Doctor, Doctor Give Me The News

            From the perspective of Washington Redskins fans, coaches, and players, today marked the end of the most difficult stretch of an otherwise largely positive 2012-13 season. This year’s team winning its first NFC East Division Title since the 1999-00 season has been marred by the torn lateral cruciate ligament (LCL) and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) suffered by Robert Griffin III in last Sunday’s playoff game versus the Seattle Seahawks. The team’s star quarterback had strained his LCL after a devastating hit during a game against the Baltimore Ravens in early December. After missing a game against the Cleveland Browns, Griffin started and helped the team win its final two regular season contests. Yet, it was clear Griffin’s knee prevented him from dynamic, athletic playmaker that made him a candidate for both the NFL’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) and Rookie of the Year awards.

            Only three days after collapsing on the ground at Fedex Field, Griffin had surgery to repair his LCL and ACL. Yet, the blame game for who was at fault for the injury started much more quickly. Many media members and fans criticized coach Mike Shanahan for keeping Griffin in the playoff game and not playing backup quarterback Kirk Cousins, who led the Redskins to a convincing victory against the Browns in his only career start. Some wonder why Griffin either did not revealing the extent of his injuries to the coaching staff or failing to remove himself from the game when knew he was injured.

              And others blame Dr. James Andrews. Arguably the most famous and revered sports orthopedic surgeon in the world, Andrews has been standing on the team’s sideline as the team’s medical consultant during for regular season games since before Griffin first injured his knee. Recent reports have surfaced, however, that Andrews had not orally communicated with Shanahan about Griffin’s knee injury during the Ravens game (instead giving him a “Hi” wave to indicate Griffin was OK). The day before the Seahawks game, Andrews was quoted as saying he had been a “nervous wreck” watching Griffin play since he first injured his knee. Many have wondered why Andrews had not been more forceful in recommending that Griffin not play if he thought there was a good chance the quarterback could re-injure his knee.

            From a Block Six Analytics perspective, determining whom to blame for Griffin’s injury is not the goal of the post. Instead, we hope that Griffin’s injury does not also lead to a potentially bigger loss in player development and on-the field performance management. The Redskins actually did take an innovative step in hiring Dr. Andrews as a medical consultant. Despite paying athletes millions of dollars to compete for their team, many sports organizations do not invest nearly as much in having best medical personnel to take care of its players. For the same amount of money as the average salary professional athlete makes in the NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL, sports organizations could hire the top medical specialist in virtually any field. Having players return to the field more quickly by having the best medical care possible would seem to provide a distinct competitive advantage as compared to compensating an average player.

            This logic does not simply apply to the medical space. As B6A has discussed before, on and off the field analytics has become one of the hottest topics in the sports industry. Yet, it is still uncommon for sports organizations to hire leading economists, data miners, or statisticians to evaluate performance data. Again, sports organizations can hire these professionals at a fraction of the cost of signing a star or average player. As Bill James, the statistician largely credited with coming up with the performance metrics highlighted in Moneyball, stated, “You can get 100 guys like me for what you were paying Manny Ramirez.”  

            Even taking the best approach, however, does not guarantee the best outcome. As Nate Silver recently stated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything Forum, “If you watch a poker hand, and a guy gets all-in before the flop with aces against kings (an 80/20 bet), our animal instinct is very much to tag him as a LOSER if a king comes up on the flop, even though he probably played his hand perfectly.” The Redskins actually did employ Dr. Andrews (using Silvers parlance, the team played pocket aces correctly) and Griffin still suffered a major knee injury. It is critical to not let what happened with the Griffin to negate the fact that the Redskins made the right strategic decision to hire Dr. Andrews. Sports organizations that employ similar logic will have the best opportunity to win their next bet. 

Crowdsourcing Decision Making In Sports

            Most people consider the Constitution of the United States as one of the foundations of modern democracy. Yet, a document starting with “We the People…” was not actually created by a wide number or variety of people. In fact, one of the most common critiques of the Constitution is that it was drafted, debated and voted on by a relatively small number of rich white males. It would seem impossible for the Constitution to be written by such a small and non-diverse group of people it were created today.

