In my high school days, I was an average (at best) clarinetist for the school’s marching band. Marching around the field was taught to us precisely - contrary to most people’s idea of the activity, the actual technique is not raising your feet up to knee level; it instead involves rolling each step so to mute the sound as much as possible behind the music you’re playing. If your feet moved out of time, you were chastised in front of the whole band, sometimes brutally. Our director never pulled any punches - and being a little bit of a jokester within the band, I was often the target. We were handed sheets with hundreds of coordinates, all plotted out for every “frame” of the show. Band camp at my high school wasn’t similar to American Pie - it was grueling, with nearly 12 hours everyday sweating in the hot sun.
But his method worked - the school had a history of over 50 years of success, statewide and nationally. My band director was shortlisted for a Grammy award, and each year, the jazz band and the drumline dominated competitions. Our success wasn’t just winning on a group level - the program trotted out about twenty-five all-state musicians every year, by far the most of any high school in New Jersey. Years after graduating from the program, I started wondering - what made the band so consistently good? In the genre of jazz, which is ripe with improvisation - how did the director figure out how to harness emotion into music? In marching band, how did my director manage to synchronize more than 200 people for 15 minutes?
For a long time, I assumed it was the cutthroat culture of the band - the competition must have driven the desire to win. Still though, I remained deeply unsatisfied with that explanation. I was convinced there had to have been a more human reason. After a while, I speculated that it might’ve been the infrastructure behind each player - each solo was accompanied by a strong ensemble. Or maybe there was brilliance in each of the students - their natural talent was too much. Unfortunately, it was not a question I could objectively answer. But then, I approached a further existential question - what makes someone good at music?
My experience in marching band taught me the complexities of measuring excellence, a challenge that has followed me long after my time playing music. Can we quantify what being good at music sounds like? There’s less set rules in music, no objective goals - just scorecards from a multitude of judges, each assessing an individual area of performance. Now, suddenly, I’m thrown into a feeling of dread. How could I make any reasonable claim that what we played sounded better than any other competitors? The system, as I feared, was flawed. A small sample of scorecards did not objectively point to the best performance - but somehow we still just know, don’t we? We all inherently know that Benny Goodman was a better clarinetist than I was—you can hear it. But, at an amateur level, the gaps in performance assessment are smaller, and the conclusion remains elusive.
Why am I talking about music though? Music is one of those fields that is basically impossible to quantify - there are too many elements of emotion and interpretation rooted in what is considered a “better” song than another. But still though, even in interpretation-based activities - take marching band, for example - there are forms that are easier to objectively point to different elements. I never used to understand when people would say “Hey, if you like numbers, then do _____”. They’d say it about accounting or actuarial jobs - and yes, those fields do have numbers. However, just because they have numbers doesn’t mean anyone is going to like them - or enjoy the process of calculating them.
After working on analytics projects, I understand what liking numbers means: deriving enjoyment from quantifying things. That’s a crucial aspect of most systems: political, economic, business-related, or even in sports fields. The extent to which something can be quantified completely depends on the subject matter - which is why we could never get a completely accurate election model or World Series predictor - but they’re still more “accurate” than a music quality scorer.
Sometimes, when I try to understand what different sports are in relation to music, I imagine that basketball is jazz, ripe with improvisation, and usually an ensemble that still isolates individual members for their styles, while football is more like marching band, with more precise sets, and less of an element of randomness. I like basketball for that improvisation. With there being an objective goal for each team, it also is possible to quantify the reasons behind winning.
When it comes to basketball - the greater basketball community often misunderstands what “analytics people” are trying to do. For sure, optimization of team performance is an important piece - but we’re trying to answer further questions than that. We’re trying to peer into the void of improvisation and randomness and quantify things only an eye could see (and usually, a very experienced one). People are afraid of sports analytics because they believe it removes the element of creativity and individualism - when in fact, we don’t want to do that. We just want to figure out what it is that makes players so magical in the first place, and then the driving factors behind those factors.
One of the guiding principles of this blog is presenting opinions based on facts. I’d argue that without analytics, the semblance of honesty we try to preserve in sports is lost, and dishonest arguments are like viruses. The world of moving dots might seem drab - but it’s going to lend us a lot of insight and help us argue things the right way.
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