advanced metrics usage in sports media - a multi-sport discussion thread

my initial post will be association football related, but obviously I would like to see the full scope of advanced metrics in sports media discussed.

in watching numerous football writers discuss team performance throughout various leagues, North American, European, etc, there's almost always a team they rate ridiculously high given their on-field performance, and the justification is always "their underlying numbers show they're underperforming and should level out over time when things start clicking". and then a team that IS doing well knocked down several pegs by saying "their underlying numbers show they're overperforming, and ergo lucky, and should regress to the mean".

I think advanced metrics are valuable and read niche blogs about them, but it always weirds me out when I see mainstream writers incorporating it, since it almost always seems they're not using it right.

like if a team scores far fewer goals than xG (expected goals) on a season, that doesn't actually mean they're inherently 'unlucky'. xG is based on the abilities of an average player. it could also mean the team is filled with below-average finishers. likewise, a team or player over performing xG could just be due to superhuman talent a la Messi.

to me it has seemed like a bummer in that I'll turn up to read discussion on football leagues and the analysis of a team's performance is almost 100% advanced metrics (often misused), and very little description of what's happening on the field.

is this just me, or does anybody else get a little annoyed by it appearing in everybody's column, whether they understand the metrics they're describing or not? or do you find it helpful? is this largely a push by the companies that create the technology that provide the advanced statistics?

also what sports do advanced metrics tend to dominate discussion more than not? how does this work in other sports?

idk fill this conversation up with whatever you want! :)

We've been arguing about analytics on I Love Baseball since I first posted in ~2010. I'd draw an analogy, though, to the politics threads, where everyone is somewhere on the left, it's just that that's a wide, wide spectrum. I'd say that everyone on ILB accepts the basic premises of analytics/sabermetrics, but there's still a spectrum as to how hardline you are about things like when to take the starting pitcher out, the truth or non-truth of various "intangibles," how meaningful something like a Triple Crown is, etc. Morbius was very hardline. I still miss some of the myths I grew up with, before we figured everything out.

Advanced Analytics encourage lazy journalism hand-in-hand with every single sports desk living through perpetually decreasing budgets and resources. See how the Athletic was a thing for a while independently so the NYT bought it and then turned it into the same shit they already had.

I am interested to see HawkEye in Basketball with the plan to follow something like 27 points of the player vs the established 1. I get the sense it is going to create vast amounts of noise with a nice little arms race to try and work out what actually matters.