Off-field analytics essentially uses data to help rights-holders make decisions that would lead to higher growth and increased profitability.
Advancements in data collection have allowed for sports analytics to grow as well, leading to the development of advanced statistics and machine learning,[2] as well as sport specific technologies that allow for things like game simulations to be conducted by teams prior to play, improve fan acquisition and marketing strategies, and even understand the impact of sponsorship on each team as well as its fans.
During his time with the Baltimore Orioles, Johnson had tried to convince the organization to use his FORTRAN baseball computer simulation to determine the team's optimal starting lineup.
[7] By the close of the twentieth century, sports analytics had gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Oakland A's, Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.
Baseball Prospectus has grown into a multi-channel sports media organization employing a team of statisticians and writers who publish New York Times Best Selling books and host weekly radio shows and podcasts.
[9] Epstein, known for his role in ending two of baseball's most famous streaks (the Boston Red Sox curse of the Great Bambino in 2004, and as recently as the 2016 World Series, helping end the 108-year drought between World Series wins for the Chicago Cubs), is a member of a growing community in major league baseball who do not rely on years of major league playing experience.
With analytics being relatively common in MLB, there is a breadth of statistics that have become vital in the analysis of the game, which include: Houston Rockets' Daryl Morey was the first NBA general manager to implement advanced metrics as a key aspect of player evaluation.
North Carolina, under coach Frank McGuire, was the first known basketball organization to utilize advanced possession metrics to gain a competitive advantage.
In 2003, the sports analytics-focused website Football Outsiders pioneered football's first comprehensive advanced metric, DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average),[16] which compares a player's success on each play to the league average based on a number of variables including down, distance, location on field, current score gap, quarter, and strength of opponent.
A few years later, Pro Football Focus launched a comprehensive statistical database, which soon featured a sophisticated player grading system.
Building on the work of these writers, sites such as PlayerProfiler.com distill a wide variety of established advanced metrics into a single player snapshot designed to be palatable to the casual sports fan.
Dubas, similar to Theo Epstein in MLB, has never suited up in a professional game and relies on the numbers generated by players on a nightly basis both now and in the past to make decisions.
[31] Research is also undergoing at Nagoya University to investigate the potential of using the defender-orientated ball recovery and being attacked as metrics, with it being used successfully with data from the Japanese J1 League to predict the strategies used by the teams.
Strapped with a minimalist budget, Beane relied on sabermetrics, a form of sports analytics, to evaluate players and make personnel decisions.
Epstein, who remains the youngest general manager to ever be hired in MLB, came into the position without any professional playing experience, highly irregular at the time.
Using a similar approach to that of Billy Beane, Epstein was able to form a Boston Red Sox team that in 2004, won the organization's first World Series in 86 years, breaking the alleged Curse of the Bambino.
As owner, Henry provided Epstein with significant leeway when it came to data-based decision making and the use of sabermetrics, as he knew the impact that such tools can have in achieving success in both sports and business.
More recently, teams like the Houston Rockets of the NBA have put a heavy focus on analytics to dictate front office and on-court decisions.
[37] One of the early adopters of SportVU, the San Antonio Spurs have been using analytics to gain a competitive advantage on opponents for a number of years.
Collectively as a team the Spurs have honed in on the importance of the three pointer and as a result constantly rank among the league lead in three point attempts.
One gambler, Bob Stoll, has been ahead of the analytics curve for a number of years, successfully betting against the line 56% (575–453) of the time in college football, a significant rate as a winning percentage above 52.4% is considered profitable.