somewhere deep down Barkley believed that he was a great player, and he was willing to do everything necessary to prove himself, including listening to Moses Malone. There is no doubt that this conviction is at the core of any success. The challenge for me as I wrote the post was how to reconcile that last comment, which came off to me not necessarily as arrogant, but as somewhat mistaken regarding the mechanisms behind good advice. Surely, Moses was not the first person to make the point to Barkley. I suspected that the missing piece of Barkley's thinking had to do with overrating the importance of what was said relative to when and how - both the moment and the method of giving advice can be more important than the advice itself. The lingering question following that podcast was why Moses waited until that moment to make his point, or why Barkley waited until that moment to finally accept the advice, but because these considerations took my writing away from the central idea of the eventual post, I cut the thought about Barkley after the first draft.

The topic remained on hold for a few weeks, then I stumbled across two key inspirations - Antonio Conte's dedication to himself and "Something To Do" from Zadie Smith's Intimations. It struck me that arrogance might be the best word to describe the conviction that drives success. The key is to direct this inward, avoiding the superiority complex associated with looking down on others. If we cannot be arrogant enough to try and beat our best, how can we get any better? I liked the way these two examples contained the argument because they seemed to clarify the opposite ends of an otherwise convoluted point - without politeness, Conte's self-dedication framed his arrogance in a negative light, while I concluded from Smith's essay that too much politeness could smother the arrogance necessary for self-improvement. 

What would happen if we changed a detail or two in those examples? Let's start with Conte - suppose everyone associated with Italian soccer believed in him throughout the season. Wouldn't this have made him more polite? I bet his comments last month would have given more credit to his team, which would suggest to others that he was open to accepting help. This would lead observers to offer him more help in the future, which would help him become an even better manager. There is a similar story with the proverbial average Joe who took up a new hobby during the pandemic - suppose he framed it not as "something to do", but as the first step toward achieving mastery of a new craft. I'm not sure what I'd make of a friend suddenly trying to become the greatest baker in world history, but I'd certainly be more likely to tell him if his brownies tasted like chalk. I think, in other words, that if these details were changed, we would all be better off because both Conte and the average Joe would be closer to fulfilling their full potential.

It's staggering to think that the biggest threat to success might be related to politeness - too much or too little, in the wrong moment, could permanently stunt our growth. So how do we know the right timing? I think Barkley's story is instructive. The two players had moved past the point of politeness, their shared recognition being that remaining polite in the moment would sell Barkley short, and this enabled the conversation. Barkley thought it mattered that he listened to Moses, but it may have been more important that Moses knew Barkley wanted to be great; if we are too polite to state our ambition, others won't feel compelled to offer their assistance. And to his credit, Moses told him exactly what he needed to hear; if we are too polite to give others the right support, then we stunt their growth. It becomes a bit of a cycle - the smothered ambition hides the need for support, then the lack of support extinguishes the ambition. Over time, I suspect the buried ambition emerges in unexpected outbursts against others, and these moments of lashing out refuel the cycle by giving them new reason to withhold guidance. The key may be to find a way to use politeness with discretion - relying on it to keep the peace when others aren't ready for the truth, then putting it aside in the key moment when politeness would sell someone short. The key is that using politeness with discretion is the only way we can help each other reach our full potential.

toa betting advice

I write often about betting here on TOA, but I rarely offer betting advice. This is why my post back in March was quite extraordinary - I advised readers to bet Washington at +1000 to win the NFC East (you can thank me now).

The reason I don't offer regular betting advice is simple - I'm rarely correct. This doesn't preclude me from occasionally picking a winner (see above) but when you see my reasoning, you see the problem - I said that by hiring Ron Rivera, they were restoring common sense leadership to the locker room. This was true, but the more important factors were Dak Prescott's injury, or Evan Engram's hands, or Nate Sudfeld failing to fake an injury last Sunday night. The line between skill and luck is a fine distinction, but it becomes a little clearer if you make a habit of articulating your reasoning alongside any prediction.

whinging analytics

Last Sunday night was off to a good start, at least in the context of what's appropriate in these disorientating days of pandemics, coups, and the Buffalo Bills winning the AFC East - I ordered eight chicken wings, but they gave me thirteen. Longtime wing connoisseurs will know that sometimes more wings means less wings, in the sense that a higher number for its own sake is meaningless when each piece is its own size, but a spread of thirteen to eight makes this a remote possibility - for eight to be greater than thirteen, you'd need one of those eight to be a quarter chicken. Anyway, my wings meant Sunday night was off to a flying start, and I sensed it was a good omen for the upcoming finale of the NFL season, where Philadelphia and Washington would determine the fate of the NFC East.

