Behind the Laptop Week 13
Asking different questions, telling different stories
If you’re interested in watching any of our matches, all of them are on ESPN+
Sunday 11/24
Considering how much my world revolves around volleyball, you’d be surprised by how little volleyball I actually watch, especially if it doesn’t involve my team. I make up for that a little bit by looking at lots of numbers. As I write this, I am also monitoring the live stats feed for the current match of our next opponent. I can glean a surprising amount of information about a team from just the numbers.
If you’re looking at stats as a casual observer, the principal questions you’re trying to answer are probably “who was good?” and “how good were they?” Those are valid questions but I recommend looking for more in your stats. I can hear you asking me why and saying that digging deeper would just spoil your appreciation for the sport you watch. I respond by quoting Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.
That’s how I feel about the numbers. There are all kinds of interesting questions you can ask when looking at a box score. Can you tell what kind of offense a team is running looking at a box score? Can you tell which positions players are in? If you figure out which positions players are in, can you also figure out where teams are hitting the ball?
If you’re watching the stats live, you can see how each play ends but you can also see how setters are distributing the ball. If a team gets behind or loses a set, you can see if they make personnel changes. You can track if a team is scoring as well in the current set as they have been in previous sets. You can do all that without even looking at the play-by-play portion of the live stats.
What can you get out of a box score?
There’s a related point I’d like to make. The stats in the box score are the same ones that broadcasters are using on television. What if they asked what more they could get out of those stats? Would it subtract from spectators’ enjoyment of the broadcast, the game, or the athletes? Might it, as Feynman suggests, only add? I believe it would add to enjoyment and understanding. But the broadcasters don’t ask more of the stats because they already have huge sheets of paper, crammed with tiny writing about the players, their families, and their hobbies. How are they supposed to get all those prepared facts out during a sport with as little down time as volleyball? Maybe they shouldn’t spend so much time on stories like those but that’s the model of sportscasting they are trying to follow. Broadcasters often end up talking about their facts to the exclusion of talking about the actual game. What if they talked more about the actions (and interactions!) occurring on the court? As a performance analyst, I’d love to hear more numbers. But I’d be just as happy if I didn’t hear numbers but heard broadcasters using what they see in the numbers to talk about the competition we’re all watching together.
I think the way broadcasters currently talk about matches they broadcast limits the stories they can tell more than the lack of down time limits the storytelling. And I disagree with the argument that broadcasts need to cater to casual or new fans who may not have a deep understanding of the sport yet. I think love for a sport comes from how it is contested rather than from how it is played. You don’t have to know all the ins and outs of a game to love how hard the players go about playing the game. Broadcasters could get fans hooked by describing how skilled and athletic the players are. The numbers then become ways to describe “who’s good?” and “how good?”, which is where we started from. Broadcasters would bring you back to the place you started but help you see it with new eyes.
I’ll be presenting at the AVCA convention next month and I hope you can attend both the convention as a whole and my sessions in particular. I now have two sessions! The first is called “Music and Magic: Ideas for Coaching, Planning, Managing, and Creating” and is scheduled for Saturday, 12/21 at 9:00am. The second session, scheduled for Saturday, 12/21 at 11:30am, is called “Risk _____ to Win _____: Identifying and Managing Competitive Opportunities”.
