ANALYTICS TWITTER: Won every battle, but was the war a pyrrhic victory?
To name something is to damn it. The problem with "Analytics Twitter" is it arguably exists, whereas the superpower of "Anti-Analytics Twitter" is that it arguably doesn't exist. It gets to fight guerilla warfare whereas analytics is stuck in rank-and-file. Some random person posts a chart they cooked up with public NFL data and a coding exercise, posts an inflammatory comment to draw attention, and anti-analytics people are quick to characterize this person as "analytics twitter" or "spreadsheets FC" to make a point about the growing use of analytics in the sport and something they are being left out of. The criticisms are generally fair: the sport is played on grass, there is a psychological element, the models are imprecise, there are other factors, the film reveals other truths. The latter is interesting, because when someone posts a highlight clip, identifies something they don't understand, makes an erroneous judgement, nobody is th...