I recently rewatched the movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt. This got me on to reading the non-fiction book that inspired the movie. The Oakland ‘A’s were losing to baseball teams with much bigger budgets and the ‘A’s couldn’t compete in that way. I’m fascinated by this story of an organization that used their brains to find a way to build a winning team despite their budget disadvantage. Their approach reshaped management strategy throughout the league, including here at home in Toronto.
It made sense to me that you could apply that to baseball since there are many discrete stats for each player. And each at bat is a sort of 1-on-1 for the hitter making it a very individual sport despite there being a team. But I couldn’t figure out how to apply the same approach to other sports where the combination of players, on both teams, has a huge impact. Michael Jordan was an undeniably dominant basketball player but he still needed his supporting cast to win. Similarly, Tom Brady was an amazing quarterback but he needed receivers, offensive linemen and all the rest to win multiple Superbowls.
I didn’t think you could take the Moneyball approach and apply it to any other team sport. Then I read the book Sprawlball which takes the numbers from basketball and explains how the game has evolved and how an understanding of the analytics has led to championship-winning strategy.
In Moneyball, the manager focused on one particular statistic – how frequently a player got on base (see my favourite scene from the movie below). Of course, that’s not a statistic in basketball. The author of Sprawlball charted where players were shooting from and the value of their attempts. Using this historical data he developed some compelling insights about the current state and the future of basketball.
The analysis must be tailored to the sport. You need to be looking at the right numbers and asking the right questions. We live in the age of big data and our lives are increasingly shaped by it but most of us don’t have a way to take advantage of that ourselves. Or do we? If you have a website then you have usage data typically in the form of Google Analytics. Your site is collecting all kinds of data about when your site is being visited, which pages are most popular, and even where people are visiting from.
Just like with Moneyball and Sprawlball, reviewing that data can suggest new strategies and directions for your business.
There are obvious indicators, like nobody visiting a page even though the rest of the site gets tons of traffic. But the real power lies in the non-obvious. And that requires asking some questions and then looking for the numbers to answer those specific questions for your organization. Want to understand the analytics of your site? Want insight into your site? Let’s talk!
Photo credit: Sony Pictures