If you pay attention to sports, one of the things you may have noticed over the last few decades is the rise of numerology. The people making money from sports entertainment and their fans do not call it numerology, but they often treat the numbers of the respective games in the same way mystics treat numbers in life. They think numbers have qualities beyond the thing they are supposed to represent. Therefore, the numbers of the game are transformed into magical tokens.
For example, there is a site called Pro Football Focus that sells itself as something like a quantitative lab for the game of football. They started on the claim that they grade every player in every game in the NFL season, by grading every snap of every game in the NFL season. They conjured a grading system that they claim lets their clients compare the value of each player to the value of other players. Their numbers allow everyone to be a quantitative expert on football.
That last bit is part of the hook. While sports are not complicated, most fans never play organized team sports, so they know nothing about the game, beyond their own emotions while looking at the results. The typical football fan could not tell you the difference between zone blocking and zone blitzing. Baseball fans have no idea why an off-speed pitch is effective. Soccer fans could not tell you anything about the game, as the strategy is a total mystery to them.
What the numerology of sports does for the fan is give them ready made truths they can easily digest and memorize, so they can feel confident when assessing what they are seeing on their televisions. The baseball fan can confidently say Play X is not a good player, because his WAR is below three. The football fan can say that his team lost because the left tackle got a sixty-grade from Pro Football Focus. These numbers bestow a sense of knowledge on the person using them.
Of course, the people using these numbers have no idea what lies behind them, which is the magic of numerology. This allows the sports fan to think these numbers are predictive of future behavior, when, at best, they merely quantify past behavior in a way that allows for further investigation. Many of the numbers that arise from the numerology of sports are meaningless nonsense. The numbers from Pro Football Focus are a good example.
If you look at their site, they state that they are endeavoring to do something that is practically impossible. They employ a team of 600 people, but only 60 are qualified to grade games. These sixty people are then tasked with assigning a pass/fail/neutral grade to every player on every play and have the results hours after the game has been completed. Not only are they doing this for all sixteen NFL games but the fifty or so college football games each weekend.
Even if they solved the man-hour problem in such a task, the numbers they produce are based on purely subjective criteria. Anyone who has played sports understands that a player can do his job as dictated by the coach, but still fail. In other words, the only way anyone can know if a player executed his assignment in a game is to know what the coaches assigned him. You can surmise in many cases, but that requires a deep understanding of the game.
The ridiculousness of the numbers do not matter, even when it is pointed out to the people who love using them. There is a magic quality to assigning numbers, especially numbers that have been sacralized, to the sport. Scan a sports fan forum right now and you will find lots of posts about the grades from PFF. The fans want to believe these numbers tell them something about the prospects for their favorite team, so they accept the validity of the numbers, despite the absurdity.
At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet which is, “I do not own a television” followed by the second dumbest comment, which is, “I do not watch sportsball.” No one cares that you do not own a TV or that you spend your leisure time in self-flagellation. That is not the point of this post. The point is that in something as banal as sports entertainment, numerology has crept in and taken up a place in the mind of the viewer.
The reason for this is our society is saturated in numerology. In every large company there are hundreds of worker bees churning out tables and graphs that have meaning to the intended audience, well beyond the factual. Show the mid-level manager a report with sales figures and he gets excited. Show those numbers in the form of a dashboard and he passes out in ecstasy. There is a whole industry built on the magical power of showing numbers in the form of a dashboard.
The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers. The things they produce for their employer are not just about understanding the descriptive reality of the company but also understanding the prescriptive reality of the company. When the needle on the meter is in the green, everyone is in a state of grace. If the meter moves into the yellow, then it means someone inside is cavorting with Old Scratch.
This helps explain the obsession with AI. Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process. The sports fan does not want to know who is posting those grades after the football game. They just want to believe that there is some objective, omniscient force that knows the truth. Similarly, the people we call the left demand AI not talk about a certain Austrian painter, because they want AI to validate their beliefs and thus be their moral authority.
This is why the game of baseball has been taken over by robots. Quants crank out decision trees they supply to the managers, which the manager consults at every decision point in the game. Everyone embraces this, even when the results are bad, for the same reason the Muslim says, “inshallah” before embarking on a project. The results are in the hands of an authority everyone must obey and trust. If the team loses, then the mystery force behind the numbers must have willed it.
One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers. The numbers of life used to be simple measures of what needed to be measured. Now they are treated like omens that not only indicate the future but weigh on our moral understanding of ourselves. The bad stats from a game reinforce the notion among the fans of the losing team that they deserve to feel bad because their team deserved to lose.
This helps explain why the sports fan went from being a guy enjoying men compete to a guy whose identity is tangled up in the identity of a team. Numerology of sports did not create the bug man organizing his life around televised sports, but it coevolved with the general phenomenon of numerology, which itself is the result of the search for new moral authorities to replace faith and tradition. The numbers of life have now become signs from the gods, whoever they may be.
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