Several years back I ended up making "moneyball for college paintball" largely inspired by a combination of Moneyball the book and Michael Lewis' article about Shane Battier [0].

That experience led me to have a couple thoughts:

- Many people think that Moneyball was about On Base Percentage. Really, it was about how to use analytics to figure out what the undervalued metric is to focus on.

- Moneyball is great on its own. When you try to do your own version of Moneyball in a sport you care deeply about, it's as if you find another "level" of the book. For example, this quote from the book (paraphrased): "You can't see the difference between a .275 and a .300 hitter. It's an extra hit every two weeks." You realize HOW MANY parts of sports are essentially invisible unless you take the stats and then analyze them.

- Another example of the above is the quote "it's a system only a rich team could afford but only a poor team looking for an edge would buy". Having worked at a lot of startups (4), I've often told this story when people are deciding whether to pay for some 3rd party tool that will have a big impact. Sometimes it's not worth it but sometimes it can really change the outcome.

- Going in to the whole process, I wasn't sure how well I could track stats in something as complicated as college level tournament paintball. I started with just a clipboard with some paper and a stopwatch. At the end of the day, that was really all I needed to get DEEP insights on how the game worked, game theory in different scenarios and which players were adding or taking away from our win percentage. A reminder of "you can just do things"

- One unexpected outcome: I got to the point where I could watch a game and know exactly what the win probabilities were as the game went on. It was like watching the World Series of Poker where you see the odds of each hand. This was both great b/c I new the next game theory optimal call or play to do. It was terrible when I knew the odds of winning a big game went below 5% (although we did occasionally win some of those too)

0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html

I like the watching NFL. I started playing fantasy football a few years ago and I see a similar phenomenon. Once I got into the weeds on current and future player ability and stats, it was like a new dimension of the game opened up to me.