There’s something inherently magical about watching sports. Whether it’s a collective groan of players as the puck bounces off the pipes of the net or the roar of the audience at the completion of a perfect touchdown pass, sports never fail to excite the audience and evoke a multitude of emotions. For fans, watching sports is all about emotion: the thrill of overtime, the excitement of a big lead and the heartbreak of playoff elimination. Feeling these numerous emotions is all a part of what makes professional sports so fun to watch. Or at least it was. As technology becomes more integrated into the world of professional sports, the excitement and fun of sports is quickly being replaced with monotonous percentages and statistics.
Before the implication of advance statistics in sports, stats were just taking up space on the back of baseball cards. But now, statistics are becoming the main focus of sports. Simple save percentages, goals against averages and season points are now a thing of the past. Sports websites are now chock-full of advanced statistics spanning over entire careers of players or even the lifetime of a franchise.
The problem with advanced statistics isn’t the fact that it’s recording the progress of athletes from season to season; the problem is the effect it’s having on the fans. Even though I’m an avid sports fan, I, like hundreds of others fans, am guilty of skipping out on watching my favorite teams play simply because they weren’t statistically predicted to win. The overuse of statistical analysis is ruining the fun of sporting events.
Every sporting event has press boxes stuffed with analysts and reports anxiously googling and tweeting, trying to get the newest statistics for a game out as fast as possible. Fans in the audience are glued to their phones, checking out the offensive stats for their favorite player or the statistical odds of their team coming out with a win. The sports industry has become so obsessed with the science and mathematics behind the game that we’re forgetting how to actually enjoy sports.
Advanced statistics are ruining the entertainment quality of professional sports. Why would anyone want to watch a Miami Dolphin’s game when a statistician has already predicted that Ryan Tannehill will throw two interceptions and that the Dolphins will lose? Advanced statistics are giving us way more information than we could ever need; sports fans are completely overloaded with information. I think it’s time we lay off the numbers, and just enjoy the game in front of us ― even if the Dolphins do lose.
