Aqib Talib, a cornerback with the Denver Broncos, once said that “people that dry-hump stats to make a point probably prefer reading sheet music to hearing the song”. If he were to spend a few weeks following the AFL, you suspect that he’d regard most of the analysis around our game as tone-deaf.
One of the best things about the media’s coverage of sports is that it is built around games where people keep score, which makes it less subjective than just about anything else in the news. But big data has blossomed to new prominence and it has come for football. It’s already come for everything else – pop music, television, and even politics.
At the risk of being crucified by gangs of statistical leviathans and the relentless critical simpering they inspire, Hawthorn’s greatest achievement this year may be reducing the reams of data to the mootest of points. The one silver lining to another year of Hawthorn domination is that by season 2016’s conclusion, it may be the cue for the SuperCoach set to get off the couch and stampede toward the exits. Hawthorn has come not to praise statistics, but to bury them.
After taking care of the Power at Adelaide Oval on Thursday night, Hawthorn sits a game clear atop of the ladder. This is despite them ranking fifth in disposal efficiency; sixth in inside 50s; and outside the top eight in contested possessions and uncontested possessions, marks inside 50, and rebound 50s. There is not a category in which they are ranked ahead of the rest of the competition – notwithstanding of course, what ultimately matters: wins.
Bookmakers, who at least have some skin in the game, have them installed either as premiership favourite, or a slight second to Sydney. Only a dim, stereotypical oaf in a bookmaker’s advertisement would back against Hawthorn should they make it to the MCG on grand final day, as there is one thing that consecutive premierships can explain that advanced statistics cannot – the ability that when the time comes to turn on the switch, you’re always able to do so.
Since having their doors blown off by Greater Western Sydney in round six, Hawthorn’s season has been a series of quiet triumphs, no matter how many tears statisticians and armchair analysts have shed over them. In the process, Hawthorn has embarked upon an object lesson in the dangers of statistical hubris.
While statistics play an important role internally at any football club as a measure of progress, it can be argued that intangibles such as innovation and culture play a more profound role. Both are traits personified in Hawthorn coach Alistair Clarkson.
Speaking on an episode of On The Couch in 2014, club legend Jason Dunstall said that Clarkson is a coach who “was happy to challenge convention” and in doing so has taken the game to new levels. That Clarkson has been provided with an actual innovation budget is testament to his (and the club’s) desire to push new frontiers. He can do this because he is the one coach in the AFL who possesses multiple premierships, a tertiary degree in sports science and an MBA – and because he is, well, the sort of person who would be inclined to request such a thing. Clarkson is in the minutes as stating that the club’s aim at the start of each year is to come in with 10 new ideas, and implement two. It is a practice he believes has contributed to their prolonged success. In 2014 Hawthorn was the first club to use remote control drones to film training from overhead, allowing them to observe running patterns and structures.
While innovation may be difficult to measure, football department spending is not, and that is one area where Hawthorn comfortably sits among the game’s elite. If you’re looking for a statistic that is a determinant of ultimate success, clubs in the top four of overall football department spending have won 10 of the past 11 premierships. And we haven’t even got to the new $50 million training and administration facility at Dingley.
This isn’t to say that Hawthorn’s approach is to simply invest in “whatever it takes”. Years of success allow you to be circumspect in determining what makes a sound investment. While the Bulldogs’ million dollar full-forward slugs it out with middleweights in the VFL, Hawthorn is probably as close as any club has come to paying players according to their value in the context of their role within the team. Name one player who would be considered to be earning “overs” at Hawthorn? Conversely, you could probably easily name a dozen below market value – including free agents. That doesn’t happen unless a culture is strong and the individual bows to the collective good. Hawthorn may be Australia’s only multi-million dollar business with communist underpinnings.
But you can’t buy a culture (despite Carlton placing Hawthorn’s former psychologist on its payroll). While there isn’t a set of statistics to “unpack it”, you won’t find an argument to suggest the Hawks’ culture isn’t the competition’s strongest. The only measurement, outside its consecutive premierships, may be the number of clubs that have tried to replicate it.
This is what clubs have truly embraced – the home-grown “Hawthorn culture”. The embracing of stats, and the cottage industry in fantasy football it has spawned, is something that we have imported. However, if there are international lessons learnt by clubs it is not as much in advanced statistics as it is in structure, management and again... culture.
Former Hawthorn captain Richie Vandenberg says Clarkson educates himself by travelling all over the world, watching basketball and gridiron and football. I wouldn’t put it past Clarkson to have dropped in to, if not a Greek amphitheatre, then most certainly The Globe in London to catch a performance of Hamlet. Hawthorn has finished the past three AFL seasons in a black mass that leaves the stage littered with corpses. Last year it was the Eagles, this year it may be the La-Z-Boy analysts whose consideration of our game extends no further than a spreadsheet.
We don’t have the stats on this, but Hawthorn is on song.