My positive mood lasted until around the fourth quarter, when Doug Pederson woke up Nate Sudfeld and sent the Eagles backup into the game for starting quarterback Jalen Hurts. The rest is, at least for helmet football fans, history, and already in the running for 2021's lowlight reel - the Philadelphia Eagles turned a competitive contest into a televised JV-Varsity scrimmage, chickening out for a quarter that ended with Washington winning the division and clinching a playoff berth by process of self-elimination; the losing side comprised not just of the Eagles, but anyone who had tuned in for a good game. Reader, if you need a sense of how bad it was in the moment, please note that NBC's commentary team, who are paid to sell the game to viewers, spent most of the fourth quarter in thinly-veiled disgust - neither Al Michaels or Cris Collinsworth went so far as to say the magic word, but Pederson was tanking (1). The odd thing about the commentary team's restraint was that they weren't so shy about criticizing Pederson just a few minutes earlier regarding a play-calling decision. It was on Hurts's last play before being replaced, and it led to an incomplete pass on 4th and goal from the four-yard line. The reaction was immediate - Collinsworth pointed out that going for it was supported by analytics, with the decision linked to a 5% increase in a team's odds of winning, to which Michaels replied along the lines of "I want to have a look at that math."

I didn't realize it at the time, but perhaps the reaction to the Sudfeld substitution - and its implicit commencement of tanking - should have had the same tone. The unrealistic aspect of my thought is that although I see tanking as the purest manifestation of analytics in sports, most people who follow these games don't see it the same way - analytics, being new, must therefore include only new ways to justify silly risks; tanking has been embedded in the realm of acceptable tactics for so long that experienced viewers miss the obvious. Tanking has all the hallmarks of good analytical thinking - it improves the chances of eventual success without guaranteeing it, leaving the matter of connecting action to outcome in the hands of execution; the doubters often center their objections around this intermediate step, and question whether the right factors are being considered in the calculation. This was evident in the way NBC's commentators questioned the fourth-down decision, essentially suggesting that the odds of scoring on the play were far worse than indicated by the analytics, but you'll never hear this kind of dispute when a team is tanking; protests usually center themselves around a set of high-minded principles, including "the integrity of the competition" or "the right way to play the game", but they never demand a closer look at the math.

I suspect one reason the math of tanking is accepted by most observers is because the concept could not be simplified further simpler - the earlier you pick, the better chance you have of selecting a superior player, so of course you want to do all you can to pick at the top of the draft. To restate it with the phrasing I used above, tanking is the action that improves potential outcomes in future seasons, with drafting being the execution step that connects the two. This is so easy to understand that I think most people accept the premise without asking further questions; if analytics were taught in K-12 education, tanking would be the introductory concept, covered between naptime and recess. An informal examination of draft results suggests the anecdotal evidence is weak but consistent with the practice - in 2017, the Bears selected Mitchell Trubisky ahead of eventual superstars Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, while in the following season future MVP Lamar Jackson was the fifth quarterback selected. Those examples confirm picking early doesn't guarantee getting the best player, but the teams at the top of the draft indisputably had the best chance - the narrative is not a failure of analytics, but a failure of execution.

However, in the paraphrased spirit of Al Michaels - I'd like to have a look at that math - I suspect the tanking equation is missing an important variable, which I'll label with the broad umbrella term of "culture". In essence, what I'd like the analytics of tanking to consider is the effect tanking has within the organization, and whether its negative cultural effects offset any advantages gained from securing a higher draft position. This was on my mind last Sunday night as I texted some fellow helmet football fans that Doug Pederson should be fired immediately, as in on the field when the clock struck 0:00 - I had thought his decision would have a crippling effect on next year's team, and in my mind a new coach gave them the best chance of returning to winning ways.

