Column: Leveling the playing field: ‘Moneyball’ in the Ivy League

Here’s a hypothetical exercise:

Three Ivy League students — a math major, a computer science major and a politics major — are bored on a Friday night. “Moneyball” is playing at the local theater. Although the three have little interest in sports, they decide to check it out — it’s free for students, after all, and they have nothing better to do.

They enjoy the movie — the story resonates with them. They pick up a copy or two of the book at the bookstore the next day and blow through it. While on-field action has never appealed to the trio, a fresh look at the maneuvering that happens behind the scenes grabs their attention.

They begin to do a good deal of research online. They dig deep into the abstracts and papers that have come to define the new movement in baseball. But baseball is a static game, with a set number of outcomes — the players seem to the students to be essentially stat-generating robots, and the concept of a team as more than the sum of its parts is almost non-existent. As the author, Michael Lewis ’82, writes, “Baseball is an individual team masquerading as a team one. By doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what’s best for the team.”

Besides, the revolution is already well underway in baseball. The three students are more interested in breaking new ground. They decide to focus their efforts on their university’s men’s basketball team and immediately get to work.

Basketball is much tougher going. It is more fluid, and the vague areas of cooperation and chemistry, so important in basketball, are more difficult to quantify. Our math major goes to every home game, taking down stats — some are traditional, some are stolen from forward-thinking NBA executives, some are his own intuitive guesses as a newcomer about what is important.

He looks at the minutes players are getting, and soon he begins to find inefficiencies in the way the team is being coached. He notes how well each player plays on a per-minute basis rather than a per-game basis. He notes which five players are most objectively successful when they are on the court together and which lineups yield less success. By now he is heavily invested. He delves deeper into the available literature and begins finding even more accurate statistics.

One night, he shows all the work he has been doing to the two friends with whom he saw “Moneyball.” While he has been doing it mainly for fun, the politics student is excited about the possibilities going forward, and he suggests that the three of them take the info to the coaching staff. The next week, they present their findings. While the staff members are initially skeptical, the longer the students talk, the more solid their logic appears. The head coach feels that perhaps these kids are seeing the game in a way he doesn’t see it, a fresh way. The team is not in the national spotlight, and he has a fair amount of leeway — trying something new, at least for a little while, is an interesting idea. He takes the three students on as temporary unpaid consultants.

Over the course of the next few weeks, there are subtle differences in the way the team is managed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the team improves. What once might have been a two-point loss is now a one-point victory. The next season, the pattern continues. The team outperforms expectations, and the three students realize they are on to something.

During the off-season, the men’s basketball coach approaches the athletic director. He says he has a way to turn the basketball team into a real contender, but that he needs more money to make it happen. To the coach’s surprise, the director, who has watched the team’s winning ways with interest, consents. But he needs to free up the money somehow. Looking around the department, he has his eye on a couple relatively cost-inefficient sports. In this hypothetical situation, he chooses fencing and golf. Both require a great deal of time and money from the school — for equipment, travel and course fees. Basketball, in contrast, is a moneymaker. The court is already built, and the tickets are selling well.

The director cuts funding for the two other teams by half and diverts the savings to the basketball team. The money is put toward scouting a wider and deeper talent pool. Scouts are sent from the university to high schools throughout America and told to look for specific, undervalued traits. The computer science major writes a program that takes an individual high school senior’s stats and, based on the system, decides how many resources it is worth to pursue him. Other high-level Division I colleges may not have the same regard for the students our hypothetical university is now recruiting, but they are good players nonetheless. They have seen the school’s recent success and figure the team is heading in the right direction. They come for this and the academic reputation.

The team is by now a consistent winner, but an enormous inefficiency remains that they have yet to exploit: academic record. It is no secret of life that it is extraordinarily difficult to be a good Division I athlete. It is less difficult if you can sacrifice your studies in high school to spend more time practicing your chosen sport.

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The Ivy League requires that Ivy League athletes must have an Academic Index of at least 171, but the school’s standards in basketball are generally higher than that. The team’s average Index Score is well above 171. The coach, who has gained a good deal of influence, asks for permission to begin recruiting students at or near the cutoff line. Permission is granted, and almost immediately more talented basketball players begin flocking to the program. They are attracted to the opportunity for a great, need-blind education combined with a winning program. And besides, other Ivy League schools are unlikely to accept them.

It is only a matter of time before the team begins dominating the conference. Given even more time, it becomes a serious national contender. The atmosphere on campus is electric. The players are mini-celebrities, and home games sell out weeks in advance. Alumni giving rates and giving amounts improve. Through ticket and jersey sales and TV deals, the team generates a great deal of money that helps to support other sports, fencing and golf included. The three students, all adults now, gather at the math major’s home one Friday evening in March several years later to watch their alma mater play in the Sweet Sixteen. It is the first time since the tournament expanded to 64 teams that the school’s basketball team has been so deep.

There we have three concentric circles of “Moneyball,” first on a team level, then on a school wide level and finally on a conference and national level. Harvard, the heavy favorite to win the Ivy League this year, is in the early stages of a less-dramatic version of it, having devoted more institutional resources to its men’s basketball team. Though time will tell just how far the new philosophy takes the Crimson, one thing is for sure — with a history of losing, the team knew it could not turn things around by doing things the same old way, and it took a chance on something different.

The question for Princeton fans, though, is this: If this scenario came to pass here, would you endorse or reject it?