Truehoop has been doing a fine job covering the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. One post from last Saturday highlighted five quotes “On how far people have delved into the potential of analytics“:

“We are nowhere yet.”
— Morey

“There is a human element in sports that is not quantifiable. These players bleed for you, give you everything they have, and there’s a bond there.”
— Bill Polian, ESPN NFL analyst

“When visualizing data, it’s not about how much can I put in but how much can I take out.”
— Joe Ward, The New York Times sports graphics editor

“If you are not becoming a digital CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), you are becoming extinct.”
— Tim McDermott, Philadelphia Eagles CMO

“Even if God came down and said this model is correct … there is still randomness, and you can be wrong.”
— Phil Birnbaum, By The Numbers editor

In other words, there is a lot of potential in these statistics and models but we have a long way to go in deploying them correctly. I think this is a good reminder when thinking about big data as well: simply having the numbers and recognizing they might mean something is a long way from making sense of the numbers and improving lives because of our new knowledge.