"Do analytics really tell the whole story?"

“Do analytics really tell the whole story?" by Vic Ketchman explores how analytics is used nowadays in the NFL draft. The entry point is the "Moneyball" movie and Ketchman’s piece is mainly a digested interview to Tony Villiotti from draftmetrics.com

According to him:

What is analytics? It’s the accumulation of meaningful patterns in data, for the purpose of using that data to predict future results.

I’m not a fan of the wording used, but well, the point they make is that they use data to predict the future.

My main issue with this article is that after the previous quote Ketchman pretty much describes some of the data. Description of the data—in my opinion—is part of what we call EDA: Exploratory Data Analysis. The data is interesting, but there are really not many predictions made.

I’m also concerned by how some of the data is presented. For example, is the 37.1 percent rate of starts by first-round picks really different form 35.5 for the teams with losing records? Plus, it’s data from only a single year! So I think that it’s not enough to actually answer any question.

To end my comment, Ketchman asks:

How do you like those analytics?

I don’t like them much. Sure, some of numbers presented are interesting but the ‘analytics’ are far from being great. Though I bet Villiotti has more interesting results that are only seen by the NFL teams.