Ever since the advent of Moneyball culture and the parallel rise in popularity of more data-related thinking in professional sports, we’ve been asking about its demise. All the way back in 2008, upon the retirement of Jeremy Brown—a prospect heavily featured in the book, whose ridiculously overdramatized weight was a crutch on which to discuss his undervalued nature as a player—Baseball Prospectus took a blowtorch to some of the mysticism surrounding the Michael Lewis book and its supposed lessons that, by then, were sloppily applied to the rest of modern sports culture.
But before we join the chorus, I want to tell you about the Philadelphia Eagles, sitting at pick No. 32 in the upcoming draft as the defending Super Bowl champions. The Eagles got there by extracting the correct lessons out of Lewis’s book, not the ones teams have morphed to fit their own warped ideas. And I think we’re about to see what happens when a few dozen competitors take the wrong lessons and try to speed run a failed imitation of what they think works somewhere else.
Now, especially, is a good time to be a loudmouth and generally despise the subculture that populated across sports after the book’s 2003 release (even though I think it’s been awesome to invite in a different group of people who have immeasurably improved the conversation as well as our access to useful information that helps us better understand what we’re watching). Even going back to ’15, the Kansas City Royals won a World Series while on a torrid stretch of base stealing at a time when the analytics community despised the risky measure, believed to be too likely to surrender valuable baserunners (now the bases are bigger so you can steal again). The Los Angeles Dodgers won a World Series this past season by, sure, having an excellent farm system but also spending a half billion dollars on a sea of wildly talented players. In basketball, after years of everyone shouting about three points being worth more than two, and altering the landscape of the sport, the value of traditional thick-bodied big men is starting to resurface and, more than a decade and four additional general managers later, the Philadelphia 76ers have little to show for The Process outside of a complicated superstar in Joel Embiid. The same can be said for a Cleveland Browns team rebuilt, in part, via the hands of Paul DePodesta, an executive from that Oakland A’s team featured in Moneyball. After some years of observing behind the scenes and a few more of actively implementing a plan, the culmination in Cleveland appeared to be F--- it, let’s pay the most outlandish and hard-to-get-out-of contract in NFL history for Deshaun Watson. This is also a team that had a spirited debate about taking Mitch Trubisky over Myles Garrett, in part because of the value of their analytics in drafting a quarterback at that particular moment in the rebuild.
This year, the Eagles won a Super Bowl, in part, thanks to a 27-year-old running back—whom they signed to a sizable free-agent contract—and utilizing him heavily on first downs (the Eagles’ run-pass ratio on first-and-10 this past season was 289 to 135).
We’re cherry-picking, for sure, and ignoring some of the nuance, but that’s part of the larger point I’m going to make in a moment. As we approach the upcoming NFL draft, I am convinced that the era of Moneyball and analytics are certainly not dead but have been beautifully clarified thanks to teams like the Eagles. I think the thought gap between the Eagles and the rest of the NFL will be on display particularly during this draft when we see, for example, how overmined the running back position becomes (even though it’s a particularly great class) simply in an effort to recreate what the Eagles did in 2024 without understanding the ethos behind it.
First, though, it’s important to address where I think everything went wrong. Where we as both fans and mainstream pundits went wrong. The initial wave of football analytics post-Moneyball instituted a handful of truisms that became wildly popular thanks to the first truly generous set of data we started getting on measurables such as player age, injury rate, rate of decline, efficiency data, risk tendency … you name it. Part of the reason they became so popular is that having some kind of data-backed nugget is the perfect, satiating, bite-sized snack for an owner who fancies himself part of a numbers-based business world and cares little to spend the time understanding the larger intricacies behind all this information, nevermind the fact that many of these data sets are weighted by individuals, some of whom are much better at their jobs than others.
Thus, we have a kind of drumbeat behind some of the more oft-repeated ideas that, over time, become more and more painfully simplified.
Example: Running backs = not valuable.
At the same time, the entire labor force is changing to fit these supposed truisms. General managers are getting hired, in part, because of their alleged ability to speak this language, subscribe to this data and live in this world, even though owners only have a very cursory understanding of its usefulness. Even though teams supposedly on the analytical cutting edge have sometimes bucked this trend—the Los Angeles Rams once gave Todd Gurley a four-year extension worth nearly $60 million—we seemed to only hear what we wanted to.
Any efforts to go loudly against the grain were then seen as controversial and any general manager who openly rejected those ideas was lampooned, though the only general manager I can think of who did so was Dave Gettleman of the New York Giants. Gettleman, while unsuccessful, was one of the few GMs at the time trying to actively build the antithesis of a leaner, pass-happy offense by gobbling up bigger defensive tackles and hurling resources at the offensive line. He also drafted Saquon Barkley, Andrew Thomas and Dexter Lawrence, three of the best power-style players in the NFL when healthy.