This kind of winged postgame reaction tends to soften with time, but I've only become more convinced over the past week. There were a lot of players on the field who were giving it their all based on a belief about competition familiar to anyone who has played sports at a high level - Doug Pederson had publicly ridiculed those beliefs in front of a national audience. Some of these players were on the last day of a contract, risking potentially career-altering injury by playing, but were willing to do so because the desire to win superseded selfish considerations - Doug Pederson made a mockery of their team ethos. These players had also just gone through an extraordinary NFL season defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, taking on risks both to themselves and their families that are inherent to any work environment in this moment, all of it for the sake of entertaining me and you by completing a televised helmet football season - Doug Pederson decided to cash in on their professionalism and treat the game like it was part of the preseason, which the NFL had cancelled this year on the grounds of exhibition games being an unnecessary risk.

I can't imagine what kind of culture a coach thinks he's building when he demonstrates that the sacrifices players make to win games are a secondary concern to the analytics of tanking. I'm sure there is a spreadsheet somewhere that proves the premise of drafting as high as possible - and I bet the math on it is indisputable - but I wonder how much the spreadsheet will matter next season when he needs to convince these players to lay it on the line. What if the situation with COVID-19 remains unchanged and the NFL once again gives players the option to opt-out of the season? I can't imagine last Sunday will make these players more interested in risking their safety. How will the team respond if they are once again knocked out of playoff contention? My hunch is that the locker room will splinter as it always does when a team becomes a collection of individual contractors, with each one pursuing selfish interests ahead of the collective good because of this evidence that the coach isn't going to offer his best effort to win meaningless games. I wonder what's going to happen next season when Jalen Hurts falters at the end of a close game - will the players remember when the coach benched him instead of giving him a chance to earn valuable experience? I don't think a single free agent turned off his TV last Sunday and said to his family - I want to play for that guy, he'll make a mockery of me and my hard work.

There's no way to know about the true effect of these things - and of course I would know even less in this specific case, given that I've never been in an NFL organization in any capacity - but I think these cultural questions will need to be considered next year if the Eagles have another poor season. There is something about winning in the NFL that, just like any other form of success, seems habitual to me - good teams seem to learn how to win over a period of multiple seasons while losing teams seem to return to the top of the draft, over and over, despite the alleged advantage of picking early. Like any habit, the habit of winning is developed by doing it, which means NFL teams should treat each of their sixteen games like a priceless opportunity to reinforce the behavior while building a culture of winning. I don't think I'd see this kind of thinking represented in the tanking math. I think I'd see what so many others suspect when they question analytics - technical precision, but very little nuance as it relates to the specifics of the decision and the people involved in the situation.

This mentality in analytics is the biggest problem I have with the practice, and why I fear it will fall short of its vast potential - no matter what the calculator says, you can't forget that the way people react to a decision is a massive consideration, and you can't make this reality go away by treating people like interchangeable pieces on a gameboard. You can't, in other words, do any meaningful analytics without factoring in the way people will respond to the decision. Until this shortcoming is corrected, the recommendations of analytics will be no more than expressions of yet another biased perspective, based in a fictional world where intangible qualities such as mutual respect, trust, and confidence - in other words, the key elements of a winning culture - have no place among the decision-making criteria.

Footnotes

1) By tanking, I mean a team deliberately losing games to improve its draft position in the following year. For those new to this topic, the major professional sports in America reward the worst teams in the following season with the first pick of new players. There isn't an explicit rule against the practice, but for the most part tanking teams are regarded with derision, ridicule, and scorn as they accumulate losses while their fans wait in an embarrassed purgatory and count the days until the draft. Some like to cite this as an example of "socialism" in American sports, which isn't strictly true - let's just agree that it's definitely not capitalism.

leftovers #2 - moneyball joe flacco (rule changes)

The pass interference penalty in helmet football is one of the saddest facts about the sport, and that's saying something if you know anything about the game. This is allegedly a macho-man sport, defined by the physicality, determination, and toughness of its players, and for the most part these qualities are on display throughout the contest. But if the football is in the air... don't you dare touch anyone... or the wide receiver will throw a temper tantrum on the field (and in the digital age, follow up on social media as well). 

