Bill Belichick receives prestigious award
For Bill Belichick, Head Coach of the New England Patriots, the praise keeps on coming. Not only recognized as the coach of one of the greatest NFL franchises in the last decade, Belichick has also been honored with the lifetime achievement award.
The award was recently given out on March 2 at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference is open to all interest in sports as a forum to discuss the role analytics plays in sports. The conference has been meeting since 2006, and has been giving out the prestigious award for the past two years. Bill James, famed baseball analytic expert, was the first to have been honored with such recognition.
Bill Belichick often comes off with an “old school’ mentality and approach to the game of football, but he is always ready to dive into the numbers to combine what makes sense and what has worked in the past. While he puts a great deal of stock in the conventional wisdom of football, Belichick is not afraid to give credit where credit is due.
“We all have different responsibilities,” Belichick told the conference. “I certainly respect the mathematical and statistical ways of looking at the game and trying to use those methods and results to improve our product on the field.”
The use of analytics is a rather revolutionary aspect of the sports world, and it keeps on growing each year. With more men like Bill Belichick who take a look at the deeper level of sports statistics you can bet that analytical analysis will become a fixture in all professional sports.
