If you're like I am, and 31/32 (approximately) of NFL fans, you know that you could have drafted, managed, coached, and ultimately led your team to a Super Bowl victory last season. Being from Cleveland, I nod my head in defeat at the draft announcements every year from the Browns. I watch with baited breath as the Browns (or insert your terrible team here) trade farther down the draft board amassing picks no doubt in a game of diabolical chess ready to spring the move that leads to their unstoppable checkmate!
The commissioner then steps up to the draft podium and announces:
"And with the Xth pick in the draft, the Browns select "Somerandomcornerback Guy!"
Mel Kiper chimes in "Wow, a little strange here from the team. I had Somerandomcornerback Guy going in the 57th round of the Vietnamese Pop Warner Triple-A Draft, but maybe the Browns see something in this guy that I don't!"
And that's the first disconnect: you assume these guys, because of their positions of authority, have any idea what they're doing. "Surely, these experts have carefully charted every quantifiable skill of every player and set them in a hierarchy with assigned values to mathematically help them select the best player!" You think. Yeah... right.
I want you to imagine your high school (which is admittedly a small sample size) as a cross-section of the candidate pool for all the jobs in the world. One guy has to be the high-ranking politician, a few have to be doctors, and somewhere in there somebody has to be the general manager of an NFL team. Now, if you're like I am, you wouldn't trust any one of these people (other than maybe the Valedictorian and a couple others) with the task of assembling a 5-step Ikea product. And these people in the position of your team's managerial authority are no different. They didn't gain some arcane knowledge or genius just by being put into the position of BOSS of the team. They're still going to carry the same illogical biases with them into the job unless they learned somehow to conceptually avoid them earlier.
But not all people are just "dumb." So let's consider another scenario in the prestigious ultra-security level clearance draft rooms:
A few years ago, we witnessed a common draft trend that became particularly applicable to the Cleveland Browns. A high profile player, who achieved his fame due to some success (and some notable narcissistic and substance-abusive tendencies), Johnny Manziel, continued to fall down the draft board. No doubt, teams saw his skill-set, performance, and personal issues and determined that his pedigree was not a good fit for the NFL. There was one thing that he was definitely going to be a good fit for: drawing media attention, and media and popularity means $$$$$. Undoubtedly, at some point, a decision came down from someone with monetary interest in the team to scoop him up and let the circus begin!
The second disconnect here: All the fans want to win games. There isn't much ambiguity there. Watching your team win is enjoyable and directly correlates to a fan's interest. HOWEVER, the ownership/management of a team's main goal is PROFIT. It so happens that by winning, the team can draw in more fans thus the interests of the ownership and the fans appear to conflate.
But what if the team's ownership knows that it cannot achieve any marked measure of success? The next best option would be to attain viewership and to monetize the team by the appearance of celebrity or general human interest.
So, just remember that when you watch your team draft "Bignameschoolflashy Man," and you start to scratch you head, that your team's management may not have your best interests at heart.
Want to know how to approach sports (including the NFL) from an analytics and data-driven perspective? Ed Feng, PhD, founder of http://thepowerrank.com/ will be appearing tomorrow on THE DISCONNECT PODCAST (available for download on iTunes) and also on my site at https://www.thedisconnectblog.com/podcasts/
Listen to the podcast HERE https://www.thedisconnectblog.com/podcasts/2017/4/26/ep-3-why-your-sports-team-stinks-and-theyre-not-getting-any-better-with-guest-ed-feng