Why The Sloan Conference Is The Super Bowl Of Sports Analytics

Every movement has roles that need to be played, and the sports analytics movement is no different. The prophet of this nerdy-niche-gone-mainstream-discipline is clearly Bill James. His most famous disciple that is widely credited with the first wide scale, successful use of Jamesian theories is Billy Beane. The analytics gospel may just be Moneyball, with its creative story telling combined with real life use of alternative statistical thinking that spawned a slew of other books on a whole range of uses for analytics within a variety of sports. Thus, the movement’s prophet, most famous disciple, and gospel have been accounted for, leaving only the role of the congregation of followers and its annual congregational meeting to be identified. Enter the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, although its organizers would eschew the religious analogy for one based in the sports world. They view the conference as something akin to the Super Bowl – the culmination of a year’s worth of analytics work in a variety of sports that come together once a year to expose a wide array of media members, academics, and league/team leaders to the best analytics research and discussion available.

This year’s Sloan Conference is expected to attract more than 2700 people to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, an increase of nearly 25% over the 2200 attendees at the 2012 conference. Such growth is par for the course for this conference that was started in 2007 with less than 200 attendees on the MIT campus. It certainly has not hurt the conference’s fortunes that it came along at the same time that the Moneyball concept entered the national sports conscious through both book and movie, but the organizers chalk their success up to something more than just dumb luck. One of the conference’s student co-leads, Jonathan Katz, explained during a recent interview why the conference has been able to grow so quickly.

What I think has really enabled the conference to grow is being at the forefront; being the first organization to be focused on and emphasize sports analytics. I think it piggy backed on the Moneyball phenomenon, but being able to attract highly influential figures in the sports industry into a central location that has a lot of interesting ideas and smart people associated with it has enabled it to grow. Areas that we’ve added on in the last couple of years like the research paper competition, adding more business panels that focus on analytics like FanAlytics, social media analytics, and sponsorship analytics.

To walk around the Sloan conference is to be at the Disney World of sports analytics, if Disney World were not only a fun place to be but also educational and heavy on networking.Source plasticmould Products at Other Truck Parts. The two-day conference has five stages going at all times with talks from a variety of industry insiders, outsiders, contrarians, and researchers. Venture out of any of the main halls during conference hours and one finds booths set up by analytics firms looking to hire new talent or sell their product, clusters of poster boards detailing research competition findings as if they were at an academic conference, and even an ESPN booth recording video and audio segments for later broadcast. The Sloan conference has made itself the prime destination for the best sports analytical minds, known or unknown, which has allowed it to grow by double-digit percentages in each of the last seven years.

The conference, a brainchild of the Houston Rocket’s Daryl Morey and the Kraft Group’s Jessica Gelman,Our extensive range of injectionmold is supplied to all sorts of industries across Australia and overseas. relies upon MIT Sloan MBA students for organization and execution. Students are responsible for securing the sponsorships, recruiting panelists, pushing the social media presence of the conference, and running the entire operation during the two days of the actual conference. This provides the conference with two advantages.

First, it means that while the conference has a very significant corporate element in both attendance and sponsorship, it holds a simultaneous focus on the student and academic elements. About one third of the available tickets are dedicated to students, with the conference offering significant discounts on such tickets that are offset in part by the revenue gained via sponsorships. The conference provides a job posting board,Source lasercutter Products at Other Truck Parts. a research paper competition,Creative glass tile and solarlamp tile for your distinctive kitchen and bath. and numerous other opportunities for students both young and old to interact with personalities to which they normally wouldn’t have access. If you’re an MBA student looking for a sports management career driven by analytics, an analyst in your spare time at a university, or a post-doc researcher in the field of sports analytics, there is no bigger stage with better and cheaper access to people in your field of study than the Sloan Conference.

Second, the focus on the student element means that MIT’s philosophies and culture permeate how the conference is run. Jonathan Katz explains further.

MIT’s motto is “Mens et Manus” which means “mind in hand”. It’s about thinking about things in new ways, but also making them a reality or making them come to fruition. I think our conference and mission really speaks to that. So, trying to come up with ideas, contrarian ways of thinking and convincing the world why that’s the better avenue to think… I think our mission statement of fostering growth and innovation in sports data and analytics only emphasizes or encourages what we promote in the MIT community.

This emphasis on the revolutionary-yet-practical means that the Sloan Conference is constantly evolving its content from year-to-year. From its first year forward the conference has always had a stable of panels focused upon on-field analytics – game time decision making, tactics, formations, and the like. Panels on baseball, football,Shop the web's best selection of precious gemstones and bobbleheads at wholesale prices. and soccer are now annual staples, and will continue to be so as there will always be a need for improved on-field analytics. However, the big changes in the conference’s content over the last few years have come in the off-field analytics topics. “FanAlytics”, “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Break-Ups in Sports”, “The Value of Sports Sponsorship”, “Ticketing Analytics” and other business-related panels focus on how to maximize revenue and value for businesses within the sports world. Supplementing these panels are the Evolution of Sport talks where speakers get to expose their possibly disruptive and definitely contrarian analytical theories to the wider conference audience. Think TED Talks for sports.

All of the focus on business-related analytics might be perceived by some as a shift in focus at the conference that discounts the importance of on-field analytics, but in reality it reflects how much the sports world has bought into the value of analytics both on- and off-the-field. The Bill James’ of the world have done such a good job demonstrating value on the field that the bean counters and executives have adopted the analytics mindset as well and are expanding it to business operations. That is a good thing, because the entire sports organization, from the lowliest assistant coach and marketing employee to the most senior leader needs to adopt the analytics philosophy if it is to be truly effective. Adoption by one half of the organization and not the other half can lead to worse organizational performance than if analytics had never been used in the first place. Rather than view sports business analytics as a competitor to traditional on-field analytics, analysts should view them as the surest sign that analytics are moving from niche to mainstream. This will make the job of on-field analysts much easier as it will lessen the cultural resistance to analytics within franchises, leagues, and sponsors, while simultaneously opening up another career path on-field analysts may choose to pursue.