The HBS case study points out that the NFL has been slow to adopt the sophisticated data crunching that has transformed other professional sports, as famously depicted in the book and film “Moneyball.” League officials say pro football, with 22 men on the field for every play, is more intricate than other sports and harder to analyze with raw numbers. Plus, most teams have been family-owned for decades, with little incentive to adopt modern management practices.
Such industrial-era management set the stage for Deflategate, then stoked the controversy instead of extinguishing it. Until the Colts-Patriots game, for instance, the NFL knew little about the dynamics of air pressure in a football and had ad hoc procedures, at best, for investigating an allegation such as the Colts raised.
“The NFL has very poorly designed processes for really understanding data,” says HBS professor Marco Iansiti, who co-authored the Deflategate case study along with researcher Christine Snively. “It’s pretty clear the refs, as representatives of the NFL more broadly, had no idea what the football pressure was supposed to be on the field."
The league only tested one-third of the Colts balls because the hurried referees had to get back on the field for the start of the second half. So there was never an even-steven comparison between all the Patriots’ and Colts' balls before the refs reinflated all of them.
