The 2013 Oakland A’s, says Allen Barra in the Atlantic, not the 2002 team depicted in the film, are the real Moneyball team. Given that football is more popular than baseball, is there a football Moneyball equivalent to the data-driven strategy exemplified in the film about baseball?
If there is one, it’s probably a team in fantasy football.
Traditional football data is abundant. A site called StatisticBrain.com will tell you that 73% of the time, the team picked by oddsmakers win, and that the team that scores first has won 75% of the time. (You will also learn the popular factoid that the average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad is $3.5M.) These conclusions are probably not drawn from Big Data.
It was in the SAP Business Trends ezine that we learned that football hero Marshall Faulk (NFL MVP in 2000, Offensive Player of the Year in 2001, Hall of Fame 2011) is a fan of the fantasy football Player Comparison Tool.
