I've liked sports since I was a little boy but not all aspects of those childhood games remain noticeable in today's contests. This is mostly due to a new way of thinking about sports, often summarized as the Moneyball approach, and the transformation it has led in the strategy of baseball, basketball, and soccer; helmet football will almost certainly follow in the footsteps of these other sports, with an emphasis on data-driven analysis likely to be at the forefront of the movement. This would be consistent with the main emphasis of the Moneyball approach thus far as it has always used data as the first step in a comprehensive overhaul of a given sport's thinking, often in terms of player value - basketball teams began coveting outside shooting to maximize the return on good shot selection whereas the catalyst for baseball's shift was a reinterpretation of on-base percentage. If helmet football is to use Moneyball thinking in broadly the same manner as its predecessors, then I expect a similar process will establish a new hierarchy of metrics which will be used to reassess the value of players and strategies.
The metric that ends up being the most valued in the future will have certain characteristics. It will likely focus on scoring rather than defense, because - as the pioneers of these methods have taught us - it's almost always far easier to measure offensive production. I expect it will be hiding in plain sight today, like on-base percentage did in baseball, because the process of convincing skeptics is always eased when the new idea is simple and intuitive - an extension of an existing worldview. It would also need to be the clear cause for any positive effect, as a new intervention tangled with multiple potential causes is nearly impossible to award with sole credit. The immediate idea that came to mind for football was what I'll call "chunk plays", those that cover at least thirty yards, because these are effectively scoring plays - a team in its own half moves into field goal range while a team in its opponent's half will almost surely score a touchdown. But this is already mostly captured by existing metrics - air yards, yards before contact, even just total yards - so any movement centered around this approach would have to leverage a currently uncredited contributor to "chunk plays". I did some thinking about this until I settled on a possible candidate - the skill of forcing defensive pass interference calls on long passes. This candidate makes some sense to me because the penalty is punished in the most lopsided possible way - it's a spot foul, meaning the ball advances to the point of the infraction. A penalty thirty yards downfield, therefore, means a thirty-yard penalty, which pales in contrast to the fifteen-yard penalty for the sport's other major infractions, including delivering an illegal hit to the head. A player with a known ability to draw these interference calls - generating a "chunk play" each time - could become the poster boy for a new way of thinking about helmet football.
The most amusing side effect of this change would be the hindsight effect on how players from the past and present are assessed by future generations. Take Joe Flacco, for example, a successful quarterback who despite his enormous contract was never quite considered an equal among the other elite players at his position. One of his unusual strengths is drawing pass interference penalties on long passes (and you can dig out some good stuff online where others highlight this skill, particularly ahead of the 2015 AFC Divisional Round against New England). Flacco, it seems, was always among the league leaders in this undervalued metric, but he doesn't seem to have spawned any imitators in the way that Michael Vick did with his rushing skills from the position. Is the future a place where Canton, Ohio is renamed after Moneyball Joe Flacco? Will JaMarcus Russell's career be described as a failure of tactics by the revisionist historians? Could the NFC East degenerate (further) into weekly clashes featuring hours of attempts to recreate Sergio Aguero's incredible touchdown catch against the Bills? If helmet football strategists reevaluate the role of defensive pass interference in generating "chunk plays", it seems possible, if not entirely plausible.
My speculation is not my wish. A helmet football game, already barely watchable when contested among the lower lights of the NFL, would be a weekly tragedy if it descended into a series of long passes heaved back and forth from end zone to end zone - it would look something like mascots firing souvenirs into the crowd with their t-shirt cannons, but without the excitement. My dystopian vision is based on the hypothetical Moneyball endorsement of pass interference creating "chunk plays", where the offense knows the analytics have concluded that the potential of a penalty call more than offsets the risk of a turnover, which on a long pass isn't much different than a punt anyway. The only catch - and it might be the only catch - is that such a shift in the sport would likely see me join the masses who are smart enough to tune in only for the Super Bowl; the teams, having improved their own chances of winning a given game, would have unwittingly conspired to make the game not worth winning at all.