In fact, Iceland has taken an entirely different approach with its new consitution. Iceland decided to rewrite its constitution after catastrophic results to its banking and political system during the 2008 financial and economic crisis. Rather than having a Constitutional Council write a document on solely on its own, Iceland decided to take “to the Internet to raise ideas and provisions from the public. A first draft was made available online in April 2011 and citizens could comment through a Facebook page. The council also remained open about decision-making posting status updates to Twitter and videos on YouTube.” In essence, Iceland decided to crowdsource its constitution by allowing citizens to provide feedback and comments to the document. Not only did the council obtain some good ideas for revisions to the Constitution but it also allowed the citizens to “buy-in” into the document. Half of Iceland’s citizens participated in the process and two-thirds agreed that using a “crowdsourced document as the frame for the new constitution” was a good idea.

            This is maybe an interesting case study in direct democracy, but how does it apply to sports? There are two main applications of crowdsourcing to the sports industry. Sports organizations often operate as top-down organizations. This means that senior managers make decisions often with limited input for more junior employees. Using crowdsourcing techniques like collective decision markets allows employees to propose and vote on initiatives that sports organization can pursue during the course of a season or fiscal year. Because employees have buy-in (they proposed the ideas) then they are more likely to support these initiatives and have higher job satisfaction.

            Crowdsourcing and collective decision making does not have to stop for strategic initiatives typically found on the business side of a sports organization. The ultimate application of crowdsourcing concepts in sports would be to allow an organization’s different audiences (such as fans, media, sponsors, and employees) to vote on certain types of front office, coaching, and player personnel decisions. In particular, crowdsourcing can be used as component for decisions that come with predictions of future performance (such as draft picks or free agent signings).

This may seem like a completely farfetched idea. Why would any team allow people with varying degrees of expertise in sports to have input on these types of decisions? One only has to listen to a local radio sports show or read some Tweets or Facebook posts to see how bizarre some recommendations may be. In addition, organizations pay millions of dollars to general managers, coaches, scouts, and recruiters to identify and evaluate the best talent for their teams.

Yet, books like The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't by Nate Silver highlight scientific studies that show how using the average predictions of groups of people making independent forecasts are better predictors future performance than those of individual experts in areas ranging from economics to guessing the weight of an ox. Both Surowiecki and Silver identify two main causes of error in experts’ predictions. The first is that experts are overconfident in their predicative abilities and often overfit their models to a particular data set or not account for how new information can impact their predictions. Second, experts in fields often follow localized “herd” mentality. Rather than making independent predictions, managers will follow other managers’ behavior because it is harder to be blamed or lose your job if you are following industry standards. The book and movie Moneyball showed how difficult it was for Billy Beane to think differently. He used certain types of quantitative analyses to evaluate players that clearly would improve the Oakland A’s chances of winning games but was originally considered a pariah in Major League Baseball because no else was employing these techniques.

            This does not mean the scouting and background knowledge are not critical to the evaluation process. Silver points out that Beane has actually spent more money on scouting since Moneyball was published. It is absolutely critical to obtain as much information as possible to make informed decisions. Yet, the evidence supports that a sports organization could be better served to follow a process similar to what the Icelandic government did with its constitution. It could provide its fans, media, sponsors, and employees with opportunities to evaluate players using its information generated by the organization and allow people to vote on whom the organization should select, sign, or draft. Using this approach could allow sports organizations to avoid the two most common errors that can cause inaccurate forecasting.

            How a team uses this crowdsourcing information would have to be determined by the individual sports organization (i.e. a team would not have to sign a player because the collective decision market says this is what is should do). Yet, it would be difficult to argue that an organization’s core audiences would not be more invested in a team if it had some real or perceived ability to influence a team’s decision making process. By having this buy-in, it would make it more likely that these audience members would buy more products and service offerings like tickets, merchandise, and sponsorship because they are a part of the process. If crowdsourcing could work for something as important as writing a constitution then it could be successful for something only a little less important – deciding which general manager, coaches, and players one’s favorite team signs or hires.