Learning at the altar of a great: the humble General Manager
I like admitting I’m wrong.
I genuinely enjoy being wrong.
I think it’s understanding the quality of humility and everything that can bring to you. I like to be liked, like everyone, and humility is an endearingly like-able quality.
But it’s more self-serving than humility can sometimes seem, I think it’s because I know the value of being right about the things you do wrong. Being accurate about how you can be better.
I think it’s why I love the Draft and more specifically the process of team-building. Humility is a large part of successful team-building.
Humility is an understanding that you can learn more – that other people, other viewpoints, even other disciplines completely alien to the environment you’re working in, can hold insight that makes you better.
It isn’t enough on its own though – you have to have it, to be able to grow, but you also need a few other things. An understanding of how to unlock that insight is crucial, and an understanding of how to apply that insight to your context.
The best people I’ve seen in sports, but also come across in my own life, also had a quiet confidence about their ability to assimilate all this information and to craft a strategy of their own making. An ability to learn from great ones who’ve come before, or thought-provoking books, or from worlds that seem unfathomably different from their own. To take all of that and to make their own way – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but it’s also the quickest way to instant success before a catastrophic crash and burn.
This is because, a generationally successful path to success was almost always carved out by a particular set of circumstances and more specifically by a leader that moved in mysterious ways and had their own particular recipe for that success. People find it very hard to exactly replicate that way, in both sports and in life, because, usually, the leader who executes the strategy themselves, let alone anyone else, can’t adequately assess what made it so good in the first place.
This isn’t to glorify leaders too much, I would always profess the importance of the team, and more specifically the assist, in both life in general, and sports. The leader isn’t always the most important person on the team and I think that goes for NFL front offices too, given how much success can fluctuate, often seemingly correlated with losing talent to other teams.
I don’t think that’s because Phil Savage or George Kokinis were the star player in the Baltimore Ravens front office but more because that team, that included those early 20/20 guys, was forged for success as a group – evolution became necessary.
Often re-invention and the finding of a new way by an already successful leader of a sports franchise is the hardest thing to find in sports. Normally, because that leader had to be so convinced about their way, that consideration of another would either be dismissed or half-hearted.
Go ahead, try thinking about leaders who created waves of success built on different foundations.
It’s hard.
Phil Jackson springs to mind, perhaps Bill Belichick, but they both had remarkable constants – Jackson with Jordan and then Kobe, Belichick with Brady.
But they did both build different types of teams for their future waves of success after the first one. They had to have some significant differences in the way they went about those future years.
I’m sure there are more but sporting history is not littered with them.
I think you can throw Ozzie Newsome into this world – we did have some consistent pieces on those 2000 and 2012 teams, in terms of playing staff, but they were few and far between. And there was much tumult in the front office, ownership and coaching between those two teams.
There was another constant though, by his side – Eric DeCosta. So I think EDC makes a fascinating case study in humility, self-development and team-building. He saw a great team-builder change his approach and build two different teams – he was there for all of it. But also because there was so much success, particularly in the draft, during Ozzie’s tenure, that it would be so easy to fall into the crash and burn pitfall that lies in wait if he were to try and replicate Ozzie’s approach, lock, stock and barrel.
I was inspired to write this piece listening to Farhan Zaidi – now General Manager of the San Francisco Giants but who, like DeCosta, learnt at the altar of a General-Managing great in Billy Beane. To illustrate how I believe Zaidi is demonstrating this masterfully, you have to take a trip with me, down the road that links analytics and scouting.
Analytics vs Scouting
The intersection of analytics and traditional player evaluation has to be the hardest map a General Manager needs to navigate in the modern sports world. The proliferation of more and more data to go alongside more tried and tested methods of, essentially, predicting the future, creates a challenging conundrum for today’s GM. It’s difficult enough to filter out the unhelpful analytics, picking up on just the right numbers to help your team, without positing that the middle way of combining the best of both worlds, is not actually the best way.
Much of the data that now pervades our favorite sports came from other disciplines, those who took what they knew from their lives and applied it to their particular pastime, some even getting hired to do more of it in the sporting world. The Orioles own Assistant GM, Sig Mejdal was a NASA engineer before he turned Baseball Executive. Wall Street is another arena that seems to have spawned some of the ideas around data and using it to increase performance in sports.
If you’ve watched any of the HBO show “Billions”, you’ll know that “Quants” are all the rage in that world, trying to find a quantifiably secure investment in a world where instinct and gut-feel from experts with track records are the most common reasoning behind chasing the pot of gold at the end of a particular investment rainbow. I heard it first from Zaidi but I went and did some research of my own, and it turns out that many Wall Street firms also believed that a sensible combination of both human intuition and quantitative investment strategy was the wisest path to be taken.
It’s not. Combining human, qualitative opinion with quantitative models actually ruined the models.
A rudimentary sporting example might be a quantitative model identifying five potential stars from a pool of college players at a certain position. This means it’s likely that a star would be found from these players, ranked in the model’s order of most likely to least likely. Add in a human element, let’s say a gut-feel from a scout that players ranked 3 and 5 by the model are the most likely to be successful and we get to the two players to be selected. Only, the model was predicated on probability and the build-up over time would work in the organization’s favor, and not if the scout routinely eliminates the two players the model found most likely to hit.
Zaidi references a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which I’m in the process of reading, but also a specific story from the book about firefighters and their ability to make quick decisions under pressure. It seems as though the story Zaidi was referencing was about a piece of work completed by him and a researcher called Gary Klein and their paper “A failure to disagree”. In it, Klein’s research on what went into firefighters’ decision-making was referenced.