From that gray period we have the rise of teams like the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, which, in totally different ways, were beginning to claw back the common sense value of the running game. They utilized heady backs and understood that explosive plays come from forcing a defense to respect and play every single block and wear themselves out via the consistent act of tackling (interestingly enough, the Shanahan system was initially seen as proof of concept when it came to running back irrelevance, thanks to a cycle of players such as Raheem Mostert and Matt Breida … until Kyle Shanahan traded a large percentage of one draft class for Christian McCaffrey). All of this makes defenses more susceptible to play-action passing and deep explosive passing. San Francisco only faltered after the scheme became so widely consumed and copied that the exact players they found an edge in acquiring were now being overmined and valued elsewhere (while also losing a great deal of intellectual capital as one coach after another left for promotions elsewhere).
The 49ers also faltered because of a failure to evolve upon the scheme itself. This was not without effort on the part of Shanahan, who traded a bevy of picks to draft Trey Lance in an effort to introduce quarterback mobility and power running to the most efficient running game in the NFL. Lance bottomed out as a prospect and, despite his size and speed, proved unable to deliver the kind of draining combination of runs and passes that the 49ers envisioned.
In my opinion, this is where the Eagles grabbed the baton, sensing an obvious opening to create something that would prove to be uniquely effective against an NFL still largely shaped by the anti-power game, anti-back revolution. Having already won a Super Bowl in 2017 by being at the forefront of the RPO revolution, the team saw its advantages winnow as more teams began copying the scheme and learning to defend it. Even after evolving the RPO itself with the RPRO (run-pass-run option) during the Super Bowl run in ’22 that ended in a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, it became clear that playing a finesse style of football and trying to score with teams like the Chiefs was less likely to succeed. Digging in on the antithesis of that, which also lined up with the Eagles’ strengths of a quality, powerful offensive line that is perhaps the best-coached unit in the NFL; as well as larger skill-position players, such as A.J. Brown, with a willingness to block; and a quarterback like Hurts, who is smart enough to audible the Eagles into better run fits and strong enough to plow ahead and gain valuable short yardage (a move that was not without pushback, certainly from a crowd that expected the Eagles to pass given the amount of financial resources put into the wide receiver position and quarterback). In essence, Hurts in this Eagles offense was the realization of what Shanahan hoped Lance would create for San Francisco to get the 49ers over the hump.
And we say all of that to say this: The addition of Barkley to that offense was simply another move in the direction where others were not. It was something that happened only after the Eagles had seen the opening and headed for the light. The remnants of the running back = bad era allowed a historic class of backs—Josh Jacobs, Derrick Henry and Barkley—to hit free agency at the same time and to be massively undervalued when they emerged on to the market. It was fortuitous that, at the same time, Philadelphia had completed its pivot away from a riskier, high-volume passing offense and Barkley was the kind of outlier talent who could build on that pivot. There was an ownership group on top of all this that was unfazed by committing what appeared to be a significant amount of cash to a position that we all deemed useless.
Having Barkley does not directly equate to success. Building an offense that will break the NFL once it possesses a healthy Barkley does. And it takes incredible foresight and courage for a team to be able to see it that way.
To me, this is no different than some of the other pivots into uncharted space that yielded success, such as Baltimore’s focus on smaller-school scouting or skilled manipulation of the compensatory draft pick formula. It just happened on a much larger scale.
So this is what we should remember next Thursday night as we see everyone else quickly trying to assemble a bulkier offense in the vein of Philadelphia. And really, this is what we should remember about Moneyball. The ethos of that particular era we should hang onto is the idea that we should always be searching against the grain; we should realize the fallacy of trying to replicate something that is already successful somewhere else. In the case of baseball, it was spending bad money on inconsistent power hitters during the steroid era and ignoring the usefulness of players with a higher on-base percentage. This time in the NFL, it was abandoning the fool’s errand of building a made-for-television vintage Big 12 offense that could work in the NFL without one of the three best quarterbacks in the league.
Somewhere along the line, we fetishized the wrong tenets of the revolution—both the strange obsession with paying less for stuff when billionaire team owners should always be maximizing their investment into the teams they own and the data points that seemed to point us toward some irreversible conclusion—and became close-minded when, in reality, we were simply being reminded of the true value of seeing what else might be out there.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Memo to NFL Teams: Copy the Post-‘Moneyball’ Eagles at Your Own Peril.
