"You (Don't) Know Ball"

Confessions of a Heretic.

“Do you even watch the games, bro?”

Mercy, m’lord. I am but a mere, humble consumer of the data.

I’ve found myself in fewer Twitter spats than usual this season — perhaps a byproduct of altered family circumstances (second kid), less sleep (very related), no longer publicly posting plays, or any number of other, secondary reasons. Regardless, I’ve been on Twitter less, and there is — naturally — a direct correlation between fewer posts and fewer conflicts.

But old habits die hard, and I couldn’t help but fire off a late-night bait tweet in response to a (seemingly popular) Bracketology account, who ludicrously admonished KenPom (a non-sentient algorithm, as you know) for failing to pay sufficient homage to Oklahoma’s game-winning 4-point play earlier in the evening:

https://x.com/JonFendler/status/1869618718705349091

Where to start? As a preliminary matter, if you are reading this blog, I presume you know (unlike the chap in the above tweet) that no predictive metrics site cares if a team wins or loses the game. They’re not designed to care. Caring about wins and losses is the exclusive domain of the AP Poll and the many pundits in the Take-O-Sphere polluting the airwaves with spazzy overreactions to rail-thin binary outcomes (see: the entire Field of 68 ecosystem and business model). If Jeremiah Fears’ doesn’t hit a difficult, contested shot in the waning moments last night, the above tweet never gets sent. And yet, whether the shot went in or not, Oklahoma’s analytic rating wouldn’t have changed, because we’re talking about one possession in one basketball game.

Anyway, my response tweet was a relatively banal observation suggesting that Oklahoma is not worth getting excited about and instead looks like a fairly mundane and forgettable 8/9 seed (quick, name the 8 and 9 seeds in last year’s Tournament. See? You’ve already forgotten).

I assumed my tweet would be swarmed by furious Oklahoma fans seeking to burn me at the stake for impugning their team. However, at press time, I have not heard from any Oklahoma fans (pretty quiet bunch, apparently).

HOW-EV-UH, I certainly have heard from the brigade of Very Online CBB Ball Knowers, who immediately posed the holiest question of all holy questions:

“Do you even watch the games, bro?”

Well, no. Not really. Not like I used to. I want to. I really do. Despite being a bettor first and a CBB fan a (distant) second, I do still enjoy watching the sport. But it’s just a terrible use of time for me — personally — to sit down and do nothing other than watch games.

For one, I’m not a scout. As those of you long-time readers and followers know, I love basketball scheme stuff and have a comprehensive understanding of strategies. But I’m not watching closely enough to be able to pick up on nuances and minutiae that can be converted into something actionable. Like most people, I’m not sitting in a dark, distraction-free room isolated from the world. More often than not, I’m fucking around on my phone, doing work for my real job, prepping for the next day’s betting slate or re-settling a cantankerous infant who is supposed to be sleeping. Even if the game is “on,” I’m barely, passively watching.

The not-so-dirty secret is that this is how most people “watch the games.” We’re all distracted. If I could hire a stenographer to export a transcript from my brain — recorded while “watching” a game — it would be something like this:

“Oh, that’s a nice pass.”

(looks down at phone to check emails)

…

…

30 seconds later…

(loud noise on TV)

“Oh damn. Nice finish…what I was doing again?”

Six minutes later…

"Oh shit, this game got close. I wonder what they’re reviewing. How long has this review been going on? Is there another game on right now? Shit, where’s the remote? I kinda want another beer….wait, is the baby crying again? For fuck’s sake.”

And so on, and so on. Does this constitute “watching” the game? Not really. It’s on, in the background, but it’s mostly just noise, much like the trashy reality TV shows my wife watches.

The other primary reason — and the more important one for purposes of this column — is that I’ve largely given up watching because it’s an inefficient means of learning about the teams. This is the part that raises the hackles of the Ball Knowers. They simply cannot (nay, will not) accept that there is another means of acquiring knowledge. Their way is the only way because their way has been around for decades.

