Bears Marc Trestman Must Weigh Human Element

Chicago Bears Head Coach Marc Trestman

As Matt Eurich reports in Marc Trestman's honeymoon phase over with Chicago Bears fans, the Bears Head Coach appreciates the importance of analytics in football decision-making.  The book and the film `Moneyball may have popularized more statistics-driven sports, but it didn't speak entirely to the complexity and even the incompleteness of such an approach.  In baseball parlance, it's called sabermetrics, after the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

I posted Eurich's article, and commented:

The thing about sports analytics (rf. sabermetrics) is that it strips off the human element of decision-making. On the one hand, this is good, because some aspects of being human are not logical or rational and these work against proper decision-making. On the other hand, this is bad, because sports is inevitably a human effort and because sports is infinitely more complex than any analytics can account for (at least right now). So, at the end of the day, to make proper use of an analytics report or stat sheet, we have to put that human element back into the `equation (i.e., decision-making). We have to recognize that that human element is the essence of sports.

In the end he is still a rookie head coach. Mistakes happen, and just as his team has to learn to pick themselves up from mistakes, so does he. Fans were on cloud-nine when his offense helped lead come from behind victories against the Cincinnati Bengals and Minnesota Vikings in Weeks-1 and 2, and while the dreamy honeymoon phase with a new coach never lasts forever, let’s just hope it does not turn into a nightmare anytime soon.

In Trestman's case, that human element has a good amount to do, indeed, with lack of previous experience as head coach.  He strikes us as a thoughtful, smart man, but how well he learns the ropes at this level and how well he improves his decision-making will determine the Bears' success for the foreseeable future.  Obviously, studying, assessing and reflecting on his coaching decisions are keys to that learning and improvement.  But he may need coaching and mentoring himself, particularly in how to account for that human element - that is, his own football intuition, thinking style and cognitive ability - vis-a-vis football analytics.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD