Episode description
How do leaders in sports balance analytics with the human element? In this episode, I welcome Paraag Marathe, Chairman of Leeds United Football Club and President of 49ers Enterprises & Executive Vice President of Football Operations for the San Francisco 49ers. We discuss how analytics-based decision-making helps to build successful sports teams. Paraag shares how Leeds United, a club with a rich history that has faced recent challenges, was transformed through decision science and strong leadership that prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term gains. He also stresses the importance of creating a safe environment that shields staff from external pressures, allowing them to focus on data-driven decisions that lead to lasting success.
Key takeaways from this episode include why the emotional framing of decisions matters more than the decisions themselves, the challenges of aligning different time horizons and goals within an organization, and why being an analytics trailblazer requires support from top leadership.
Guest bio
Paraag Marathe is the San Francisco 49ers chief contract negotiator and salary cap architect, in addition to presiding over 49ers Enterprises business ventures and investments. Marathe is chairman of Leeds United Football Club of the English Premier League, with 49ers Enterprises holding principal ownership of the club. Beyond the 49ers, Marathe is a faculty member at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Marathe is a philanthropist, sitting on the Board of Directors for The Body Positive and Sequoia Hospital Foundation – where both of his daughters were born. In recognition, Marathe was selected as a member of the Sports Business Journal’s 2015 Forty Under 40 class, in addition to being a two-time recipient (2012 & 2019) of the Fritz Pollard Alliance’s Johnnie L. Cochran Salute to Excellence Award.
Marathe, his wife, Jennifer, and two daughters, Juniper and Maren, live in Los Altos, California.
Transcript
Producer’s Note: This transcript was created using AI. Please excuse any errors.
Annie: I’d just love for people to be able to hear some of your background. I mean, obviously right now you have multiple hats, not just with the 49ers, but also with Leeds. And there was a journey to get there and just love to hear about how you ended up on that journey, particularly because the start to that journey wasn’t necessarily during, like, what we would think of as like the analytics boom.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: Right? So would love to hear a little bit just about your background.
Paraag: Yeah, certainly. So we’ll start way at the beginning.
Annie: I love it.
Paraag: I grew up playing sports. I loved all sports. I played baseball and soccer primarily, but I really loved everything. I’ve watched everything. I pretty much ate sports for breakfast every day, reading the newspaper, and I just loved it. I wanted to be a professional athlete. Unfortunately, my career capped out in high school. But I just always fancied the sports industry. And, uh, when I got to college my freshman year at Cal, uh, that’s where I was an intended business major and I ended up studying business, but I just always wanted to be in sports.
And I watched the movie Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr. And, um, that’s when I realized for the first time that wow, there’s this whole other part of the sports business where you don’t need to be an athlete or a coach, uh, to be able to have a significant part in the industry. You could be an agent, you could be a GM, you could be a, uh, a club president. You could do lots of different things and still be pretty connected to the sport. So I, uh, back then sent cover letters and resumes to every single sports agent that I could find an address for. Uh, it was 70-something of them. Only one responded. And that was IMG, which is one of the largest, uh, sports marketing agencies in the world, or at least it was at the time.
They enjoyed my cover letter. They wanted to have a conversation, and in the end they offered me an unpaid internship. Uh, they were in San Francisco. I was in Berkeley. Uh, so unpaid meant it cost me money to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) fare every day, and I did it, and I took the job my sophomore year of college, and I did it when all my friends were going into banking, internships or consulting internships or whatever. I was losing hundreds of dollars a month working at IMG, and I wasn’t even working on the true talent side on the sports side of things. I was working on doing, uh, athlete endorsement deals, you know, helping Cadillac when they wanted to sponsor Tiger Woods, for example, and putting the pitch together, and I loved it. I just loved being connected to it.
I also realized during that time, given my three years of unpaid work, that sports is very polarizing compensation-wise. You either get paid very well, or you don’t get paid much at all. There’s not a whole lot of middle class, and so at that time I thought, all right, I’ve got to start paying some bills. I want to move to San Francisco. I want to enjoy my young adulthood. So that’s when I applied to consulting jobs and banking jobs. I ended up getting a consulting job with Bain & Company. Big strategy consulting firm and, uh, I really got my kind of first hardcore education on, you know, business intelligence, business analytics, uh, building data-based strategies and analytical-based strategies.
But because of my sports background, uh, at IMG. Anytime that Bain had a sports client, they were obviously going to put me on it, even though I was the junior analyst on these teams. But anytime Bain had a sports client, they would say, “Paraag, well, do you want to join this team?” Then by chance, Bill Walsh and Terry Donahue, who were the president and GM of the 49ers, reached out to a partner that they knew at Bain for a project on the 2001 draft. And that project was evaluating draft picks, what the currency value, the exchange rate of draft picks, what they’re worth, not the players themselves, but the actual kind of currency value. What’s this first pick worth relative to the 250th pick when you’re making trades? And so there’s an algorithm to it and looking at the expected value of the last 50 drafts and how they panned out, and what should the right exchange rate be.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: So it was a three month almost pro bono project because the 49ers weren’t paying Bain’s rack rates. But Bain got the benefit of having a really high profile client that they could market saying, “Hey, we have the 49 ERs as a client.” But that pro bono type effort meant that no Bain partner was really going to put much of their time into it because they weren’t getting paid for it. So on our case team of four people, it meant that I was the kid doing all the work onsite at the 49ers and I grew up a stone’s throw away from 49ers headquarters. I grew up 15 minutes away from here where I sit today. So for me it was like my dream job.
I was in the draft room on the draft with, like, my idols, Bill Walsh, John McVay, Bill McPherson, Steve Mariucci, Terry Donahue, all there, and helping them figure out the algorithm on if and when they wanted to make a trade. And so that was my first taste of it. I had been at Bain for two years at that time, and after that project ended, they asked me to come join full time.
I had already applied to business schools, um, at that time, which is what you do when you’re two years in banking or consulting. And the essay when they ask you, what do you want to do when you grow up—my essay answer was, I want a chance to run a pro sports team. And so here I was with a dilemma that do I go to school and forgo this opportunity or do I take this opportunity and not go get my MBA? Because sports is like Hollywood. It’s about who you know, not what you know. It’s not a meritocracy. And so if I left it, there’s no way this random Indian kid from Saratoga who never played professionally or had a dad who played professionally, would get that chance.
In the end, Dr. John York, Jed’s father, stepped in and he’s big on education and he said, “Don’t be a fool. Find a way to do school full-time and I’ll talk to Coach Walsh and Terry and everyone here and figure out letting you do full-time work in just different, kind of, hours.” So for two years I did full-time school at Stanford for my MBA, and I did full-time work and it paid for my MBA, which was great.
Annie: So you enjoy working full-time and going to school full-time apparently because you have now done it twice up to this point in the story.
Paraag: Yeah. I did, but it was just more because I couldn’t let it go. Right. Because I knew they’re not going to wait for me.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: I started my career because of that draft project, really doing a lot of analytics-based work on the draft on free agency, doing contract negotiations, research, helping build salary cap models, stuff like that. And that’s just sort of how my career grew. And then after we opened the stadium in 2014, that’s when, you know, we just kind of sat back and thought, all right, we’ve got this really great bench of talented executives, and that’s really because I sort of wanted to pay it forward. I ended up hiring a lot of people at the 49ers that had my kind of background, meaning, didn’t necessarily need to be playing sports, but just people who like sports, love sports, but had really great backgrounds that could add value to us as we were building our stadium and just really building our franchise.
And so we had this great group of people from Silicon Valley, from tech, from consulting, from banking, from venture, all of whom really their first job in sports was with us, many of whom are now presidents of other sports teams—something I’m really proud of.
Come 2014, we thought, wow, we’ve got this powerful global brand in the 49ers. We’ve got this great bench of executives and leaders. We have this intellectual curiosity and appetite to go do more. We’ve sort of transformed the 49ers from playing in the oldest stadium in the NFL to the new stadium at Levi’s Stadium. When I first started, we weren’t very good on the field and obviously we went recently four or five years in the NFC Championship games and two Super Bowls during that time. And so we just wanted to go see like where else could we apply everything that we’ve learned.
And so we went across the pond and looked into English football and Leeds United was an example of a club that really, to me, resembled a lot of what the 49ers were. A club that had a history of success, and by virtue of that historic success, they’ve got a global fan base, but the club had fallen on hard times. It was like an uncut diamond. It just needed someone to restore the luster and build a sort of analytical platform, both on the commercial side and on the sporting side. That can hopefully build sustained success. And so that’s sort of what we’ve been doing in Leeds the last two or three years. And a lot of it is based on, sort of, like empirically based objective decision-making models for however we run our business.
Annie: Yeah. So it’s such a great background because your path is so interesting and really that a-ha moment for you what, you know, I often think about of just the realization of what your options were.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: I think about that a lot in decision-making that just knowing your options, knowing the things that are available to you matter so much, right? And you obviously watched this movie and then you’re like, wait.
Paraag: Yep.
Annie: There’s all these other options that I hadn’t even considered. But I want to hone in for a second on that first project that you did when you were at Bain on valuing draft picks. Just tell me what year that was.
Paraag: 2001.
Annie: So this is super early on.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: So a question that I have for you, because I’ve done some consulting work with NFL teams myself, and this was recently, so I’m trying to put myself into the mindset of 2001 here. Were teams thinking about that in an analytical way? Were they mainly relying on coaches or sort of received wisdom about what draft picks were worth? Were teams in general trying to look historically and actually be able to do price discovery on what each pick might be worth in terms of driving their trade decisions?
Paraag: Yeah, so that’s what’s really fascinating is there was a chart, so to speak, a piece of paper that had ascribed values to each pick in the draft that, um, nobody really knew what it was based off of or where it came from, and everybody used. It was famed to be done by the Cowboys at some point 50 years ago. Everybody knew there was some flaws to it, but that became just sort of the social norm of an exchange rate that was used. And Bill Walsh, you know, the genius of his mind, he always sort of viewed it a little bit differently. So he always made what appeared to be counterintuitive trades because it didn’t match that chart.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: And as we started building our algorithm on, like, what the right formula should be for that, a really fascinating discovery happened. And that was that the ultimate chart that we created, the new exchange rate that we created, when we go back in time and test Bill’s trades that he had done.—he had actually already done it, but he had just happened to know it subconsciously knew whatever it was.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: We were almost like replicating the genius of his mind, you know? It was just really interesting. And the other discovery or epiphany was that we were able to figure out what that chart, that exchange rate was based off of and what the flaw was. So what it was based off of was a market of perfect efficiency.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: If the first pick was actually the best player in the draft and the second best player was picked second, and the third best player picked third, and so on, then the chart and the currency values ascribed to each pick would be accurate. Now, we all know that in real life that doesn’t happen. Error happens. And when you have one error, it impacts in two places.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: Right? Because if the second best player is not picked second, but instead picked 25th, now all of a sudden when you run a 50-year expected value calculation, the second pick in the draft is worth less, the 25th pick in the draft is worth more.
Annie: Is worth more.
Paraag: Right? Now multiply that by, you know, exponentially more decisions that, where there is human error or mistakes made because of, you know, the human component of it. And so the new exchange rate was simply accounting for the average amount of error that happens in any given draft.
Annie: Isn’t there another source of that inefficiency from the standpoint of not just an objective observer, but sort of thinking about each team, right? So isn’t it not just you’re going to make errors in terms of like, you’re not objective or omniscient? So I can’t actually know who the best player is, particularly in terms of things like, what does the best player mean for one thing. And you can’t see into the future to see, like, vulnerability to injuries and things like that. You can estimate them, but you’re going to make errors because you’re not omniscient.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: But isn’t there another issue too, which is that it couldn’t possibly be that the best player is picked first and the second best player is picked second, just on an omniscience level, because it matters what team is picking because they’re picking for positions that they need.
Paraag: No doubt, no doubt. But also, remember, the key thing I mentioned at the beginning is nobody really knew what it was based off of.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: But it became the social norm of how people made trades. It still is to some degree, and so it just became the way of working in the same way real currency was created thousands of years ago. You know, it just became some accepted way at barter.
Annie: I want to kind of get into the mindset of 2001, because one of the things that I think about in the sports analytics world, and I think about this in particular with two things. Thing number one is the three-point shot in basketball. And thing number two is fourth-down decisions in the NFL. And what I find very interesting about them, and I feel like this draft decisioning goes into this same category because there’s a status quo.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: Is that you have these situations where the math is known for a very long time. If you want to maximize your win probability, here’s what you ought to do. And yet it sometimes takes, you know, I mean, in the case of fourth-down decisions, I think two decades, you know, for widespread adoption, and even then it’s not perfect. What are the risks that you’re exposing yourself to when you’re trying to make a choice to maximize win probability, but that choice is going to go against the status quo?
Paraag: I mean, I think there’s just a lot of human factors to it. Let me borrow a page from Leeds United and European football in that, you know, there’s a lot of work done now on set pieces because set pieces are basically corners and free kicks and things like that.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: And there’s the flow of a game when everyone’s running around and there’s the set piece where everyone is static until the kick is made. Right? And so for all intents and purposes, if you have an inferior club playing against a superior opponent, the set piece is kind of the great neutralizer because everyone’s static.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: It’s a designed play or has the opportunity to be a designed play. And so if you are the inferior club, you’re going to get beat 98% or 80% of the time in the flow of a game. But you can get closer to 50/50 on the set piece. So why not spend a majority of your time trying to be a few standard deviations better on the set piece, because it’s such a low scoring game and a binary result, like one-nil or a nil-nil, means such a difference that if you can create a goal from that and be exceptional at that, then you’re so much better off.
And so there’s a lot of work recently that’s been done on that, but there’s just the human element of it. You know, managers want to be great coaches on all aspects of the game. Players, they want to be free flowing, great players on the pitch, not just, you know, really be good at heading the ball into the net or kicking a curved ball on an inside swerving kick or outside swerving kick. Like they just, they want to be more in the flow of the game. So. Just the human element of it and the ego and the confidence and the insecurity, all of those things coming into play. And probably the most important of which is also pressure, right? Media and supporter pressure that you feel if something doesn’t go your way. So they’re just, you almost, I can’t remember who it was. It was in basketball. I can’t remember which NBA coach that just said they’d rather lose by traditional means, rather than lose by untraditional means. And so it’s just, like, safer to do it that way.
Annie: Yeah. People have heard of this concept of loss aversion, right, from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which is we tend to weigh potential losses or we feel potential losses or losses that we’ve experienced one-and-a-half to two times as intensely as an equivalent game.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: So it’s just this thing, like if you win $50 at blackjack, it feels about as good as losing $25 feels bad. Right? So there’s this imbalance, right? Like the losses feel worse.
Paraag: That’s funny. That’s well said. That is me on a craps table.
Annie: There you go. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So the losses are so horrible and the wins are like, that’s nice, but you have to win a lot more to sort of feel the same. Right?
Paraag: Very true.
Annie: There’s something interesting though with loss aversion. How are we thinking about the pain of those losses and that it’s asymmetric depending on whether you’re losing through some sort of standard way through the traditional way to use the term that you use. Right? Is this normally the way we do it?
Are you, is it consensus, right?
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Versus have you done something innovative? I like to run the thought experiment of: it’s 2005, and at some point in a game, particularly if it’s toward the end of the game, you make what looks like a very unusual fourth-down call.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: Right? So you decide to go for it in a spot where people don’t understand that that’s mathematically correct.
Paraag: Uh-huh.
Annie: And you end up losing the game. You know, what happens in terms of the anger toward the decision maker versus you punt, which is mathematically incorrect, and you lose that way.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: And in one case they’re like, ah, you know, man, the defense was too good. You know, they stopped us. And that, you know, it’s sort of all about how good the other team was.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Versus, oh, you were a bad decision maker.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: And the most classic example of this is the 2015 Super Bowl, Seahawks versus Patriots, where Pete Carroll calls for a pass play on the very last play of the game.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: With 26 seconds left. It turns out to be mathematically really smart because if you don’t succeed, you mostly stop the clock and he’s only got one time out. And that gives you an option for three plays instead of two, which, you know, three is better than two, which is the whole basketball three-point shot thing anyway. Obviously the ball gets intercepted and like to this day, it’s what an idiot. He was so bad. Whereas if he had to hand it off to Marshawn Lynch twice, which obviously runs the clock, and 25% of the time they’re going to lose that game that way, I don’t think anybody says boo. Like, nobody makes a peep. Right?
So as you were thinking about this stuff at the 49ers, how did you think about how do I actually implement this and manage this problem that you have as a decision maker, which is how are people going to process the loss depending on which path you’ve taken?
