Kwesi Adofo-Mensah Clarifies That Analytics is More “Evolution” Than “Revolution”
K. Joudry
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Since news emerged that the Vikings were considering Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to be the team’s new general manager, fans and writers insisted that Minnesota would be getting an analytics guy.
And another:
The examples go on and on.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon suggests that there is nothing new under the sun. We may perceive something as being new, but the reality is that it most often only has a veneer of newness. If that was true when the biblical text was written thousands of years ago, it’s certainly true today.
The Kwesi Adofo-Mensah interview is part of the “Big Data Bowl,” so it makes sense that analytics was one of the main topics. In KAM’s mind, analytics is merely about being “thoughtful and intentional.” It’s more about having one more information source rather than completely overturning former ways of doing things.
Plus, he suggests that analytics aren’t particularly new. In his mind, analytics is just a new name for something that has been going on in the NFL for several years, leading him to insist that it’s more a matter of “evolution” rather than “revolution.”
An example he relied on was the Dallas trade with the Vikings involving Herschel Walker. KAM lifts this example up as a decision made with uncertainty and as one that involved a decision maker – Jimmy Johnson – gathering information about unknown commodities to decide what to do with a known commodity (don’t forget KAM’s background in economics).
So, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah doesn’t believe he’s reinventing the wheel with analytics. Rather, he’s trying to fill-in gaps in knowledge in whatever way he can. Analytics thus supplements more traditional routes of knowledge acquisition as the draft nears.
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