DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum How the Browns and Paul DePodesta Brought Moneyball to the NFL

“We’re always super cautious about what we don’t know,” DePodesta says, “and that’s an area where we lean really, really heavily on people with vast experience in the space: our scouts, our coaches, our players. They provide so much context and so much richness to any other information we might have.”

“Computers are great at dealing in volume,” DePodesta says. “They can process so much more information than any one of us can individually, and they can do it without bias or emotion. But what they struggle with is context and nuance. That’s hard for a machine, and that’s where the human expertise and experience becomes invaluable.”

That makes it incredibly important for everyone in the organization to be on the same page, and an NFL GM (or chief strategy officer) can’t just dictate policy to the coach the way an MLB GM can to a manager. The ability to communicate information and get buy-in from coaches and players was one of the last dominoes to fall in baseball’s sabermetrics movement, and it’s still a struggle in other sports. After living through that evolution in MLB, DePodesta views it as one of his primary responsibilities. The questions he sets out to research, he says, are largely inspired by what he thinks Kitchens and Dorsey need to know in order to make good decisions, and sometimes originate with the coach and GM themselves.

“More than anything, we try to make information as accessible and actionable as possible,” he says. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff. There’s a lot of neat stuff, but if it’s not actionable, it just isn’t relevant, and what we’re really trying to do is support both our coaches and our personnel people in their decision-making process.”

What the Browns have done—stockpiling draft picks, unifying the organization’s thinking, looking outside football for ideas—makes success more likely, but not certain. DePodesta knows this.

“Our job is to try to corral uncertainty as best we can,” DePodesta says. “But we’re never going to reduce it to zero.”

Uh-oh.

There's going to be dumb take after dumb take on here.

I'm getting my popcorn ready.

Is this a Pure Football topic or a Tailgate topic?

Is this a Pure Football topic or a Tailgate topic?

Wasn't an article on this posted months ago?