Paraag: Yeah. Again, I think the better example for me to use is Leeds, and that’s because as chairman of Leeds, I need to make it clear and empower people. I want to do what I think is empirically, objectively right or correct. And you won’t be punished for it if it doesn’t work. And it’s a lot easier to just not do the risky thing.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: Not do whatever might be the right thing. You’re better off that way than taking that chance and failing. So I guess another way of saying exactly what you said on the blackjack example. So for me it’s just really not when it comes down to something specific, like a set piece, or what kind of transfer we’re going to go make, or player we’re going to sign for the number nine striker position. It’s really more around let’s objectively evaluate what is the best decision, and let me be your guy’s shield to help tune out the noise.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: Because we’re going to do what’s best for us and over the long haul, hopefully we’re going to be right more than we’re not. And in the end, you’re basically just trying to take 50/50 decisions and make them 52/48 decisions and try to stack as many of those 52% chips as you can. And hopefully you’re going to be right. Now in the championship, which we just got out of, you have 46 games, so you have a lot more, sort of a bigger sample size to be proven right. Halfway through our season, there was lots of media rumblings and supporter rumblings for us to go make a bunch more signings in the January transfer window, and particularly because our direct competitors in and around us in the 1, 2, 3, 4 spots in the table, were making a lot of signings and signing a lot of players from other clubs in that January window.
But objectively speaking, we considered everything. And as we looked at it, we felt like the players on our bench, who were not even getting the minutes because our starting players were playing so well, were better than any of those players. So we’d be signing players and spending money just to satiate supporter or media interest in signing players or even because we need to show our team, we need to show our players, that we’re trying, and that’s why we need to go sign these other guys because it shows the players that we are going for it.
I just disagreed with that because objectively speaking, where the empirical data showed us that the players that we had on our squad that just happened to not be getting minutes and not starting, they were better than any of those players that we could have brought in. There might’ve been one or two examples that were gonna be better, and we tried to get those. But absent that, we weren’t going to bring in guys just to bring in guys, and that proved to be correct.
Halfway through the season, we had guys come into the lineup, by virtue of injury, that ended up being the difference to us winning the title. Whether it was Joe Rothwell coming in in the midfield, or Karl Darlow coming in to replace Meslier, at keeper, whatever it might be. Those guys were the difference and we believed in them because the data believed in them, and I needed to make it okay to everybody that we’re all empowered. We’re all in this together.
Annie: I’m hearing something so interesting in what you’re saying, this idea of you coming in and saying it’s okay. Funnily enough, when you say omission and commission, there’s a bias. It’s called omission commission bias. That’s what I was describing before. When you’re stepping out, right, when you’re doing something innovative, there is so much more risk associated with it, right? When you do things that are SOP and things don’t turn out well, you get a lot of, well, what could you do? What could you have done?
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Right? When you do something that’s innovative, if it happens to work out, you will get called a genius. But the problem is you’ll also get called an idiot. And idiot is so much worse, right? Because we know that psychologically. So how are you dealing with that? What’s the problem? So one of them is I think you could be Bill Walsh or Bill Belichick, and you’re just so successful that people assume if you’re doing it, it’s probably okay. Right? So in some sense, just because you have such a proven track record, any decision that you make, there’s some consensus around it’s probably not terrible. So then people are going to maybe tolerate these things a little bit more.
And Bill Belichick I think is pretty interesting because when you look at his fourth-down decisions, when he was with the Browns, they were terrible. It took a couple Super Bowls before he really started to step out. Because then you have the protection, right? You have the protection of look.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: You can’t really argue that I’m great at what I do, so now I’m going to start to get more correct in terms of maximizing win probability and sort of balancing other things. Right? But another way to do that is for someone to say, as long as we think you’re making good decisions, you’re safe, regardless of what happens with the outcome.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: And I think about this problem in games, which is nobody sees the win probability ticking up and down. I mean, you do if you look at in-game betting, I suppose, but.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: But mostly nobody sees the win probability ticking up and down. They just see that you either won or you lost.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Right? And so it’s hard for people to see the decision quality, but it’s not hard for you as president to see the decision quality so you can protect them. I’m curious when somebody doesn’t have somebody like you. When there isn’t somebody stepping in and saying, we’re not going to do that. You’re safe. We just want to make great decisions. We think this is the right decision. I promise I’m going to stand between you and the fans. I’ll take the blame. Or, you know, the media, I’m going to take the blame, which I think is, that’s an unusual thing, right?
