By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette
Asking sport fans how they feel about analytics usually results in one of two responses. The first answer is that sports are meant to be played on the field, not on the calculator. The second is that analytics have always been in sports, but we simply know how to use them better now.
I land somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I prefer when we get to see the deeper side of why something worked or didn’t work. Other times, I just want the game to go on, untouched. But what I truly like seeing is when people smarter than I am dissect the games they love.
I have two examples from this week that I found interesting. My favorite morning newsletter is Y! Sports AM, a daily roundup of all things sports from around the world. In addition to scores and highlights, they drop in Yahoo Sports articles. This week, writer Kendall Baker added the piece “A dying art,” which is about how the one-handed backhand in tennis is dying.
I’m not much of a tennis fan, if at all. Even so, the athletes are much more athletic than the world gives them credit for. See my point here between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz. But, as I stated, I love it when fans break down the game in ways I never could have thought of. Did you know that, from 1970-90, players with one-handed backhands won more than 60% of Grand Slams? I sure didn’t. These days, only five men ranked inside the top 100 use the swing. I would have never noticed that, but I’m glad someone did.
A realm I’m much more familiar with had its own new development. The NFL is increasingly experimenting with international games, and Commissioner Roger Goodell has stated publicly, multiple times, that he expects to see an international-based team join the NFL in his lifetime. With this influx of international travel, NFL teams have a new challenge to figure out.
The San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams played in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday. The teams took differing approaches in handling the time change and long travel. The 49ers flew into the land down under on Sept. 2, a full week before the game. They wanted to give their players as much time as possible to recharge after the travel and 17-hour time difference.
The Rams left the day before. The team’s theory — one they tested last season when playing in London — is that if they leave as close to before the game as possible, and leave right after the game is over, there would be no need for their body clocks to adjust. Last year, the Rams destroyed the Jags, but they Jags weren’t very good anyway. So, who’s to say it made that much of a difference?
Well, the 49ers won this year’s game, 27-7. This result flew in the face of what neurologist and sleep specialist W. Christopher Winter predicted, which was the basis for the column. The theory is that because athletes reach their physical peak typically in the late afternoon and early evening, the Rams players’ bodies would still feel like it’s 5:30 p.m. The 49ers, who let their bodies adjust, would be playing a time earlier than their peaks.
He was wrong, analytics and sleep studies be damned.
That is why I land somewhere in the middle on analytics. I want the numbers. I want the sleep studies, the percentages, the trends and the people who are much smarter than I am explaining why something should happen. But I also want to see what happens when the numbers are wrong.
That’s the beauty of sports. Analytics can tell us what is most likely to happen. They can tell us what has happened thousands of times before. They can even tell us what should happen next. But they cannot tell us what will happen. And sometimes, thankfully, a tennis player hits a shot that nobody saw coming, a football team ignores the science and wins anyway, and all the spreadsheets in the world are left staring at the final score. That is when sports stops being a science and reminds us why we love it.
Reach out with comments, suggestions, story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.