Stats & Sports

If you have some time on your hands, this article written by Michael Lewis ("Money Ball," "The Blind Side" [the book I recommended a couple months back]) for NY Times magazine is very interesting. Sports will never be completely predicted by stats, but the new statistics that are being applied to sports I care about (see www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods and their explanation of DVOA; to a lesser extent, basketball) are making the role of statistics in determining the "value" of players and the possible contributions they can make to a team absolutely fascinating (to me, at least).

I acknowledge that boiling sports down to pure numbers takes away from much of the human factors that make it great -- passion, drive, will, discipline, inspiration etc -- so I'm not saying stats are the end-all, say-all. But they provide some nice insight.

Anybody have thoughts on this? Are stats taking over too much of how sports / players are judged? Do they need to be more of a factor?