Klein and his field of naturalistic decision making, found that firefighters who might refer to a gut-feeling or an instinctive decision made, as a burning building was collapsing, wasn’t actually a gut-feel at all but was a decision predicated on any number of factors not limited to the color and amount of smoke, the temperature outside the building, the wind direction and the structure of the building. All of these went into the catch-all of their “gut” and out the other side came the correct decision.
Zaidi theorizes that this is the closest he has seen to an explanation of scouting future sporting talent – gut-feel about the success of a player is usually the make-up of several factors that are characterized by the scout, at times, as one feeling that a player will be good. When in actual fact, there are years of expertise and evidence across a great many factors built in to their instinctive assessment. And that these could be vital data-points in themselves, therefore added in as a quantitative score or set of scores when you can accurately break down what the scout is looking for.
This is how Zaidi helped to shape Oakland’s model under Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta beyond the approach that was immortalized in the movie “Moneyball”. Integrating human evaluation into their new-found adherence to numbers. What I like most about this, is that Zaidi took a seemingly successful approach in Oakland, challenged and questioned it, and built his own way off of an already successful way.
This is the path of a future champion team-builder. Smart and humble enough to recognize what went right when they are in the presence of greatness, but innovative and confident enough to add his own aria to the concerto.
Of course, while I talk about quantifying scouting judgments as ground-breaking, that was only the case several years ago. Now, it is more commonplace. So this brings us to the second challenge for the modern-day GM, staying innovative enough to compete.
The Ravens under Eric DeCosta
Evolve or die.
NFL = Not For Long.
GM’s like DeCosta must move quickly and keep getting better.
It is with these lenses that I want to explore DeCosta’s tenure so far, with specific reference to the Odafe Oweh selection in the latest draft.
I wrote a draft review at Russell Street Report, that started my line of thinking on this but it has evolved somewhat – I am fascinated by DeCosta’s selection of Oweh and what it signals about how he will operate at the helm of this team. I think, providing an example of how he will take the best of the old way, having learnt under Ozzie before applying his own stamp.
What I love about the Oweh pick, is that it solidifies what I believe is the smartest approach to player acquisition in the league, when it comes to defense.
I wrote in that original piece about the link-up between scouting and coaching being preserved and that’s undoubtedly important in the construction of this defense from a player evaluation perspective. It hinges on Wink Martindale’s play-calling style and his coaching staff, but more than that, the Oweh pick signals the commitment to an edge the Ravens think they’ve found when it comes to constructing a modern-day defense.
They are committed to defending the run. This is non-negotiable and they continue to find defenders at the college level who played well as part of a good or elite run-stuffing unit. Oweh is a demon run defender despite limited experience. Daelin Hayes comes from the best run stuffing unit in college last year.
What I like about this, is a prioritization of the whole unit being able to stop the run. Run defense is an unselfish art, getting guys like Odafe Oweh who played run first and it hurt their sack totals, perceived “get-off” and consequently draft position, is exactly the type of self-sacrificing example you need to play the run well. Without discipline and the ability to play for each other you won’t be able to play the run consistently effectively.
But in today’s NFL, the passing game is King. And the ball is out quickly from the Quarterback, so this front office has started to heavily invest in its secondary, building one of the best in the league. Remember when we were hoping Dominique Foxworth would hold up for a full season as the number one Cornerback.
While other teams continued with their cognitively biased approach to building defense around pass rush, because to beat Tom Brady, you had to pressure Tom Brady, the Ravens went heavy after building a fortified secondary because pass rush wouldn’t get it done for you when Brady finds Edelman less than a second after he got the ball from the Center.
The Oweh pick signals a slight deviation in that approach to understand that pressure is important, even if sacks aren’t, and especially the ability to get quick pressure when combined with an elite ball-hawking secondary. If Oweh can continue to develop and eventually produce, even like his past season – zero sacks but multiple pressures – it could wreak havoc for opposing offenses with that defensive backfield behind him.
For me, what’s most important in this change of approach is the continuous improvement that it shows from the Ravens front office. A commitment to constantly challenging what they hold true and evolving.
In two different phases.
Making that change with an eye on making sure it chimes with their overall strategy – that quick pressure with fewer rushers could add a new dimension to their defense, but also that their current approach to player evaluation could not facilitate that, so they changed it.
Our approach to finding heavy, slower-developing, mid-round pass-rushers with a next man up philosophy as the last one walked out the door, worked for a long time. But the cupboard was bare this year as we wait for Ferguson to develop. In this approach they prioritized sack production but not athletic traits and certainly not speed. Oweh is a completely different beast to the players we’ve been used to seeing screaming off the edge in purple – his jersey will be more of a blur than those that have come before him. There are some studies that look at the correlation of athleticism and success as a pass-rusher in the NFL but the Ravens have seemingly ignored that until this year.
What I love about what they did, was to take their approach, change the ingredients for its success to create an even sweeter result but also changed the make-up of their model for a certain position accordingly. In this case – looking for a more twitchy edge-rusher that could get to the QB quicker.
I am excited to see the results of this but I’m most excited about Eric DeCosta’s approach to succeeding Ozzie Newsome, taking from what went before and adding his own approach, with care and attention to keep what was working, be accurate about what wasn’t and move forward with a new strategy.
By taking a twitchy pass rusher without much sack production, with a solid rationale, connected to a wider strategy, DeCosta showed that he can wipe the slate clean with every decision, regardless of past success or failure, and chart a new path in the Ravens pursuit of greatness.