Why not revise the rule so that the passing game is governed by the same rules that apply to linemen? Pushing, shoving, anything except holding - and don't forget this would go both ways, meaning it wouldn't strictly benefit defenders. I'm not here to guarantee it would improve the sport, but I'd like to see it given a trial at some point - there's no need for helmet football to reserve a specific portion of its rulebook to sanction physicality that is common to the basketball court, soccer field, or local tourist trap.

moneyball joe flacco

I've liked sports since I was a little boy but not all aspects of those childhood games remain noticeable in today's contests. This is mostly due to a new way of thinking about sports, often summarized as the Moneyball approach, and the transformation it has led in the strategy of baseball, basketball, and soccer; helmet football will almost certainly follow in the footsteps of these other sports, with an emphasis on data-driven analysis likely to be at the forefront of the movement. This would be consistent with the main emphasis of the Moneyball approach thus far as it has always used data as the first step in a comprehensive overhaul of a given sport's thinking, often in terms of player value - basketball teams began coveting outside shooting to maximize the return on good shot selection whereas the catalyst for baseball's shift was a reinterpretation of on-base percentage. If helmet football is to use Moneyball thinking in broadly the same manner as its predecessors, then I expect a similar process will establish a new hierarchy of metrics which will be used to reassess the value of players and strategies.

The metric that ends up being the most valued in the future will have certain characteristics. It will likely focus on scoring rather than defense, because - as the pioneers of these methods have taught us - it's almost always far easier to measure offensive production. I expect it will be hiding in plain sight today, like on-base percentage did in baseball, because the process of convincing skeptics is always eased when the new idea is simple and intuitive - an extension of an existing worldview. It would also need to be the clear cause for any positive effect, as a new intervention tangled with multiple potential causes is nearly impossible to award with sole credit. The immediate idea that came to mind for football was what I'll call "chunk plays", those that cover at least thirty yards, because these are effectively scoring plays - a team in its own half moves into field goal range while a team in its opponent's half will almost surely score a touchdown. But this is already mostly captured by existing metrics - air yards, yards before contact, even just total yards - so any movement centered around this approach would have to leverage a currently uncredited contributor to "chunk plays". I did some thinking about this until I settled on a possible candidate - the skill of forcing defensive pass interference calls on long passes. This candidate makes some sense to me because the penalty is punished in the most lopsided possible way - it's a spot foul, meaning the ball advances to the point of the infraction. A penalty thirty yards downfield, therefore, means a thirty-yard penalty, which pales in contrast to the fifteen-yard penalty for the sport's other major infractions, including delivering an illegal hit to the head. A player with a known ability to draw these interference calls - generating a "chunk play" each time - could become the poster boy for a new way of thinking about helmet football.

The most amusing side effect of this change would be the hindsight effect on how players from the past and present are assessed by future generations. Take Joe Flacco, for example, a successful quarterback who despite his enormous contract was never quite considered an equal among the other elite players at his position. One of his unusual strengths is drawing pass interference penalties on long passes (and you can dig out some good stuff online where others highlight this skill, particularly ahead of the 2015 AFC Divisional Round against New England). Flacco, it seems, was always among the league leaders in this undervalued metric, but he doesn't seem to have spawned any imitators in the way that Michael Vick did with his rushing skills from the position. Is the future a place where Canton, Ohio is renamed after Moneyball Joe Flacco? Will JaMarcus Russell's career be described as a failure of tactics by the revisionist historians? Could the NFC East degenerate (further) into weekly clashes featuring hours of attempts to recreate Sergio Aguero's incredible touchdown catch against the Bills? If helmet football strategists reevaluate the role of defensive pass interference in generating "chunk plays", it seems possible, if not entirely plausible.

My speculation is not my wish. A helmet football game, already barely watchable when contested among the lower lights of the NFL, would be a weekly tragedy if it descended into a series of long passes heaved back and forth from end zone to end zone - it would look something like mascots firing souvenirs into the crowd with their t-shirt cannons, but without the excitement. My dystopian vision is based on the hypothetical Moneyball endorsement of pass interference creating "chunk plays", where the offense knows the analytics have concluded that the potential of a penalty call more than offsets the risk of a turnover, which on a long pass isn't much different than a punt anyway. The only catch - and it might be the only catch - is that such a shift in the sport would likely see me join the masses who are smart enough to tune in only for the Super Bowl; the teams, having improved their own chances of winning a given game, would have unwittingly conspired to make the game not worth winning at all.

