Inept sports punditry
By For your amusement, some 2012 draft analysis:
No. 1: Seattle Seahawks
After one of the worst picks in the first round I can ever remember, the Seattle Seahawks didn’t draft any positions of need or draft for the future.
Pete Carroll is proving why he didn’t make it in the NFL the first time. Not only was Bruce Irvin a reach at No. 15, the Seahawks proved they were oblivious to their madness by celebrating their selection.
As if the day wasn’t bad enough, Seattle selecting Russell Wilson, a QB that doesn’t fit their offense at all, was by far the worst move of the draft. With the two worst moves of the draft, Seattle is the only team that received an F on draft day.
Grade: F
In fairness, Wood was not alone. The lesson, I think, is that as with political punditry, so-called “experts” are primarily conduits of a particular version of conventional wisdom. In politics, (and in baseball), there are multiple and competing conventional wisdoms, and so experts exhibit a greater range of disagreement. I don’t follow this terribly closely but to the extent that I do this seems to be much less the case in football. What was revealed in these rankings was more about football punditry than about the quality of the Seahawks draft: they weren’t following the script, and considering the viability of a new script is beyond the scope of what “experts” in this field do.
On the worthlessness of political experts I strongly recommend Tetlock. One of the unsurprising but amusing findings of that book is an inverse relationship between the frequency with which an expert appears on the TV and the rate of accurate predictions. I don’t know if this holds for sports experts, but seeing has how Skip Bayless is on TV about 6 hours a day I expect there’s a decent chance it might.
[Erik] See also Jeffri Chadiha’s piece “Pete Carroll Destined to Fail as Seattle Seahawks Coach.”