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This is something that I wanted to do for a while in fact. Every year I would hear about Sloan, and it'd be February or so and it would already be sold out. This year, by chance I remembered in December or so, and planned a trip around a few other things as well. Newark to Boston is a really easy, cheap flight, and you can get pretty good deals these days on blind booking sites, so this didn't set me back much at all. So gently caress it, nothing was stopping me, so I pulled the trigger and went. It helps that the Boston area does have functioning public transit, and holy gently caress was it needed with how cold and windy it was. You take an underground bus to the MBTA (aka The T, Boston's subway system), and hop on the Green Line (which also goes to most of the Boston area schools outside of Cambridge.) The conference was held in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood (the most Manhattan-y area of Boston) at the Hynes Convention Center, which is off of Back Bay's main commercial thoroughfare, and attached to a giant mall called the Prudential Center. Upon registration, all regular conference attendees got this tote, which had a water bottle, a guide for the event, a list of attendees, a free complimentary issue of ESPN the Magazine, and a few other random things that I don't remember. Apparently the panelists got much nicer swag bags.  The morning of, all the attendees (yes about 80% male - there were giant lines for the men's rooms the entire event - and 70% white :P) gnoshed on Danish and filled up on coffee before filling the auditorium.  One immediate issue was there were a lot of last minute reschedules and panelist reshufflings. The original schedule was balanced in terms of having something for everyone at most times, but the shuffling meant there were often times when there were either multiple interesting panels going on, or none. I had very little interest in most of the scheduled panels the first morning. The 8:30 panels were both horrible, so I spend a lot of time walking around and getting the lay of the land. The main auditorium was called the "Bill James" room, with a "Bill Walsh" and "Pat Summit" (was she really into analytics?) rooms as well, along with some smaller conference rooms.   I was disappointed in the sense that this wasn't a purely analytics conference. It was a mix of general sports, sports analytics, sports media, sports science/technology, and sports business. A little disappointing to me because I work in analytics and was actually looking forward to more nerding out. (In fact, the day before, I visited one of our vendors in Boston. Another conference attendee was also in town and stopped by - he was an agent at CAA. I imagine we had very different conversations than my detailed interrogation of their Q2 roadmap.) There was some cool stuff, and I don't regret going, but it wasn't this vision I had in my mind of what a sports analytics conference would be - far from it, although I guess things like SABR might be closer to that. I went to the Andrew Brandt talk (former agent/NFL executive) on marijuana that was actually very entertaining. He told stories about being a NFL agent, and talked largely sympathetically about Eugene Monroe, and about the trend to replace opioids with marijuana. I wanted to go to the two basketball panels after that, but passed (assuming I could watch them on YouTube later, although I don't think they're up yet.) This was mainly so I could get lunch at Eataly (one of the best NYC upscale food destinations) instead of the crappy boxed lunch that was being offered. That was probably my second biggest takeaway from the whole weekend beyond the bitter, searing cold - the foot in metro Boston is quite bad outside of Cambridge. I regret missing the sports science and player tracking talks in the afternoon. I wanted to give one of the workshops a try. The SQL one looked really rudimentary so I took a chance on the R one - I've seen the speaker at other conferences. I figured it would be rather introductory but could speak about some interesting things - it was too R 101 for my tastes, I think I wasn't really the intended audience - all of the workshops were seemingly for novices trying to get a first introduction to things. On a similar note, looking at the technology at the conference - including the booths and vendors, there wasn't really that much that was impressive. There was a Google Cardboard type thing where they had field level views of games. Generally speaking, the broader the conference, the less interesting stuff you will see if you're relatively embedded in a topic, but this was a cut below a lot of the more business-focused conferences I've attended. I'm sure a lot of people are doing interesting things behind the scenes, but they're not sharing them.  Given the title, I was really looking forward to this talk, but alas it wasn't an hour of praising Romer, and they only briefly talked about things like Belichick hoarding second round picks. John Urschel was really good on this panel, but the problem was they didn't really cover much interesting ground. Also, Tedy Bruschi is a gigantic meathead and came off like he barely has two brain cells to rub together. He contributed nothing and dragged the conversation down every time he would pipe in with his comments. Mike Lombardi is fine for what he is, but also had nothing to add.  That was disappointing, but the real tragedy was Nate Silver talking to Adam Silver. I had really high hopes for this, and it was just unspeakably, unbelievably boring. Adam Silver's style can put you to sleep, and he was determined to say nothing of interest, running the Virginia Cavaliers' offense for an hour.  I'll stop complaining now, because that was quickly made up for as it was followed by one of the two absolutely excellent panels I attended that were worth the price of admission alone. Daryl Morey, Billy Beane (who is really loving handsome and charming in person btw, you could tell why Brad Pitt played him in the movie), Farhan Zaidi, and conference superstar Sam Hinkie. All were super candid and taking playful jabs at each other throughout. The talk was about cognitive bias, and paired well with the recent Michael Lewis book on that (which has one chapter about Morey with a few hilarious anecdotes.) Absolutely recommend people watch this on YouTube when it goes up. I would have rather torn my fingernails out than watch a panel with Darren Rovell, so I spent the last hour wandering around before the reception. It's not listed on the website anymore, but there was a last minute cancelation of a panel with Ari Emanuel about the Internet of Things. Day two didn't start out great. I was looking forward to the gambling panel based on the description, but it was another snoozefest. I then tried wander over to the negotiation panel (another Sam Hinkie joint) which was turning away attendees because the room was too overpacked. 