More Than One Way to Skin a Pig
On process vs. results, the cautionary tale of baseball, and the Super Bowl
The Cincinnati Bengals may not ever draft an offensive lineman again. Analysts roasted the team in the offseason because they had a quarterback who lost a season to a torn anterior cruciate ligament and instead of drafting Penei Sewell, a franchise cornerstone-type tackle, they took Joe Burrow’s college teammate, wide receiver JaMarr Chase. The Bengals went into season with a ramshackle, replacement-level offensive line, and all they did was win the AFC North, take three straight playoff games on the last play, and punch their ticket to the Super Bowl. Chase set rookie records along the way, and Burrow laid a legitimate claim to the league’s Most Valuable Player. He probably won’t win over Tom Brady, but he should.
The Los Angeles Rams may not ever use a draft pick again on a player. They won’t have a first-round pick until 2024. The last time they had a first-round pick was in 2016, when they selected Jared Goff first overall. Goff is no longer with the team. He was included as a sweetener with two first-round selections in a trade to acquire Matthew Stafford from the Detroit Lions. Other draft picks went into acquiring name players like Jalen Ramsey and Von Miller. Other players, like Leonard Floyd and Odell Beckham, Jr., were free agent pickups. Yeah, some of the players on their team this year, like Cooper Kupp, Van Jefferson, and most famously, Aaron Donald, were picked up via the draft, but this is a team whose engine is driven by post-market player acquisitions. While the common wisdom is that you build teams through cheap, productive players on rookie contracts. The Rams are in the Super Bowl after pasting a divisional rival in the first round, surviving a comeback from the most successful monger of comebacks in league history in Brady, and mounting a come-from-behind win against another divisional rival.
Judging results without analyzing the process is often considered bad form. If you can’t reproduce a result, you can’t count on it as a model for success in the future, and the way all business is moving, you’re going to have to be able to predict success. It can’t be enough to achieve it. Capitalism is a model based on infinite growth, so if you don’t have an avenue to continue growing, you’re of no use to the top classes. “Infinite growth” in a universe with finite resources sounds silly because it is silly. Even if you have a good process, the universe is chaotic enough that nothing is guaranteed success. It’s not pragmatic, for sure, but what is pragmatism but desperation anyway?
The “smart” process in the NFL involves building around a simple core tenet. Football is a violent chess match, and the quarterback is the king. If your king succeeds, you succeed. If you can make their king fail, you can succeed. There’s a hierarchy for other players marked in direct importance from that king from the queen all the way down to pawns. If you’re a running back or an off-ball linebacker, you’re a pawn. If you’re the left tackle or an edge rusher, you’re the queen. The cult of the quarterback probably can’t even be labeled a cult anymore. It’s religion. It’s the Roman Catholic church, or Sunni Islam. Every cost decision stems from the quarterback. Eventually, if you have a quarterback worth keeping, you will end up having to pay him nine figures over a time-period approaching a decade. Therefore, because that quarterback is going to soak up a lot of money, you have to put a jigsaw puzzle together for other positions. The real dream is having a quarterback on a rookie contract so you can spend premium dollars on contracts less expensive than that of a franchise quarterback and have a better shot at winning it all.
Still, if you can be cheap and good at multiple positions, you put yourself in position to win. However, planning on being cheap and good at multiple positions requires someone to have a virulently antilabor mindset. You’ve seen it in baseball over the last two decades. Sabermetrics were the Trojan horse housing the financial extremism that has led to the current baseball labor stoppage. Statistics in football outside of traditional counting stats are harder to quantify because a single football play is a kinetic, frenetic mass of human bodies running in concert. It isn’t a duel between pitcher and batter that might have involvement from the other eight-to-eleven guys who could be on the field of play at any given moment. A baseball plate appearance is algebra. A football play is a fucking complex differential equation. However, there are people who solve those for a living, so of course, there is a burgeoning field of that statistical analysis growing in football.
All those statistical analysts hate this Super Bowl matchup. Of course, much like the sabermetricians in baseball who didn’t get front office jobs and actively work in the erosion of labor rights in baseball through use of advanced metrics, it’s not necessarily a hatred of the fact money was spent in places where it didn’t need to be spent. Bad process led to good results, and therefore, it’s unsustainable. Maybe it’s less the Bengals than the Rams. The Bengals did make the Super Bowl with a quarterback on his rookie contract. They just weren’t supposed to make it this far right away because they didn’t have all the pieces yet. Perhaps there was bristling because they didn’t play as well according to all the analytics either. The Bills or Kansas City would’ve been better options in that regard. Forget the fact that football is the sport unfriendliest to sample size-appropriate analysis because of how few games are played. The numbers said the Bills were the best team in the league! Still, the Bengals feel like a team that was built the way these people think teams should be built.
The Rams feel like the real sticking point. Their process involved putting together the football version of The Expendables without any regard to pesky things like “positional value” or “keeping draft picks.” If they win next Sunday, the din from analytics Twitter won’t be as loud, but you’ll hear the snarky comments creeping after like you have now and before, comments about how the team has no picks in the first round until the next Trump administration or snide comments about cap management. You know my thoughts on this, so maybe you think I’m an unreliable narrator. Still, one can’t deny that this Rams team feels like an affront to how most title teams are built. Even the Buccaneers last year only really added Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski. Yeah, they added Leonard Fournette too, but it feels like he didn’t really get going until this season. Anyway, most of that team was drafted, while another key contributor, Jason Pierre-Paul, signed there after things went south with the Giants. The Rams spit in the face of this logic putting together a team of mercenaries.
