ROI: Cavan gets it right
To this wonderful article written by Jim Cavan:
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But there’s a difference between changing what we know about the game, and what — and how — we think about it. Using advanced analytics can show what we know, but it’s in how they’re used — contextually, strategically, often in the heat of a split second — that can make the difference between winning and losing, between trophies and lotteries.
For as much as modern analytics gives us in the form of fascinating raw data, we’re still very much scratching the surface of how that data translates into wins. Which, after all, is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Perhaps one day we really will find ourselves fully immersed in a brave new sports world of medical, mathematical and scientific analytics, where the human body itself functions more as cog than cognition.
In the meantime, what we’re left with is the image of a splitting atom, without much of an idea of how we get that image to power our homes. Through research presented in forums like Sloan, we’re flush with information — lots of it — but information without a real vehicle, much less a GPS-guided road map to wins and championship. And that’s OK. Because it’s in that lag time — the gap between information and actionable results — that the art, the music, the poetry, indeed the chaos of sports is allowed to breath.
Instead of seeing them as the paint which coaches, front offices and franchises will use to compose the future of sports, we should instead see stats as the strengthening canvas — the increasingly sturdy base without which you wind up with nothing but a mess on the floor — where the game is the paint, and the players are, and remain always, the artists.
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this corner says a simple: “Amen, brother.” 