My wish is something different - a sport that emphasizes the strategic possibilities of involving all eleven players on each play. It might mean three quarterbacks are on the field as often as just one, which would represent an evolution on simmering trends being tentatively stirred by teams such as the New Orleans Saints (and their Taysom Hill experiment). If helmet football is going to change, I'd much prefer this direction, as it would retain and perhaps enhance the best quality of the sport - the way discipline, selflessness, and commitment among teammates demonstrates the possibilities when people work together for a shared goal. I admit that I am no prophet, possessing neither the vision nor the conviction to predict the more likely of these futures, but I have a hunch based on how we use numbers today - we'll move forward with what we call the data-driven approach, but ignore that not all things are easily measured; we'll speak of the gains without stopping to think about the incalculable that is always lost in these equations. Those who have endured the stupefying process of replay review at the end of NBA games or the utterly disorienting ceremony preferred by soccer's VAR will understand my trepidation - in the name of progress, we often regress.
The Moneyball approach, in short, is about efficiency, which I use in a very broad sense, like the way a business owner describes how recent initiatives have increased productivity while decreasing cost; teams with a Moneyball approach are finding ways to hire undervalued players, which gives them a higher return for their salary dollars, increasing efficiency. The issue is that I can extend the business analogy, and I feel I am right to do so, because teams becoming more efficient is having an effect on the sporting event in the same way businesses becoming more efficient is having an effect on the local economy - eventually, all the charming neighborhood storefronts, those "hole in the wall" or "mom and pop" shops that subtly defined the essence of a place, are replaced by one familiar brand or another, who despite being called "chains" seem to have a limited capacity for bringing communities together; it's something I think of anytime I lip-synch the cashiers at the grocery store, who of course have little choice but to read from the corporate script if they wish to keep their jobs.
It's unfair in a sense to blame individual companies for doing everything in their power to win but when the effects of widespread self-interest harm the greater good, it should be like a maiden baking voyage being interrupted by the smoke alarm - "A" for effort, but time for plan B. Unfortunately, the response among governing bodies worldwide is like the equivalent of taking out the batteries to disable the warning device, or just willfully ignoring any unwelcome sounds - they will sit dutifully on their hands while the communities they claim to serve go up in smoke. It's not surprising that sports leagues seem to have imitated the world in which they play their games - teams are doing all they can to win while the leaders in their respective leagues do nothing to offset the negative effect on the product. An NBA game these days will see long stretches of ten people jogging disinterestedly back and forth, pausing every few seconds to change direction at the moment one of the players launches the ball at the hoop from twenty-eight feet away - this is, as you know, the most efficient strategy. But is the result worth two and half hours of my time, or all the money it costs to attend a game? And the NBA suggests diehard fans watch their teams do this up to one hundred times a year!
The lasting legacy of "Moneyball" thinking may not be the way teams innovated decades-old baseball strategies or reevaluated the worth of specific basketball skills - it may be that the custodians entrusted with caring for these sports sat passively on the sidelines while their games slowly drifted toward the abyss, first by becoming boring, then irrelevant; the inevitable extinction will be a relief. The great wonder, as noted above, is that I am still somewhat surprised despite understanding that sports is always a mirror of the society where it plays its games. The legacy of competitors weaponizing efficiency to conquer market share is the untold story of the American economy, and American life - it's untold because we all know it, and because we wake each day to write the next chapter; the retelling would be inefficient. There are locals in every community who talk wistfully about going to the butcher, then the florist, who is of course on the way to the grocer, these tasks concluding just in time to meet the arriving milkman at the front door; I complete a day's errands in about five minutes at Whole Foods, and return home to clamber over a fresh obstacle course of delivery boxes in the foyer. The benefit of efficiency advancements is obvious, as I suspect is true to anyone who remembers the good old days of wasting their time and money, but we've lost something in the exchange; we'll continue to overpay for efficiency as long as we insist the only evidence of value is measurement, and that the only ball in the game of life is made of money.
