Deion Sanders might have just had the best college football take of the year
Don't expect Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders to consult an analytics chart in a close game anytime soon. Sanders didn't hold back this week while discussing analytics during his weekly press conference, telling reporters "forget analytics, man". “Who is the guy named analytics? I’ve never met him, I’ve never seen him," said Sanders. "I […]
Don't expect Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders to consult an analytics chart in a close game anytime soon.
Sanders didn't hold back this week while discussing analytics during his weekly press conference, telling reporters "forget analytics, man".
“Who is the guy named analytics? I’ve never met him, I’ve never seen him," said Sanders. "I don’t know what he looks like. Is he a winner? Is he wealthy? Is he broke? Who is he? I don’t know what he looks like. You got to know your team. Forget analytics man. You got to know your team and what they’re capable of. Sometimes it's just self-explanatory."
“So especially with the quarterback we have and the offensive skill set that we have, sometimes we go for it," continued Sanders. "Sometimes no, I don’t like the momentum, I don’t like the feel, I don’t like the conversation I just heard. I don’t like it, let’s get out of it, let’s punt the ball…..it’s a feeling and it’s on me. When we succeed, everyone else gets the credit for it, but when we fail, I don’t mind taking it because it’s on me.”
This might be Coach Prime's best take yet. And it might be the best college football take of the entire year.
I'll never understand coaches consulting analytics during a game. It completely takes coaching out of the game.
Sanders makes a great point when he mentions the momentum and the feel of the game and conversations on the sideline. Analytics tell you the story of what's happened in the past, but they don't tell what's going to happen in the future. They can't. They don't know what's been working in a particular game for a team and what hasn't been working. They don't know the health of key players or the mental state of key players. Analytics charts don't have any idea how the opposing defense is playing, what kind of looks they're giving, or if a team just happens to have another team's number that day.
It's an insult to coaching, and competition in general, to reduce the game down to analytics, models, and metrics. That's not what competing is all about. Maybe that stuff is fun for people to argue about on the internet, but it has no impact on a team winning in the trenches on a key fourth down, or on a running back breaking a key tackle to pick up a first down when the chart says you should've kicked a field goal.
If coaches want to consult analytics to see what's worked most often in the past so they can incorporate some of those things into their game plan, then I get it. But if a coach wants to consult analytics to decide what to do in the final moments of a game? Well, that's not coaching. That's trusting a spreadsheet. And that spreadsheet isn't going to block for you, it isn't going to throw the ball for you, and it's certainly not going to make a contested catch for you.
The analytics nerds will shake their heads and point to the numbers, but I'm going to trust the Hall of Famer who happens to be one of the greatest competitors that's ever lived on this one.