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: How is it that people balance kind of two things, you know, like the different constituencies, people have different goals? And then the other thing I’d love to hear your thoughts on, which I think is related, is balancing out different time horizons.
Paraag: Yeah. Yeah.
Annie: The fans have a different time horizon than the head coach has, than the GM has, than the owner has.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: Right? You’re a very unique case and saying, I’m going to stand in the way of this to create this over here. But I think that that’s not the case for most people. So how does that distort people’s decision-making and actually cause them to make terrible decisions? And then how would you solve it outside of someone coming in and saying, no, I’m going to stand in front of you?
Paraag: It’s a good question. I can’t speak for others, so I’m just going to speculate here that it’s safety. If you can create safety another way, if you don’t have an owner or chairman who’s saying it’s okay, we’re going to focus on the best objective decisions. If there’s some other way to present safety to somebody, then I think it can work.
So let’s say a long-term guaranteed contract for a coach or a first-time manager or a GM or whatever, then maybe you have a little bit more safety to be able to take the time to make those right decisions. I mean, take our friend Sam Hinkie, right? Like if he had more safety, history hopefully shows that like what he was trying, was espousing, was actually the right way to do things. He just didn’t have a little more time to see it through, whereas Theo Epstein did. And so there’s just different examples of like, if you have that safety on it, then maybe that helps.
But you bring up a really excellent point in terms of timelines. Everybody’s life cycle is different and it’s actually why my experience in all sports, both like observed and just seeing from afar experience, is like when a club isn’t totally in sync or not performing well, the first place I always look is like, oh, wait a second. Are the GM, the owner, and the head coach kind of on the same timeline? Right? If a GM has gone through, or a sporting director has gone through, multiple different coaches and all of a sudden he goes and hires his third or fourth coach, and that head coach is in his first-time tenure at a club, they are on totally different life cycles.
Annie: Right.
Paraag: Like the sporting director is just focused on making sure he can win right now or look good that year, that moment, that now. Whereas it’s the manager who comes in is thinking about, all right, I’m building a program. I actually probably don’t want to be too good my first year because I want to continue to show gradual growth. And now you have two people who are on totally different life cycles, right? And who knows what the owner or the chairman wants? Conversely, the clubs that are the most successful, they all have sort of safety, similar tenure, similar life cycle. They’re in it together, whether it’s an ebb or a flow of the actual team’s lifecycle, and they have a much better chance of success. But it is true, like you’re always battling.
For Leeds, we were relegated when we first bought the—a hundred percent of the club. We were in the first year in the championship—desperate to get back up. We spent the most amount of money in the history of the league last year to try to get back up. We went all the way to the Wembley Championship game and lost, and now there’s so much more jeopardy involved in the second season because we really needed to get up. But we also needed to make sure that we weren’t just full tilt, where if we got up that we had burdened the club with so many bad contracts that it was inevitable that we were going to have just one year in the Premier League and get right back relegated and who to—I’m not saying we’re not going to, I’m not saying we are. I’m just saying we are balancing the one year full tilt, go for it, with all of the jeopardy and everything at stake with: we’re actually trying to build a club for two, three year, four year, five year sustained success or be as competitive as we can be. So you’re kind of trying to do both at the same time.
Annie: What I’ve seen in a lot of teams is a conflict, a lot of resistance to sort of the analytics people versus like the coaching decisions. And I’m the coach and I know, and I don’t want these nerds telling me what to do. And I had the pleasure of watching a panel that you were on. I want to say it was from 2014, if that rings a bell.
Paraag: Okay.