0-2. So I wandered over to the drone demonstration for a bit. Then I went to a panel with Owen Daniels and another former backup WR for the Texans. It was fine, but it really wasn't about analytics so much as basic football strategy. (I think the WR does work in analytics, but he didn't really talk about it.)  After that there was a mildly interesting demonstration about two different football analyses. One was one that showed that combine tests had about a .2 correlation with NFL coaches' assessments of players a few years later. They also showed a football segmentation, breaking out players by smarts, work ethic, and various measures of athletic ability, and mapping that against success rates. It's hard to see the text from that pic - the group third from the right are the bluechippers who are basically good at everything. Second from right are the Wes Welkers who make it solely through smarts and grit, and last are the Josh Gordon knuckleheads who have every physical gift but keep screwing up. They grouped NFL players into these 9 profiles and showed what their average bust rates were. I took another pic that didn't come out well - there was another graph that also showed their average careers. The third from right group have by far the best careers, but also tend to peak early, while some of the smarter, grittier guys tend to peak later, along with the more raw athletes.   All the e-sports people were playing Smash Bros with commentary in a big room near the end of the hallway, and I, well, did not see the appeal of that. I was looking forward to the basketball analytics panel, and it was okay, but it had two fatal flaws. One was that Zach Lowe came at it as much more of a NBA journalist than an analytics enthusiast. They had poor choice of moderators. Much worse though was Haralabob Vulgaris (from Twitter and the Bill Simmons podcast, he's great) pulled out at the last minute and was replaced with motherfucking Vinny Del Negro, who was like loving Joe Morgan up there. He was incapable of giving an answer without throwing shade on analytics and demanding respect for "The Human Element." Mike Zarren was fine, and it was enjoyable when Zach Lowe teased Dean Oliver about being unable to talk about the Kings trainwreck. Nate Silver had a bad day 1, but came back strong with his one on one chat with Mark Cuban, which was the second really good talk from the event. The first half was a discussion on Trump - on Nate's various analyses, on Cuban's tortured love/hate relationship - with the second half on sports. I could see why Cuban turns off people, and I know a lot of supposed ideas men like him who are annoying as all hell and can't stay focused for a second. Cuban genuinely comes off as curious and thoughtful though, which is what sets him apart even though admittedly a lot of his ideas are half baked and superficial. Annoyingly, the top level of the main auditorium was closed for most of day 2. The Statcast panel was supposedly good, but I tried going to another workshop, this time on data scraping. Very sharp presenter although again, a very shallow look at a topic solely for novices. There was a Pro Football Focus panel - I didn't know Cris Collinsworth owned them, or that PFF's staff was British. Collinsworth was in full aw shucks sales mode, but like a southern judge, I allowed it. This presentation was largely a commercial for PFF, and they didn't really touch on their criticisms like not knowing the assignments for certain players on a play. It was entertaining though, and they made some good points about being able to have others do more advanced analytics on their data, and possible unknown uses for their data. Collinsworth told an anecdote a Nielsen executive shared with him about how all sorts of data points could end up having unforeseen usage in marketing. Last was the baseball analytics panel. I already hated Dave Cameron for his writing, but he was 7000 times as spastic and annoying in real life. He repeatedly drove this discussion off a cliff by being the worst person in the history of time. I left early in the awards ceremony counting on my ability to catch up on it later. Definitely the ability to refer back to later video recordings hurt my attendance at some of the talks, although I'll appreciate being able to catch up on the ones I missed due to conflicts later on. I also blame myself for making a rash decision to attend without looking at the content first, or doing more rudimentary research about the event, although definitely some of what was held looked better on paper than in practice. The smart money :P would have been on just waiting for the Silver/Cuban and Moneymind panels to be posted, although there were a few other good ones that I saw, and maybe more that will come out over the next few days as the talks are posted. Overall, I am happy I attended in spite of some disappointment and the horrible weather. It was a good experience, and probably worth attending once if you are a regular SAS reader. I think with the variety of interests here, any SAS reader would probably find a few things at future conferences that would appeal to you, even though ironically it's increasingly like a SXSW or similar cultural events that have been co-opted by SVPs of marketing for their own nefarious ends. I'm sure I'd be pissed as poo poo too if I went to one of those expecting The String Cheese Incident or something and instead had to deal with a panel about disrupting digital marketing or some other bullshit. It's a product for the masses now, not a nichefest, but maybe in the end that's okay. Random dudes off the street like me certainly wouldn't be able to buy a ticket if it was literally Bill James lecturing to a bunch of statistics professors and internet weirdos, as cool as that sounds in theory to me.
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Mar 11, 2017 08:42
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