Written by Big-time data analytics has arrived in college football. FCS Division school Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina has hired Kevin Kelley to coach the Blue Hose next year in the Pioneer League. Kelley has been a successful high school coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. For the last 20 years, he became famous for studying statistics and playing the percentages rather than following conventional thinking.
Kelley’s teams never punt. They blitz a lot. They run plays where they toss the ball around, emulating a rugby team. They have several different types of onside kicks that they always use when the difference in the score is within 21 points. Why do they do this? Because it works. Kelley knows from his studies that you will win if you have more possessions and complete more 20-yard plays.
Using analytics in sports is not new. The “Moneyball” teams the Oakland A’s put together at the beginning of this century ushered in an era that has continually evolved since. However, football has been slow to embrace this trend. Football values strength and toughness much more than math. So they dabble in analytics a bit, with charts that tell them when to go for two points based on which quarter you are in and how far you are behind. Kelley will test the limits of what is possible.
Kelley dabbled with analytics early in his career at Pulaski, with some success. Then, in 2007, he decided to go all-in and after losing a championship game by watching a team take a drive for the winning score after they had punted with the lead late in the game. Then he doubled down after attending a conference at MIT with famous sports nerds Darryl Morey, Bill James, and Nate Silver in 2014. Four consecutive state championships followed. He calls these “tipping points,” based on what he learned reading Malcom Gladwell’s book with the same title, which describes how minor changes can make significant differences.
I’ve been down this wormhole myself. You start by reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, The Signal and the Noise by Silver, and Gladwell books like Outliers. They all point you to Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for the research that he and his close friend Amos Taversky completed over their career on how people make decisions. The conclusion being we make them poorly due to our biases.
Once you get to the bottom of this wormhole, you read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb was a stock trader who learned how to take advantage of other people’s poor decisions and their belief that rare events never occur. He mentored under mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and learned how to identify areas where “fat tails” existed, areas where opportunities for exponential gains exist from extreme events. Then you place bets on all of them and hope that one hits, scoring you a “home run.” The Black Swan came out right before the financial crisis of 2008, making Taleb famous for predicting its occurrence. It suggested you identify potential unexpected events (so-called “Black Swans”) and what companies would benefit from them. Then, buy those stocks and patiently wait for one of your bets to pay off.
You have to commit fully to your pursuit of a fat tail for the math to work. This logic explains why Kelley never punts, James Harden doesn’t shoot mid-range jumpers, and all teams shift all their infielders to the right side of the infield when a left-handed pull hitter comes up.
When it doesn’t work, you look foolish. Just ask Nate Silver about the 2016 election or the Astros this week when they let a runner score from first base on what almost was a double-play ball. Nobody was able to cover third base or home.
Another flaw is that once it starts working, everyone does it and your fat tail turns into a skinny one. The A’s saw this happen to them. First, they had a brief period of advantage. Then, when other teams caught on, the big teams ended up on top again because they had the resources to pay the players with the best launch angle and exit velocity and the best nerds to crunch the numbers.
The world of finance has been all-in for some time on this approach, with a lot of success. Initially, you saw the private equity craze of the 2010s. Now you see the mad rush for cryptocurrencies. You see the successful pioneers strike it rich at the beginning of the craze, and then the big boys like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs take over once it becomes mainstream. They sit around like dealers at the blackjack table, waiting to take advantage of players once they have one drink too many and become too overconfident.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Kelley and the Blue Hose. Due to the tough-guy bias in football, you didn’t see a rush of high school teams to follow suit after his success in Arkansas. Will he be able to replicate it in small-time college football? If so, will he get an opportunity to try this in big-time college football? Or will Alabama beat him to the punch and recruit all of the best onside kickers and rugby-style wide receivers?