Annie: And it was on analytics and sort of what was going to be the role of analytics in football kind of going forward. I noticed this very interesting thing among all the panelists, and even from you, less so, but from you as well, which was this: oh, the humans, we really care about the human decision-making and oh, we’re not trying to overrule them. And we’re, you know, it was this very sort of soft touch sort of tiptoeing around the human decision-making aspect of it in a way, and I thought, oh, this is very interesting because I don’t think there would be this much tiptoeing today. Comparatively, right? Because I think that people are much more accepting of, look—
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: The analytics really matter and it’s actually going to inform my coaching decisions as opposed to make it so that I’m not worthwhile. And obviously you need an interaction between the two, but I need that data in order to outperform, because if you don’t have a good analytics team in an outfit today, you’re just not going to succeed. So I saw this in 2014. You know, the panel is so interesting to see how much delicacy and deference there was being paid to—of course, the coaches are the main decision makers.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: Right? Which they are, but like to the point of like, it’s a tiny bit of analytics, but mostly coaching.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Which I thought was like a really interesting thing at, sort of, the forefront of that world. But obviously you had a unique opportunity with Bill Walsh because he was into it, and so I’m sure that there was much less of that conflict occurring between coaching and what you wanted to do. As you went into Leeds, did you find some of that conflict in a way that you hadn’t necessarily experienced at the Niners? And maybe I’m wrong, maybe there was that conflict at the Niners.
Paraag: Yeah, so I, there’s conflict everywhere. You all—price is the same. Really, the same.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Paraag: But also I would say, you know, I don’t think it’s tiptoeing. Maybe I, maybe I am in the minority here of folks who are a little more focused on analytics, but I really do feel like the human psychology of how the game plays out with players is still really, really important.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Paraag: And a coach’s, manager’s job is to manage that psychology and those collection of egos where some of the parts are greater than individual pieces and bring out the most motivation, right? Everybody is big, strong, fast. Whatever sport. The most successful people are the people who have, they’re going to succeed or die trying. They have such a fear of failure and being able to extract the most out of those individuals—I keep going back to Leeds because it’s just so, the season just ended. But I had this discussion with my coach over the last couple of months on a particular player that I was thinking we should swap out because the data wasn’t good, but he knew that there was something in him that was, that just hadn’t been able to come out and that wasn’t representing itself in the data, but knowing that when the pressure was on, this player was going to come out of his shell and deliver for us, even though the data did not tell that to me. And so, and he, so he didn’t want to make the change. We didn’t make the change and the player blossomed in the last month of the season, which was by far the most kind of high-pressure point part of the season. So to me, that just, again, reinforced what I always thought is that their human psychology element of it, like coaches are psychologists, they have to be able to understand ego and the combination of egos in which the chemistry among pairs and trios and groups of, uh, you know, position groups and whatever, like that matters so much.
And so we in the analytical, decision-making, Decision Education, of what this podcast is, I think we actually try to over sterilize it in a way because it’s not as simple as being able to just make decisions, which is why I’m also not a believer that like AI is taking over sports. Frankly, I think it’s the opposite. I think sports are just on the nascent cusp of what it can potentially go to because AI might take over the rest of the world by, you know, creating rote processes and things like that, but sports is still truly the last sort of bastion of the romance of unpredictability. Because it’s the human element that does actually play a big role.
So. Whatever I said back in 2014, maybe I was partly being deferential and tiptoeing, but it is what I believe, like there is a big part of this that is around, like, finding the right manager to be able to, you know, get the collection of great players. Like Joe Torre, he had an all-star team, right? But it still took his leadership to turn those Yankees into World Series Champions. Now if Phil Jackson, Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, there’s just a, there’s a lot of examples, like it’s great to have all the talent, but you’ve got to go put that together and get the guys to play for a bigger cause as one.
Annie: I completely agree, and I think a great decision process is actually supposed to include those things.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: Articulate them, because obviously you want to be able to, as much as you can, replicate those in the future, that ought to be included in the decision process.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: I was thinking more along the lines of how much are you allowing the coach to overrule math that’s obvious? When I think about why weren’t teams in the aughts going for it on fourth down in spots where it wasn’t a close decision, the differences were quite wide in terms of what is that going to do for your win probability, right?
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: And on any individual decision, they might step in and say, but if we don’t make it, the team’s going to be down, right? Or it’s going to—momentum gets invoked a lot, right, as a reason for not doing that. But obviously if you can keep not doing that, you’re just giving up so much to it and the coaches that are willing to step out and say, no, we’re going to go for it and get buy-in from their players.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Right? Which is part of where they have to be really great psychologists, right?
