If you follow football closely enough, specifically the conversations about football, you’ll likely come across the friction that exists between two different sets of philosophies regarding how we should understand the game. Some believe that the best way to ascertain the truth about a team, player, etc. is to watch the tape, identify the context in which things happen, and draw conclusions based on those mostly qualitative assumptions.
Then, within the past decade or so, data have been crowned King. Pro Football Focus. Next Gen Stats (GPS tracking data). DVOA. Expected Points Added (per play). Regression. Pythagorean Expectation. Elo Rankings. The goal has been to seek out ways to understand achievement, decline, performance, efficacy, etc. through an objective, numbers-based framework.
King Analytics has an admirable goal: leverage the tools of math and science to bring order from chaos. It’s a great way to attach a number to a performance. It can help fans understand the game in a more statistically nuanced manner. It’s also blunt in its conclusions and has the effect of developing a different type of groupthink.
In essence, it’s football’s continuation of a centuries-old debate between rationalists and romantics (warning: tangent forthcoming). During the Enlightenment, the rationalist philosophical movement maintained an enthusiastic zeal for humanity’s capacity to reason. We could, through disciplines like math and science, develop universal determinations about how things in the universe work. And so it was. Much of our modern success is attributable to that framework. Yet, it wasn’t much longer until we started to notice certain limitations. Enter the romantics, who believed there were certain conceptions of reality that are simultaneously truthful but unquantifiable. We could quantify things but not their purpose. We could understand how certain abstract things functioned, but that such knowledge was a mere approximation of true reality. There are certain things – heart, purpose, etc. – to which we cannot attach a number and thus “know.” The romantics sought to answer this problem by saying that our intuition is the source from which the gaps in knowledge can be filled. Think of knowledge as a curved line that slowly but surely approaches its axis, we’ll call that axis truth, but science, math, and reason can only get us so far. It’s an asymptote, and the romantics think heart knowledge, or feeling, is how we can best fill in the gap.
You’re most likely wondering: “That was random and seemingly irrelevant, Jack. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
The reason I bring this up is that for an entire offseason, I think what ultimately skewed expectations for the Packers was (at least for me) an over-reliance upon the football rationalists.
I thought the Packers would finish below 13-3 but would be a better team. I thought the regression would happen in ways that probably limited their ceiling. With some skepticism, I was sympathetic to the arguments panning the Packers’ offseason approach. The Packers would have to beat odds that historically weren’t in their favor. I was wrong, and so were many others. We missed it because there are certain truths within the game of football that cannot easily be ascertained by a data point. Heart. Toughness. Physicality. Chemistry. Momentum. Will. Determination. Resolve. It’s in front of our eyes, too. We can see it. If we want to.
Watch Robert Tonyan the game after penning his own Players Tribune post regarding his big season and career development. He’s not George Kittle, but Saturday night showed just how much Kittle’s influence is permeating his own game. He’s a fighter. His confidence is paying dividends.
Watch the defense swarm to the football on each play, gang tackling and playing selfless, confident, and aggressive football in ways they hadn’t done earlier in the season.
Watch role players like Allen Lazard. After three quarters of dirty work in the run game along the perimeter, Lazard gets to thrust the Larrivee Dagger into the hearts of the Rams coverage defenders. The play doesn’t work if he isn’t knocking cornerbacks and safeties and linebackers all game in the run game.
Watch Marquez Valdes-Scantling, for all his roller-coaster moments, squeak through on a third and short to move the chains in a crucial late-game moment.
Listen to Aaron Rodgers recount the feeling after the game: “Oh, man, talk about just pure joy running out of that tunnel…We’ve had a few hundred (fans) for a couple games, but it felt like 50, 60,000, it really did. It’s hard to really put into words how special that feeling is. But you can feel it. It’s so palpable. You can feel that energy in the stadium. It’s just different. It’s different playing in front of a crowd. It is.”
Listen to Matt LaFleur explain his personnel: “We went out there with the mentality that we were going to be physical, and I think that showed up tonight in all three phases…..our guys (receivers) didn’t get the respect they deserved from the media, but we knew what we had on our roster.”
There was something beautiful about the Packers’ win. I’m not sure it can be explained mathematically either.
A year removed from a strong showing at home against the Seahawks, the Packers find themselves in a similar situation. They’ll again be playing in the NFC Championship as a 13-3 regular season team. Call me a romantic, but this team just feels different. This team looks super.
Onto the takeaways: