I bring this up because of your introductory um rant? speech? Just plain introduction? to this podcast. What you said at the onset of this pod here felt like a cousin to Leslie's post.
What I mean is the if one substitutes "opinions" for "stories" one gets what you were talking about today. There's analysis and then there's what we think of the analysis, which is a different animal.
In football, a game, it is really really really hard to find commentary that isn't mainly an opinion, even in the analytics community. That's what I appreciate so much of Unexpected Points-that you try to minimize Opinion and let the numbers speak for themselves.
Your Schatz example to me perfectly illustrates this. I love DVOA and if the Bills are ranked 4th this week and with you they are #1, that says to me that they are one of the best teams in the league and the various useful analyses out there agree with that. Cool. The Bills aren't perfect and some analysis sheds a different spotlight that illuminates that imperfection, but every team is imperfect. But some are better than others. I guess going for perfection at the expence of just being accurate can trip a person up as they create a story.
There's a really good substack called The Ruffian by Ian Leslie who last month wrote a post called, "Stories are bad for your intelligence". https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/stories-are-bad-for-your-intelligence
I bring this up because of your introductory um rant? speech? Just plain introduction? to this podcast. What you said at the onset of this pod here felt like a cousin to Leslie's post.
What I mean is the if one substitutes "opinions" for "stories" one gets what you were talking about today. There's analysis and then there's what we think of the analysis, which is a different animal.
In football, a game, it is really really really hard to find commentary that isn't mainly an opinion, even in the analytics community. That's what I appreciate so much of Unexpected Points-that you try to minimize Opinion and let the numbers speak for themselves.
Your Schatz example to me perfectly illustrates this. I love DVOA and if the Bills are ranked 4th this week and with you they are #1, that says to me that they are one of the best teams in the league and the various useful analyses out there agree with that. Cool. The Bills aren't perfect and some analysis sheds a different spotlight that illuminates that imperfection, but every team is imperfect. But some are better than others. I guess going for perfection at the expence of just being accurate can trip a person up as they create a story.