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: You have to get buy-in from your players and say, we’re different than everybody else because we do this thing that’s right that other people aren’t willing to do.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: But what I saw in a lot of organizations was the coach saying, get these people away from me. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I have feel for when it’s right to go for it.
Paraag: Yeah. I don’t think that’s really the case today. You’re right. People are definitely, kind of, factor in everything. Yeah.
Annie: No, it’s definitely not the case today. But you could sort of sense—what I’m saying is that that 2014 panel, I could sort of sense that there was still that issue going on.
Paraag: Yeah. I’ve got to go watch that again.
Annie: Yeah. It was really interesting. It was like you could sort of feel that issue going on where it’s like, I don’t want to make a coach mad.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: Now I think everybody has caught up and everybody wants that information now.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: But I find the evolution really interesting, right? And what I think happens in these types of arenas is that you have people who are trailblazers start to have tons and tons of success, and then other teams are like, ooh, if I don’t do that, then I’m never going to do well. And it kind of gets everybody to follow along and start to understand like, okay, what—but I have to do it now.
Paraag: Right? Yeah. Fascinating.
Annie: Yeah. And the question is like, are you willing to be a trailblazer? And how do you create a culture, which I think you’ve done a great job of, of making it so that you can be the trailblazers and not the ones lagging behind to try to catch up.
Paraag: Right. Yeah, it’s interesting.
Annie: Yeah. So let’s do some quick questions.
Paraag: Okay.
Annie: We’re going to do a lightning round. Here’s the first one. If you had to think of, like, a decision-making tool or an idea or strategy that you would want to pass down to the next generation of decision makers, what would it be?
Paraag: Oh, well then it’s actually something that I’ve been talking about here on this podcast, which is the extra dimension of decision-making, which is the psychology of it.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: You know, I teach a class in negotiations at the business school at Stanford, and, in a negotiation, what you get is not nearly as important as what you feel about what you get. And that is more important than the actual thing being transacted or traded or negotiated. So same thing here. It’s like I will take a six-out-of-10 piece of decision-making framework that is communicated at a 10-out-10 level every day of the week over a 10-out-of-10 piece of decision framework that is not communicated well.
Annie: That goes back to what we just talked about, which is a great coach, who wants to step out and be a trailblazer, first of all has to have safety.
Paraag: Yeah.
Annie: But also has to be great at communicating it to the players.
Paraag: Right.
Annie: So you have to say, look, this is why we’re doing this. Otherwise it’s not that great a decision tool because it’s going to break your culture.
Paraag: Mm-hmm.
Annie: I love that, by the way. That’s such a unique answer. Do you have a book in particular that you would recommend to listeners who want to improve their decision-making?
Paraag: Yeah. I can’t remember who wrote it now. It’s a book called Getting to Yes. It’s again, it’s a negotiating book.
Annie: Yeah.
Paraag: And it’s sister book Getting Past No, which is all around the communication aspect of whatever it is that you’re selling. I keep going back to it, but it’s such an undervalued component of decision-making.
Annie: For people who want to learn more about your work or follow you on social media, where should they start?
Paraag: Hmm. I’m not a public social media person at all. I generally like to have my actions speak for me, and so follow along as we go and try to build success.
Annie: So follow along with Leeds United.
Paraag: Let’s see what happens. Exactly.
Annie: And the San Francisco 49ers. All right. I have one closing question, which is if the Alliance for Decision Education is successful in its goal to get Decision Education to every K-12 student as part of their learning experience, what impact on society do you think that would have?
Paraag: That’s a great question. I just think you build more thoughtful, empathetic, well-rounded analytical minds. You know, we tend to take a lot of shortcuts or we tend to follow whatever our confirmation biases might take us, or our recency biases, whatever we most recently heard. But to a proper decision framework, Decision Education helps you treat all information with equal skepticism. And I think that’s a really key component to just growing individually.
Annie: Thank you so much for coming on.
Paraag: Yeah, of course.
Annie: For anything that we talked about, books, we’ll make sure that that panel gets linked in the show notes that I had the pleasure of watching, you’ll be able to look at the show notes.
Paraag: Okay.
Annie: Really appreciate the conversation and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with me today.
Show notes
Books
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Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In – Roger Fisher; William Ury; and Bruce Patton (1991)
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Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations – William Ury (1993)
Films
Resources
Websites