Narratives versus Updates: The Importance of Changing Your Mind
The secret sauce of analytics: an emphasis on methods of getting it right
Changing your mind is hard, but so is talent evaluation. In fact, talent evaluation is so difficult, that only the #1 pick—the very best player from each class—has a greater than 50% chance of being a 5-year starter in the NFL.
Every other draft position has a less than 50% chance of being a 5-year starter.
And that’s because this problem is hard. It’s not obvious that the data that we have about college players is any good. All the best players play on Super Teams and spend most of their time competing against inferior talent. The players are also young, and their bodies develop significantly between 21 and 27 when they reach their physical prime.
To account for all this, we need to focus on analytics special power: changing our minds.
Narratives versus Updates
The media, and many fans, live in a world of narratives. So once a narrative is created, it exists and can be drawn upon to explain the current situation. For example, when Lamar Jackson won his first MVP, he got a narrative: Jackson is Really, Really Good.
This year, even though he wasn’t playing nearly at the level we expect from an MVP—there were at least two players on San Francisco more deserving of the MVP than Jackson, to say nothing of the other candidates such as Dak Prescott or Josh Allen—Jackson won the MVP because he had a highly accessible narrative: this player is really, really good.
In the playoffs, we saw the return of another narrative: Never Count Mahomes Out. Vegas saw the Chiefs flaws, but the public and the media didn’t. And when Mahomes and the Chiefs narrowly won a narrow victory propelled by surges of luck, the media fell back to that narrative and proclaimed the win an inevitability.
Elo Rating: Original Updates
By contrast, analytics has always looked to change our beliefs—not to bring up old beliefs.
The Elo Rating is perhaps the oldest true instance of analytics. And it is first and foremost a formula for updating what we believe to be the relative quality of two players or teams. After each game, we nudge our opinions by the appropriate amount, and we become more certain as a result.
Sports media may look like it’s doing this, but what it’s really doing is creating new narratives. For example, LeBron James has the He’s the King narrative and the He Can’t Do This Forever narrative. No matter what happens, the media will use those narratives to explain the outcome of a Lakers game or season.
In contrast, using analytics, we’d rather say something like: LeBron James is not a top 10 player anymore, but he is probably still a top 20 player. Unfortunately, we expect most championships (+90%) to go to the truly elite players in the league.
Right now, we think there are six of those players: Jokic, SGA, Luka, Tatum, Embiid, and Giannis.
If we are wrong, we have to update. Maybe LeBron was better than we thought and we need to update your methods. Maybe lesser-skilled players bring home titles more often than we thought and we need to update our data.
Either way, we are admitting there’s a missing component of our explanation.
The Curious Case of Justin Fields
Which brings us to the curious case of Justin Fields. Fields is a bad quarterback. He has proven that over three years as a starter in Chicago. He can run, but he can’t really pass. And he cannot run at the level that is necessary to be a successful run-first quarterback like Lamar Jackson.
Over the same stretch of their careers, Jackson—who I do not view as a great option at quarterback—threw for twice as many touchdowns as fields, ran for 1,000 more yards, passed for 2,000 more yards, and averaged a 5% higher completion rating and a passer rating more than 20 points higher!
All of that is to say, Fields’ ceiling is much lower than Jackson’s. Fields’ ceiling is probably that of Mark Sanchez.
Sanchez, during the first three years of his career, was a more accomplished a passer than Fields—but didn’t have the legs to supplement it. And on net, they were about equivalent in terms of efficiency.
After the Jets moved on, Sanchez started half a season before riding the bench the rest of his career.
That’s probably what we should expect from Fields. Between 8 and 11 more games as a starter.
So why do we have a conversation about trading the #1 pick and keeping an obvious bust?
Because the narrative around Fields as the former #1 overall high-school recruit, former Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback, and a top draft pick says Justin Fields has the Tools to Win. And also there is a narrative around the Bears that goes like this: The Bears Are Good at Defense, Bad at Offense.
Together, those make it easy for the media to still have stock in Fields. Even though his career is about to fade away.
Note: We have Fields’ ceiling as approximately a Teddy Bridgewater like career. Starting for partial seasons for bad teams, later in this career. The modal case is a Mark Sanchez or RG3 type career, where he mostly disappears into the world of backup quarterbacks and retires around 30.