Making Noises At Jim Nantz, With Aaron Schatz
It’s a tough situation for Drew. While he has dialed up his football fandom to super-sicko levels (complimentary) in recent years, my interest in the sport has remained stubbornly around average. When we discussed having an NFL Draft-focused episode of The Distraction, we were politely avoiding talking about the fact that I can’t go nearly as deep on the subject of sleeper mid-round edge rusher values. Thankfully, we hit upon a compromise that worked for all of us: having the legendary Aaron Schatz, now of the sports analytics site FTN and the founder of Football Outsiders, as a guest, then spending half the episode talking about how awful online media is. Something for everyone!
Aaron had a lot to say about his (highly negative) experience with the venture capitalists who bought and ultimately killed Football Outsiders, which Mike Tanier wrote about for us a couple years ago, and which finally wound down once those owners just straight-up stopped paying anyone. That URL, which once contained nearly decades of football analysis, from writers who became stars in their field and also in pro teams’ front offices, is now a dead link.
We talked about the uneasy present and uncertain future of public-facing sports analytics in the context of Pro Football Focus, which Drew wrote about this week, and in the broader, more concerning context of the vanishing early internet. I was kind of “on one” here, admittedly. Whether it’s hip-hop media or sports analytics, I feel that this sort of endemic rot weakens the foundations supporting the conversations we have today, and that an ecosystem in which people can learn and demonstrate their skills is important not just to that conversation, but to our industry. We also talked about the role that gambling plays in Aaron’s sort of analytics work; the fine but real distinction between fantasy and gambling intelligence, and how their audiences do and don’t consume that kind of writing; and the time my car died in Worcester, Mass.
Then it was time for NFL chat. For the most part, this was about how teams value picks, including ones in a draft as lousy as this one is widely seen to be, and the big-ticket veterans who have been traded and will be traded for those picks. We also talked about teams’ offseasons, best practices in tanking, the New York Jets’ heroic push to get to 7-10, and One Weird Trick for evaluating college quarterbacks. There was some talk of specific prospects—for someone who proclaimed himself not to be “a draft guy,” Aaron knows a lot about the players in this draft—but more about how teams and analytics writers understand and contextualize the value of different positions, why running back has fallen so dramatically in that estimation, and the challenges of building a prediction system of the kind that FTN has.
The Funbag question was one which we were all qualified to weigh in on. Our listener asked whether the general league-wide adherence to analytically driven practices has made baseball commentary less interesting, by removing so many old variables from the conversation. Aaron made the point that football analytics have made football more fun by arguing for fun stuff, whereas baseball analytics have optimized the product into sterility, and I talked about the queasy realization that what fans want from analytics is necessarily going to be different than what a team will do with it. We did finally address the broadcaster question, too, in a way that led to the episode ending in a hail of Excited Tony Romo noises. Finally, my kind of NFL discourse.
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