What they’re really doing is showing that there’s no dogma in building a team. If one thinks that this year is a one-year wonder, they’re discounting the fact that none of the veterans on the Rams appear ready to ride off into the sunset. Even if Beckham leaves after this year, Robert Woods is still due back from his injury next year. Matthew Stafford is back next year. The earliest Jalen Ramsey can opt out is after 2023. Aaron Donald is on board until 2024. Von Miller might be an unrestricted free agent after this year, but Leonard Floyd is still under contract. Also, who’s to say that the Rams couldn’t pull off another trade to get a cheap veteran with gas still in the tank for a run next year? The Rams, barring massive regression, can still contend next year. In fact, their window next year might be more open because one expects Trey Lance in his first year as the 49ers starter to be erratic, the Seahawks to bottom out, and the Cardinals to fade down the stretch again. It’s also not like the NFL cap is some monolith that must be obeyed. There are more loopholes put in place than in the US Tax Code. If the Rams end up in an endless cycle of trades and signings to stay relevant, who’s to say that’s a bad idea?
If you can build a winner, you build a winner. It shouldn’t matter how the sausage is made, at least to you, the fan, or the analyst, or anyone not involved with Stan Kroenke’s bank accounts. Kroenke obviously is cut from a higher stakes mold than some owners given he also has Arsenal in his back pocket. When you own one of the marquee Premiere League teams, money isn’t an object to you, nor should it be. No billionaires are seeing heaven; let me make that perfectly clear. However, the ones who can come closest are the ones who spend the money that usury will make sure never runs out on lavish things that benefit people vicariously or tangentially. I’d say spending money on the best free agents you can find is a hell of a better use of that mammon than it sitting in an offshore account somewhere in the Caribbean, being stored for a rainy day that not even the worst category five hurricane could provide.
That’s why this isn’t so much an argument of “bad process” vs. “good process.” Whether they know it or not, and I gather more of these nerds are cognizant of this fact and eager to do so than let on, the ones who go so far into analytics to get mad that the Rams did the 1997 Marlins thing only for football or that somehow it was the Bengals who outlasted the field in the AFC instead of teams built more correctly like the Bills or Kansas City, act as free public relations for owners who think that these players make too much darn money. They won’t win the genpop over by saying “uhh, actually, using DVOA, this team was better,” but when they start linking up player value stats to money, then it’s game over. It’s not like the NFL Players Association is an ironclad union these days anyway. Perhaps the weakest union among the three major sports, the NFLPA stands at the precipice of total annihilation if the same leap from advanced stats to advanced penny-pinching. Perhaps the only thing that saves them is the same reason why advanced stats really don’t work as well in the NFL. There are only 17 games on the schedule (for now), so even if the league just stops marketing players, it’s a lot harder to ignore what goes on during one day out of the week than when the games are every single day. Trust me on this; even after conservatives shit themselves and promised not to watch the games anymore, the NFL still scored their highest ratings overall this year.
Being idiot-proof doesn’t mean the players are going to be okay in the long run, and all this chatter about how this Super Bowl isn’t representative of the season when it totally fucking is portents something gross and depressing. Forget for a second the fact that seeding was up in the air in Week 18. There was no real hierarchy in either conference, and the fact that both number one seeds lost Divisional Playoff weekend bore that out. You can’t tell me that Scott Kacsmar on Twitter bemoaning the fact that this is the first time no team in the top three seeds made the Super Bowl is analytically correct when the correlation line on the season has a R-squared value as far away from 1 as Los Angeles is from Cincinnati on a US map. The problem isn’t that he’s a nerd who knows too much. You should never apologize for being smart, but you absolutely must be smart enough to realize when your knowledge is being used to further talking points that will end up widening the gap between capital and labor. Forget the “millionaires vs. billionaires” debate for a second. If you have useful idiots on social media using analytics to decry any outcome that isn’t based in “good” processes, then what’s to think that other companies won’t turn to sports for information on how to regulate their labor bodies?
I know I set this newsletter up as a place to forget about real world issues, but the phrase “stay woke” wasn’t created among the Black community to talk about always trying to be “politically correct” or however the nerds at Fox News have twisted the meaning of that word nowadays. You have to remain aware of your surroundings at all times. The owners and the billionaires are all going to attack on every front possible, and it’s up to you to identify the bullshit. Using analytics to smoke out the idea that labor should get a fair cut of the pie is one of the more insidious tactics. You have to be on your guard.
In the meantime, if someone tells you that this is a Super Bowl that highlights unsustainability of two teams who had bad processes that led to lucky results, tell them to shove it up their peeholes. Yeah, the Bengals didn’t address their offensive line, but when you have a quarterback with as quick a release as Joe Burrow and explosive wide receivers with massive catch radii, maybe time to throw isn’t the issue you think it is. The Rams didn’t show a bad process either. They just showed a parallel process to the cost-cutting bullshit you’re led to believe is the only way. If they win this year, they will not repudiate one process for the other, but show that titles are titles, and unless you’re an owner’s accountant, you shouldn’t care. Frankly, if you’re a fan, it shouldn’t matter how you win. You would sell your soul to win a title, and that’s what the Rams are doing for you, if you happen to be one of the few people in the Los Angeles area that actually readopted the Rams after they moved back.