When the Vikings hired Mike Zimmer, I started following the team again. They improved quickly from pathetic to respectable. I searched for football news that wasn’t just gossip or marketing to help me understand what I was watching. I found Pro Football Focus (PFF). They didn’t just take available statistics and crunch the numbers. They built their own foundation by watching each player on each play, assigning a grade, and then applying analytics with that information. There are parallels between the lessons of football analysis and the lessons of analysis for our culture. They are outlined below. The lessons are in bold. The context here is the NFL--but can you see how they might be lessons for American culture as well? PFF tries to be objective, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make decisions. Any decision process can be criticized as biased. That does not mean every decision process is equal. PFF makes judgments about how good or bad a play is. They judge every player on eve
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