One fun thing about GMU's Final Four run is that it has caused the national spotlight to fall on some of the centers of excellence here at GMU that had previously been little-known, including, of course the law school, but other programs as well.
Another area, known to VC readers through our co-conspirator Tyler Cowen, is the GMU Economics Department. There have been a number of excellent articles about our colleagues in the Econ Department in recent days. Two especially good articles describing the rise of GMU's Economics Department are in the Washington Post (focusing on Peter Boettke, Robin Hanson, and Vernon Smith's work) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (focusing on Jim Buchanan's work). Many readers may have already seen Peter Boettke and Alex Tabarrok's article in Slate that explains the success of GMU's Economics Department as well.
Given the close relationships between the Law School and the Economics Department (we often co-teach classes and several Econ professor teach in the law school), readers will not be surprised to learn that Boettke and Tabarrok attribute the success of GMU's Economics Department to following a Moneyball strategy, a model that at least one GMU Law Professor extolled as the secret to the Law School's success (the full text of John J. Miller's article on GMU Law is now available here). In fact, I was the guy who first lent Pete a copy of Moneyball to read a few years ago, so I figure I am allowed to chime in a bit here. While I might quibble a bit with some of their application of the model I think their analysis is basically sound.
I would add just one further point of elaboration to their Moneyball analysis of the basketball program. I heard Coach Larranaga on the radio this week addressing the precise question of how he managed to find these kids on the team who were overlooked by the larger schools. Larranaga suggested that he just looks for something different from what the big programs are looking for in a player. Larranaga says that rather than just looking for kids with the best individual skills, who all the big-name programs focus on, he looks for kids who come from winning high school programs. The idea is to find kids who are know how to win and are willing to do what it takes to win, which means working hard, listening to the coach, and playing as a team. First he mentioned this stunning statistic that Will Thomas and Rudy Gay both went to high school in Baltimore and that Thomas's teams are now 8-0 playing against Gay's teams in their careers. He then proceeded to list the key players on the team, noting that every one of them (if I remember correctly) had played for a state champion or major city champion in high school. Larranaga indicated that he thought that it was this intangible commitment to winning that accounts for the selflessness of the team in terms of sharing the ball, running the game plan, playing defense, and doing the hard work to win. If this is true, it is a fascinating observation that commitment to winning (versus raw talent) is an undervalued attribute in the modern basketball marketplace.
So I think that the interesting point here is that Larranaga suggests that even now the big-time programs probably wouldn't really want any of these GMU kids because they are not the individual superstars with brilliant talent that those teams are looking for. So it is not that somehow those programs "missed" these kids, but rather that those programs have a different model of talent acquisition. It is only when melded together in Larranaga's system, with the emphasis on the way in which their individual skills complement one another within the system, that their total value is maximized.
Those interested in the relatively new JD-PhD Economics Joint Degree Program and the LLM in Law & Economics Progra at George Mason can find more information here.
As for me, I am off tomorrow for Indianapolis and the Final Four. Thanks for indulging my occasional sports post around here over the past week or two.
Go Mason!
I will never read anything about GMU without thinking it should be renamed GPU. Sorry for the off topic post. I'm on a personal mission to ensure that in all the hype, no one forgets the groin punching.
I began to suspect this several decades ago when a local high school player garnered all kinds of news coverage for scoring 50-60 points a game while his team couldn't make the playoffs.
Of course, the whole point of Moneyball is that Billy Beane rejected overvalued intangibles such as being a "winner" or a "gamer" in favor of objective, measurable skills such as plate discipline and power.
It's an irony, but not a contradiction, because it may be that such intangibles are (or were) overvalued in professional baseball but undervalued in college basketball.
First, have you even read moneyball? It would scoff at something like the “intangible” of knowing how to win. It would also scoff at the idea that you can learn anything from one team’s success in one year. Talk to me in five years after GMU consistently puts winners on the court.
Second, lets be honest: GMU isn’t that good. If they were such an elite team they would have had a better regular season record. They’re here because they’ve been a bit lucky and they’ve been playing good basketball at the right time of the year.
One of the great things about the NCAA tournament is that anything can happen in one game. It doesn’t say anything deep about any one particular team or their style of winning.
Keep in mind, though, that basketball is a very different sport. Fundamentally, baseball is an individual sport, coming down to that individual pitcher/batter duel. In comparison with that, the team aspects of the game are quite secondary. Basketball is a team sport in almost every aspect. Thus, the undervaluing of such intangibles might be a real phenomenon in the basketball world.
You can't read anything into one team's "success" in one year. Isn't this statistics 101?
Basketball, on the other hand, requires a sum of the parts, five guys willing to play as a group and do what is best for the team on every possession, on both ends of the floor. Something like "good player on winning teams" might be a good proxy for what Larranaga is talking about. I could see those intangibles being undervalued in basketball as people focus so much on individual talent. In baseball, many of those intangibles are totally worthless. AJ Pierzynski is a great example -- detested in San Fran, but loved by his teammates in Chicago and they won it all. From "clubhouse cancer" to "championship engine" in one year.
On the same token, in basketball you can have a team like the Bulls, who have some talent but many of whom Paxson has been drafting from winning teams and at least manage to stay in the playoff hunt with smoke and mirrors (i.e. Skiles), as opposed to the Knicks, who have piles of talent and a hall-of-fame coach but stink to high heaven.
BB, while basketball is more of a “team game,” there’s no proof that being a good “team player” matters much in basketball. Instead, all we have is “conventional wisdom,” which, as Moneyball itself argued, is often wrong and rooted in biases that go back to the inception of the sport.
I think the real Moneyball lesson basketball teams should learn is that teams should continue to focus in on individual stats, but they should be smart about which stats they focus in on. Much like baseball teams worried too much about batting average, homeruns, and RBIs, basketball teams focus too much on scoring, assists, and rebounding averages. Basketball teams should be focusing in on numbers like shooting percentages and assist-to-turnover ratio.
You point to the Knicks to support your argument, but they don’t help you because they don’t have much talent. They have a bunch of overrated players who can’t shoot. See, e.g., Marbury.