Jonathan Kraft Makes Uneasy Bill Belichick Compliment

Patriots president Jonathan Kraft is well aware of the power head coach Bill Belichick has on the field. It’s all about his version of “machine learning.”

“I think if you wanna use a football coach like Bill Belichick who’s coached football for 40 years, you might not call it data, but he’s got a steel trap for a mind,” Kraft said at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Friday. “Every instance of everything he’s ever seen — he won’t call it data, and he won’t call it machine learning, but his brain is a machine and it’s machine learning. So you can call it old-school coaching — Bill probably wouldn’t like it called machine learning, but that’s effectively what it is.”

Last season, the Patriots head coach told media members that analytics weren’t none of his interest.

“You could take those advanced websites and metric them wherever you want,” he said in 2016. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I’ve never looked at one. I don’t even care to look at one. I don’t care what they say … All the metric pages and all of that, I mean I have no idea. You’d need to ask that to a smarter coach than me.”

Jonathan Kraft praises analytics

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts the annual Sloan Conference. It relies on advancements and issues within the sports analytics industry. Kraft talked alongside commissioner Don Garber at a panel discussing Major League Soccer’s success. Does Belichick use advanced analytics at the sidelines? Kraft doesn’t mind any of that. He shared his opinion of the industry’s advancements.

“I think that data in any business, with anything you’re doing should be a part of the decision-making tools,” Kraft said. “If you’re not open to understanding what’s out there, then you’re putting your team at a competitive disadvantage.”

Jonathan co-owns MLS’ New England Revolution with his father.

“On the football side of the house, data doesn’t get used as much [as in soccer] in charting the play-by-play stuff. I know people talk about it all the time, it still really doesn’t,” Jonathan Kraft said. “You might look at certain tendencies and other things and probabilities around certain decision tools, but I would say that in football it’s one of a number of ingredients that go into a gameplan, whereas in soccer now, for coaches who believe in it, I think it might even be the primary — one of the two or three primary drivers.”

Kraft said that unlike his team, the Revolution has always been “on the cutting edge of analytics.”

“On the soccer side of the house, we hired our first data analyst over a decade ago. I think we might have been the first team in the league to have one,” he said. “We’re tracking every player’s movement on the field, how passes are made, how teams perform in the different thirds, et cetera.”