Faith + Reason = Truth

The New England Patriots in the Super Bowl have had a few of their unorthodox secret weapons exposed over the past couple of days.  The first one I came across was an article on espn.com about an extraordinary football genius (probably even more so than coach Bill Belichick) that's been working with and influencing Bill since their high school days at Andover.  The next one arrived in my inbox this morning from MIT Technology Review.  Both are stimulating and insightful, both mention the same influential academic research paper about going for it on fourth down, and both cover the subject of non-traditional statistical analysis to maximize human resource returns as well as strategic decision making on the field.

Is it a coincidence that the two exemplars of using analytics in sports to rise to dominant championship levels are both found in Boston, home of the Red Sox and Patriots?  Those are the only teams in pro sports, in my opinion, that have truly developed a systematic formula and blueprint for maximizing the dollars spent on their rosters, as well as a plan for in-game management in the case of the Patriots, and turned them into consistent championship-level contenders (the Oakland A's don't count, since they employ the same methods but with more highly constrained financial resources and therefore no championship-level results).  It seems like there must be at least a little cross-pollination  of ideas between the franchises in the same city, even if at the very least it's just the exposure to each other through intensive local media coverage.  It can't be too long before everyone else catches on - then again, I've been thinking that same thought every since Moneyball came out, and since that time, only the Red Sox have been able to bottle the same kind of magic that the A's Billy Beane originally developed.