Against Analytics: The NFL's Popularity and Anti-Intellectualism

by Chris Alarie

That football is the most popular sport in America and that the NFL is the most popular professional sports league are indisputable facts. This is a frequent source of consternation for me because, while I am certainly a football fan, I find it to be a vastly inferior sport to both baseball and basketball and believe that the NFL is one of the most onerous institutions in all of sports. Of course, the reason for football's dominance are myriad—from the primal appeal of the sport's violence to the relatively short season and once weekly games to the sport's particularly good fit for gambling and fantasy leagues—but there is one key factor that seems to have been overlooked: football's comparatively lesser engagement with advanced statistics.

Both baseball and basketball have been embroiled for years—or decades, in the case of baseball—in debates about the merits and value of advanced statistical methods of quantifying and evaluating the performance of players and teams. These debates often divide along generational lines, with younger writers, fans, and executives generally tending to lend greater credence to these advanced statistics than their older peers. And rather than offer a defense of one approach or the other,¹ I'd just point out that these debates are essential parts of the fabric of both MLB and the NBA. Football, however, has mostly managed to avoid this debate and, really, the encroachment of advanced statistics almost entirely.

Indeed, when ESPN tried four years ago to introduce an advanced football statistic titled QBR, it was roundly ignored and routinely mocked. It exists now primarily as a means for other sports media organizations to criticize the "Worldwide Leader". But beyond reflecting somewhat poorly on Disney's otherwise impenetrable sports behemoth, the failure of QBR further serves to demonstrate football's immunity to having advanced stats as a part of the general discourse surrounding the sport. QBR's flawed analysis and laughable conclusions is a larger part of the NFL media and fan landscape than far better and far more useful advanced statistics such as Football Outsiders' DVOA. Often times the debate surrounding advanced stats is reduced to "numbers" vs. "the eye test"; in football, "the eye test" reigns supreme.

The question implicit in this is: why doesn't the majority of football fans care about advanced statistics? While I wouldn't claim to fully explain it, I can hazard a few guesses. Partly it is because football is so much less about individual achievements than baseball and basketball and much of advanced statistics focuses on the performance of individual players. But even still, there are advanced stats (such as the aforementioned DVOA) that focus on team performance and have not gained much traction among the mass of football fans. Perhaps it is a result, in part, from football's militaristic symbolism² and borderline fascistic obsession with the strength, unity, and secrecy of individual franchises and the league as a whole. The NFL is well known for its paranoid credo, "Protect the Shield". And, as Tim Kawakami frequently observes, NFL fans, more than fans of any other sport, have an extreme loyalty to their franchises and owners over players or even coaches. And the paranoia³ and gamesmanship of NFL coaches is legendary. So perhaps advanced stats, which ostensibly peel back the curtain of of the sport and offer a deeper understanding of why teams and players succeed or fail, are, to NFL fans, the proprietary realm of the overlords running the teams and not the business of us plebes in the general sporting public. Another possible explanation is that the dominance of fantasy football—which traffics almost entirely in traditional stats as opposed to advanced stats—has kept all but the most dedicated fans uninterested in these more complicated statistical analyses. Whatever the reasons, it is clear that advanced stats do not have the same place in football discourse as they do in the realms of baseball and basketball. And that lack of advanced stats is part and parcel of the NFL's perhaps confusing dominance in this country.

This is perhaps an oversimplification, but I suspect that the disparity between the NFL and MLB/NBA reflects, in some ways, differences within the culture as a whole. Advanced statistics, and the sports that more directly incorporate them, seem more likely to appeal to intellectual, coastal elites. By contrast, the NFL, with its rejection of advanced stats in favor of more primal, simplified, and traditional notions of sports, seems more likely to appeal to the mass of red state denizens who feel like the coastal elites and the media ignore their concerns and interests. As I said, this is probably not entirely accurate—among other problems, plenty of us coastal intellectuals still watch football. But it seems, at very least, to be of symbolic importance that probably the biggest football fan among American presidents was Richard "Silent Majority" Nixon while Barack Obama is famously obsessed with basketball. And it is worth noting that the same analytically inclined media that dominates baseball and basketball has been unable to predict or even understand the continued successes of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

In this somewhat convoluted metaphor, the baseball and basketball focused, pro-analytics crowd is the coastal, media-saturated segment of the population arguing in increasingly minute, esoteric detail about the various discrepancies between Hillary Clinton's complicated financial regulation plans and Bernie Sanders's promise to "break up the banks!"⁴ The more conservative, anti-advanced stats faction of the baseball and basketball world is analogous to the conservative intellectuals futilely decrying Donald Trump's conservative bona fides in the pages of The New Republic. In the meantime, the remaining hordes are actively defying both sides of these debates by watching football and pledging their intention to vote for Donald Trump. This is not to say that all football fans are Trump supporters or vice versa, but there is clearly a similar dynamic playing out in the realms of sports and politics.

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1 Of course, like any good liberal, I almost neurotically try to split the difference between the two camps in my personal feelings toward the subject.^↩
2 George Carlin's famous routine about the difference between baseball and football remains as true as ever.^↩
3 There's that word again.^↩
4 Clearly, I fall into these camps.^↩

Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.