“You can have the cure for cancer sitting on your porch, and if you don’t open the box it really doesn’t make any difference… [Even though] everyone has this data, doesn’t mean everyone is going to use it.”
That was retired NFL player Sean Jones at one of the many panels during the two day MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference held in Boston last weekend. This general resistance towards data analytics has slowed the NFL’s growth relative to other professional sports leagues and feels very much reminiscent of the nascent days of sabermetrics in MLB.
The NBA never seemed to have that initial pushback, likely because of the success attained by the more data-driven franchises (the Spurs being one of the pioneers).