Lately, I’ve been consciously reminding myself that it’s 2022.

Stay with me.

When I look back at, say, the research I did on my dissertation, I have to actively remind myself that that is nearly 10 years old now. The digital and social media that were still so new back then are now just a part of the world.

The point is that a lot of the things I instinctively think of as new or developing are, in fact, old and established.

One of those is the analytics movement in sports.

Moneyball, the book that brought a lot of these ideas to a mainstream audience, andFootball Outsiders, the website that developed a lot of the advanced metrics for the NFL like DVOA, both turn 20 years old next year.

I mention this because one of the weirdest but also interesting stories this NFL season has been media critiques of coaches using analytics to make in-game decisions. Kick or go for it? Take the points or go for more? Go for two?

Part of this is The Take Division of the Sports-Media Industrial Complex, in which media are incentivized to express strong opinions on anything and everything. You will never convince me that that many people feel that strongly about a Chargers-Browns game in Week 5.

Part of it is a continued misunderstanding of the term “analytics” which has become a catch-all term for using any stat that wasn’t on the back of a trading card in 1987. Check out this excellent podcast between Pablo Torre and Bill Barnwell about defining the term and how this information is used. (A really fun fact from that podcast is that the Surface tablets that players and coaches use on the sidelines do not have internet access. Which means we at home have access to more information than the coaches and players do.)

But part of it is captured by this newsletters favorite Get-Off-My-Lawn Media Member:

The 2-point conversion obsession in today’s NFL will be largely justified by analytics nerds and ex-players when the truth is these are largely moronic decisions that don’t involve any astute anticipation and leave teams desperately chasing points!
— Michael Wilbon (@RealMikeWilbon) October 30, 2022

Joe Posnanski got me thinking about this topic the other day.

I realize now that the real argument I have with people about the intentional walk is the argument itself.
They want to argue STRATEGY. And I want to argue ESSENCE. Sure, I think a huge percentage of the time the intentional walk is a terrible strategy, but I don’t care about that. What I care about is that the intentional walk is a fundamentally corrupting force in the game. It takes an exciting situation and makes it boring. It takes away key at-bats from the best and most thrilling players in the game. It robs us of joy.
And yet, people constantly defend it, constantly make spurious comparisons to annoying strategies in other sports, and I’ve lost my mind over this countless times, but Derek has opened my eyes to what the real disagreement is here.
The real disagreement is that they think baseball is about winning and losing.
And I don’t. I think baseball is about entertaining millions of people.

King Kaufman made this point on Twitter the other night:

It's interesting that "analytics" has made baseball less entertaining — I'm both a baseball guy and an analytics guy but that's an objective fact — but has made football and especially basketball so much more entertaining.
— King Kaufman (@king_kaufman) November 3, 2022

Seriously. What’s better than a team going for it on fourth down? Especially a kinda crazy fourth down early in the game? What’s more fun than a two-point conversion? Going for a touchdown on fourth and goal is fun. Kicking a 22-yard field goal is boring.

Nobody wants to see a game of punts.

I think Mina Kimes made this point, but in essence, in football analytics rewards aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is fun to watch. We don’t want a throwback to the 1970s football (seriously, the halftime score of Super Bowl IX was 2-0. Halftime. OF THE SUPER BOWL).

So why do the Wilbons of the media world react so viscerally to it?

Here’s my guess: It’s because the actions drive by analytics goes against how sports are supposed to look. When you have fourth down, you punt. When you have a short field goal, you take the points. Shortstop and second basemen play at certain spots on the field. Football is on at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Sundays. Sports, in many ways, brings us comfort because of its connection to memories and because of its consistency.

So next time you hear someone decry “analytics,” in football after the Ravens go for a touchdown instead of a short field goal (or whatever), imagine they’re really saying “Sports used to look a certain way, and now it looks different, and I don’t like the change because it takes me out of the comfort zone that sports provides me.”

Remember. It’s 2022. Things have changed. That’s not always a bad thing.