Several years ago, as a relatively young lawyer, I found myself appearing in the courtroom of a notoriously-tempestuous judge in New Jersey (he’s now retired, so I can write this). I had never appeared in front of this particular judge before, but I had been forewarned of what *not* to do to avoid incurring his wrath (it was a lengthy list). Dutifully, I made sure to closely adhere to the rules and made it through the hearing unscathed and without inciting an eruption. But then, just as we were wrapping up, I slipped. During a routine exchange regarding the filing of certain post-hearing documents, I asked the judge if he wanted a paper copy of my filings delivered to his chambers (some do, some don’t):

“Do you take me for a Luddite, Mr. Fendler?”, he boomed. The rest of the courtroom fell silent. No one moved. They had all seen this script before.

I hesitated for a split-second. I had heard the term “Luddite” previously but couldn’t recall on the spot where I heard it. As was my habit throughout law school, I quickly considered trying to BS my way through it (after all, I was named by my fellow classmates as the best on-the-spot BS’er in my graduating law school class, an honor which surely made my parents exceptionally proud). I thought better of it and instead conceded:

“Your Honor, I’ve heard the term, but I don’t know the meaning.”

“A Luddite is someone who hates progress,” he admonished. “They’re afraid of it because they don’t understand it. Their way is the only way. Is that what you think I am? You think I don’t know how to turn on a computer? Upload it to the court docket like everyone else.”

Smoked, but it could have been worse. I got off relatively easy. But so began my deep dive into the history of the Luddites, an insurgent group in early 19th century Britain who waged a guerilla war against the indomitable tide of the Industrial Revolution in a futile attempt to thwart the ongoing automation of the textile industry. As you might suspect, it didn’t end well.

200 years later, the Ball Knowers are the Luddites. The confidence with which they attempt to convey their expertise is both entertaining and farcical. They completely skip over the foundational question of “why are you someone whose opinion is valuable” and instead pre-suppose that the sheer amount of time they spend watching games requires no further explanation.

Contrary to the central ethos of the Ball Knowers, it is not at all self-evident that watching a lot of college basketball makes someone an expert in assessing the true ability of college basketball teams. It simply makes you a person who enjoys watching college basketball. This country is littered with people who absolutely LOVE golf. They play every weekend. They own tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. It’s their primary hobby. And yet, a lot of them fucking suck at golf. The mere act of frequently doing an activity doesn’t confer expertise — even more so when the sole “barrier to entry’ for this purported expertise is….passively sitting on a couch with a remote in your hand.

You will surely recall the famous Moneyball exchange (in the book and the movie) in which Billy Beane’s old school scouting department clashes with the Jonah Hill/nerd crew, with the former maintaining that there is a tactile, know-it-when-you-see-it component to visual, in-person scouting that doesn’t translate to spreadsheets.

I agree with them. There absolutely is such a thing. For professional scouts.

This doesn’t apply to Twitter content creators, whose Ball Knowing observations range from “this team could make a run,” to:

As I said to Max today during our exchange, one need not spend 2+ hours watching Jeremiah Fears play basketball to understand that he’s a good player. In fact, as a person who has never seen Jeremiah Fears play basketball, I can search any number of the dozens of websites tracking player data in the year 2024, and within 1-2 minutes, reach the below conclusion with another 1 hour and 58 minutes remaining to do other things:

Like the Luddites of yesteryear, the Ball Knowers are driven by fear. They are terrified that someone can accrue the requisite knowledge to match or exceed their expertise in a more efficient and time-saving manner than dutifully sitting in front of the telly every night for hours on end.

For them, KenPom, Torvik, EvanMiya, ShotQuality, CBBAnalytics, Synergy (RIP…too soon?), etc., are existential threats to their purported expertise. If someone (hypothetically speaking, say, Jon Fendler, or someone similarly-situated) can quickly marshal massive amounts of data for 364 teams and efficiently organize it in such a fashion that it becomes both profitable and insightful, then what purpose do the Ball Knowers serve?

“How could you have an OPINION without watching the team?!,” they ask, incredulously, as if we’re still living in 1999. Or 1979.

For now, their place in the ecosystem is safe. There’s still a widespread distrust of analytics at the highest levels of media coverage in the sport. This will continue to be case for the foreseeable future as the dinosaurs interminably linger and forestall the inevitable. Broad swaths of fan bases are vocally, demonstrably anti-analytics because they have solely been fed a diet of Jeff Goodman and Andy Katz-style punditry. And, admittedly, the barrier to entry for analytics (in any sport) can be intimidating at first, especially if you’ve been trained to fear it.

But we will win. Like Oklahoma’s forthcoming regression, it’s simply inevitable.