Analytics is only a dirty word if you are doing it wrong

I’m a Cleveland Browns fan. It feels good to get that admission out into public. I lived outside of Cleveland for a little over 2 years and ended up adopting the Browns and Lebron.

For sports fans, the above intro is enough for them to know the pain I’m about to speak of. For everyone else, the Browns are notorious for their inability to do anything right over the past 20+ seasons since they were brought back as a new team. They have seemingly averaged a new head coach every 2 seasons. They have a season with no wins. They have done every stupid thing a franchise can seemingly do. When you talk about inept sports teams, they are the picture in the dictionary.

Recently, they went about the process of hiring a new head coach after giving the most recent one only 1 season and firing the GM (who had only been there 2 years) as well. This time, the process was led by their Chief Strategy Officer who is one of the original Moneyball people from baseball. He’s Mr. Analytics. Because the hiring process was led by an “Analytics” person, many writers have felt the need to write about whether Analytics is a good or bad thing for the Browns and the game of football.

I consider myself an analytics person. Numbers have a way of cutting through the marketing jargon, ego posturing, over-confidence, and general gut decision making that can often take place around big decisions. Numbers are not cold and dispassionate because numbers are pure neutral. They take on whatever position an analyst chooses to put them in. An analyst can use them for good or bad or make them accurate or inaccurate. But they allow for more context to the decision.

Anyone who decries Analytics as bad is essentially saying that there are no analysts that they can trust to support them. Analytics is not a thing to itself, it is a human enterprise just like sales, marketing, finance, graphic design, art, construction, or used car sales. If you have a good lead opposite you, something great and valuable can come out of it. If you have a clown that doesn’t know a 1 from a 3, something bad and ugly will come out of it.

Because, here’s the dirty secret of analytics: you cannot have it exist on its own. It must support non-analytical experts. It must be challenged by people with different opinions. It must be part of a bigger process with lots of points of view. There must be someone in charge that brings all these disparate points together to make the final decision – almost always a non-Analyst.

If analytics is a dirty word, it’s because you don’t understand it and are doing it wrong.