Michael Lewis in Moneyball described the success of analytics approach to baseball, called sabermetrics on the example of success of Oakland "A" and its general manager Billy Beane.
Analytics have more recently been applied to basketball, NFL, and other sports.
The recent
MIT Sports analytics conference (Boston, March 2010)
drew over 1,000 people - clearly Sports analytics are hot.
On the other hand, there are random and unquantifiable human elements in sports which are hard to analyze.
Please vote in new
KDnuggets Poll: How useful are Sports analytics
- Sports analytics are very useful - teams with better analytics increase their chances to win
- Sports analytics are moderately useful - they are limited by the inherent randomness and unquantifiable human factors
- Sports analytics are not useful - they extract random correlations and mostly good for entertainment
- Don't know much about Sports analytics