Why is the NFL so boring? Blame data analytics

So as I was watching my Philadelphia Eagles play the New Orleans Saints on Sept. 22, a realization about the state of society dawned on me.

For some context, the Eagles haven’t looked any good since their Super Bowl run in 2022. And this game was no different. Everything about this team just feels disjointed and discombobulated. Turnovers, bad defense, lack of rhythm.

No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.

Passing out

But this isn’t a problem that only my Eagles are dealing with. This is an NFL problem. If you haven’t been paying attention, the product the NFL has been putting out there, for lack of a better word, stinks. And that can partly be attributed to the NFL not being a passers' league anymore. Instead, it’s trending toward more hard-fought, defense-heavy play styles.

Through the first two weeks of the 2024 season, passing yards have been the lowest they’ve ever been since the 2007 season. Seventeen starting QBs still haven’t even been able to hit 200 passing yards in a game. Put plainly, the NFL is boring.

But there’s something deeper going on here than mere mediocrity. And something jumped out at me in this game that finally gave me the words to describe what’s deeply wrong with the NFL.

Twice in this game, the Eagles went for it on 4th and short when they could’ve put points on the board with field goal attempts. And both times, they failed.

Why did they go for it?

Why abandon all common sense?

Because the almighty data analytics told them to.

Analytics arms race

Analytics are the major fad these days in pro sports. Every franchise across all pro sports has been scrambling to assemble the best possible in-house data analytics team to keep up with the analytics arms race. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t be considered a serious organization if your team hasn’t made some kind of serious investment in it.

Funnily enough, the Eagles were the ones who spearheaded the push for analytics-based football back in the '90s and were the first football franchise to have an in-house analytics department back in 2010.

And the problem is this: Teams are over-relying on data analytics to the point that pretty much all decisions are made in some form or another based on analytics. What this ultimately does is stunt and make fragile the development of everyone involved in the success of a team, from the players to the front office.

Relieved of command

Tom Brady said it himself recently in an interview. He points out how the NFL has a development problem. Rookie QBs are getting thrown into the fire and starting in their first year without taking the first few years to hang back and learn the team’s culture and program.

But even worse, QBs are no longer taking command of the game. The era of the “field general” QB is over. The QB no longer reads the defense and makes adjustments in real-time. Now, what you have is a young kid who simply takes the play his coach gives him and runs with it. And who did the coach get the play from? The analytics guys up in the booth.

No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.

It’s a very artificial, robotic process. And the product on the field is reflecting that.

So why does any of this matter?

What you’re witnessing in today’s NFL is just a small sample of society’s slow transition into full-on transhumanism.

Transhumanism? That conspiracy theory stuff?

Existential hole

Despite its conspiracy-theory-coded stigma, the transhuman agenda is very real and very apparent.

Let’s start with what it is. Simply put, transhumanism is the gradual abolition of roles human beings traditionally performed throughout history and, therefore, the abolition of what gave people’s lives meaning.

Transhumanism has been around for awhile. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has slowly made all kinds of manual labor obsolete, as the invention of new automated technologies have been able to complete tasks in place of human hands and minds. Sure, this has made life easier and more convenient.

But there is an existential hole left in its wake. When the roles that defined humanity are slowly taken away from humanity, how then do we define humanity at all?

When a rural rice farmer is replaced by a humanoid robot, what is the rice picker?

When a mother is replaced by a surrogate mother, what is the mother?

When labor no longer exists because all labor is performed by automated machinery, then what exactly are we?

Cling to the machine

The answer is that we become welded to the machine. We offload our labor (and therefore our ability to think) onto machines and, by doing so, cling to the machine in total dependence.

That is what’s happening here with today’s NFL. Owners, front offices, players, and coaches have all given away their unique ability to make high-pressure decisions at the highest level of pro sports in exchange for the almighty analytics department.

And that destroys any chance of achieving greatness.

By committing their hand in this unholy marriage to data analytics, NFL teams have stunted the organic growth of their players and coaches and, consequently, have created a debilitating dependence on the answers the computers feed them.

The ChatGPT-ization of the NFL is here, and its mediocre, boring, and robotic output is merely a reflection of what the rest of us are going through in our own lives here in 2024.