My wish is something different - a sport that emphasizes the strategic possibilities of involving all eleven players on each play. It might mean three quarterbacks are on the field as often as just one, which would represent an evolution on simmering trends being tentatively stirred by teams such as the New Orleans Saints (and their Taysom Hill experiment). If helmet football is going to change, I'd much prefer this direction, as it would retain and perhaps enhance the best quality of the sport - the way discipline, selflessness, and commitment among teammates demonstrates the possibilities when people work together for a shared goal. I admit that I am no prophet, possessing neither the vision nor the conviction to predict the more likely of these futures, but I have a hunch based on how we use numbers today - we'll move forward with what we call the data-driven approach, but ignore that not all things are easily measured; we'll speak of the gains without stopping to think about the incalculable that is always lost in these equations. Those who have endured the stupefying process of replay review at the end of NBA games or the utterly disorienting ceremony preferred by soccer's VAR will understand my trepidation - in the name of progress, we often regress.

The Moneyball approach, in short, is about efficiency, which I use in a very broad sense, like the way a business owner describes how recent initiatives have increased productivity while decreasing cost; teams with a Moneyball approach are finding ways to hire undervalued players, which gives them a higher return for their salary dollars, increasing efficiency. The issue is that I can extend the business analogy, and I feel I am right to do so, because teams becoming more efficient is having an effect on the sporting event in the same way businesses becoming more efficient is having an effect on the local economy - eventually, all the charming neighborhood storefronts, those "hole in the wall" or "mom and pop" shops that subtly defined the essence of a place, are replaced by one familiar brand or another, who despite being called "chains" seem to have a limited capacity for bringing communities together; it's something I think of anytime I lip-synch the cashiers at the grocery store, who of course have little choice but to read from the corporate script if they wish to keep their jobs.

It's unfair in a sense to blame individual companies for doing everything in their power to win but when the effects of widespread self-interest harm the greater good, it should be like a maiden baking voyage being interrupted by the smoke alarm - "A" for effort, but time for plan B. Unfortunately, the response among governing bodies worldwide is like the equivalent of taking out the batteries to disable the warning device, or just willfully ignoring any unwelcome sounds - they will sit dutifully on their hands while the communities they claim to serve go up in smoke. It's not surprising that sports leagues seem to have imitated the world in which they play their games - teams are doing all they can to win while the leaders in their respective leagues do nothing to offset the negative effect on the product. An NBA game these days will see long stretches of ten people jogging disinterestedly back and forth, pausing every few seconds to change direction at the moment one of the players launches the ball at the hoop from twenty-eight feet away - this is, as you know, the most efficient strategy. But is the result worth two and half hours of my time, or all the money it costs to attend a game? And the NBA suggests diehard fans watch their teams do this up to one hundred times a year!

The lasting legacy of "Moneyball" thinking may not be the way teams innovated decades-old baseball strategies or reevaluated the worth of specific basketball skills - it may be that the custodians entrusted with caring for these sports sat passively on the sidelines while their games slowly drifted toward the abyss, first by becoming boring, then irrelevant; the inevitable extinction will be a relief. The great wonder, as noted above, is that I am still somewhat surprised despite understanding that sports is always a mirror of the society where it plays its games. The legacy of competitors weaponizing efficiency to conquer market share is the untold story of the American economy, and American life - it's untold because we all know it, and because we wake each day to write the next chapter; the retelling would be inefficient. There are locals in every community who talk wistfully about going to the butcher, then the florist, who is of course on the way to the grocer, these tasks concluding just in time to meet the arriving milkman at the front door; I complete a day's errands in about five minutes at Whole Foods, and return home to clamber over a fresh obstacle course of delivery boxes in the foyer. The benefit of efficiency advancements is obvious, as I suspect is true to anyone who remembers the good old days of wasting their time and money, but we've lost something in the exchange; we'll continue to overpay for efficiency as long as we insist the only evidence of value is measurement, and that the only ball in the game of life is made of money.