The Inefficiency Was the Point

Why optimization is the enemy of fans.

Last week, a couple of co-workers and I were having a conversation about the appeal of the Olympics.

Storylines, mastery, and patriotism were the three most-discussed drivers. But we agreed on the core belief that sports are about relationships.

Sports fandom intersects with relationships along two avenues—the fan-to-player relationship, and the fan-to-fan relationship. The former barely exists in the Olympics. You don’t follow skeleton the other three years and eleven months. Patriotism, maybe, fills that void. But what if the fan-to-fan relationship is actually the more powerful of the two all along—Olympics or not.

If that’s true, then the sport itself isn’t the product. It’s the vehicle. We don’t really care whether Matt Weston or Axel Jungk wins gold in the skeleton, or whether Michigan or Duke wins at a neutral site on a Saturday in February. What we care about is the text thread that fires up. The Twitter/X argument about Michigan’s lack of physicality. The feeling of being in something together—a gateway to a deeper conversation with a friend, a reason to call your dad. The relationship that truly matters is the one between fans, and the sport is simply what puts us all in the same room.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: if sports is the vehicle, what happens when we start tinkering with the engine?

Because lately, it feels like fans are increasingly frustrated with the sports they love. And it’s not just typical disappointment of a bad season marred by injuries. It feels as if it’s something more structural.

I believe it stems from the idea that the things that make sports work as a vehicle for human connection are increasingly being optimized away.

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The NBA is in its optimization prime. Front offices have become so analytically driven that the product on the court has fundamentally changed. And it’s gotten to the point where fans have taken notice.

Tanking

The topic every content creator seems to be salivating over right now is tanking. Tanking has been a quiet part of the league’s ecosystem for four decades, but the line has been crossed.

The fix-it ideas are flying: no top-four pick two years in a row, flattened lottery odds, limited pick protections in trades, eliminate the draft entirely. Adam Silver has apparently seen enough. Last week he held a call with all 30 front offices and shed his signature I-want-everyone-to-like-me-but-I-still-sound-like-an-annoying-lawyer act to sternly notify teams that changes are coming.

Silver told the executives on the call that the league had to change incentives ‘and mindsets.’ Silver’s delivered message was…’This is not who we are going to be as a league.’

Adam Silver is the commissioner of a dynasty fantasy football league whose members are benching Puka Nacua or JSN in a week with playoff implications just to secure a better draft pick. The fantasy commish’s solution would be simple: “Don’t be an asshole.” I’m sure Silver wished it were that easy.

It’s not just $1,200 on the line in the NBA world, but the counter-argument remains unchanged. These teams aren’t being assholes. They’re being rational. The league has built an environment where mediocrity is the worst possible outcome. So front offices optimize their losing: phantom injuries, starters pulled in close games. They’re playing the odds correctly and killing the league’s integrity in the process.

This is what optimization looks like when it metastasizes. Nobody in those front offices is cackling like a villain. They’re simply following the data to its logical conclusion. The teams aren’t broken. The incentive structure is, and front offices found the exploit. Tanking is just the most visible symptom of a disease that runs much deeper through the sport.

Load Management

The conversation about load management dominated the first half of the NBA season the same way tanking has dominated the second. It was implemented roughly 15 years ago to preserve older stars through a deep playoff run—reasonable enough on its face. But it has since evolved into a league-wide practice that has devalued the regular season. The game has never been more physically demanding, and the gap between regular season and playoff basketball has never been wider.

There’s enough blame to go around. The league’s own refusal to shorten the season, knowing what it would cost them in media rights, earns them a seat at the table as well. But it doesn’t change the outcome: the NBA regular season has worsened as load management’s prevalence has risen.

Shot Selection

The third form, and my least favorite, is shot selection. I’ve been an avid NBA fan my entire life. Everyone points to the Warriors as the ones who changed the game with the 3-point revolution. As a Warriors fan, I’m honored. But I am of the belief the analytics movement was getting us here regardless. The mathematically optimal shot in today’s NBA is the three or the layup. Everything in between has been mostly phased out.

At risk of sounding like an old-head casual, I won’t mention how Kobe’s mid-range fadeaway wasn’t just a shot but a personality. This is not to say all modern stars have the same play style. Shai’s game and Ant’s game are nothing alike. It’s more the role player level where the freedom around shot selection has narrowed considerably. The product, especially in the regular season, has become homogenous in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.

Luckily, the NBA has a case study on fixing this issue with its product. The shift was the MLB equivalent of the mid-range death. Teams utilized analytics to identify the optimal defensive alignment for each opposing hitter. Players like Joey Gallo made defenses contort in ways that didn’t look or feel like baseball.

Baseball fixed it. Took forever, required actual rule changes, and the purists screamed the whole way through, but the game with the shift ban, bigger bases, and pitch clock looks and feels like baseball again. And to the NBA, I believe the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Player-driven Media

The fourth form of optimization I’ve observed is the most hidden—and in some ways the most damaging.

The beat writer was once responsible for telling the story of a player or team. The decline of reading and the economics of modern media have pulled reporters off beats and reduced the writers covering a sport for a major publication altogether. Into that vacuum stepped the players themselves with their podcasts, vlogs, streams, and newsletters.

Fifteen years ago we as fans would have killed for this kind of access. And now we have it, but at what cost? A beat writer reads the label from outside the bottle. A player running his own podcast is reading it from inside. He's telling you what he wants you to know, framed exactly how he wants you to hear it. The storylines of the game haven’t disappeared, but they definitely were optimized. The content has become PR. And a press release isn't a story.

The NBA isn’t Alone

MLB is implementing the ABS challenge system this season—allowing players to contest ball and strike calls. The logic is straightforward: reduce human error, increase accuracy, put outcomes more firmly in the players’ hands. A neutral observer would call that progress. Fans might even say they want it.

I’d argue they’re wrong about what they want.

The blown call is part of the game. Not despite being wrong, but because of it. Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game. The infield fly call in the first-ever Wild Card game. Joe Nathan’s egregious strike three against Ben Zobrist. These moments live in the memory precisely because they were human, and argued over, and unresolved. Fans want accuracy until the moment accuracy robs them of a grievance—and the grievance, it turns out, was half the fun.

And then there’s the great and untouchable NFL.

I won’t argue that coaches shouldn’t have challenges or that instant replay should be abolished. Though if I were making my strongest case for that, it would involve the NFL—what even is a completed catch anymore?

With the NFL, optimization has taken a different form. It’s not happening on the field. It’s happening to the identity of the league itself. Ethan Strauss framed it better than I can:

“The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest…The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And so you start forgetting about your base.”

Strauss is referring to the fact that the Super Bowl halftime show is no longer for football fans. It’s for the people the NFL wants to convert—the undecided whale.. The same logic drives international expansion: the NFL, NBA, and NHL all chasing markets that don’t yet belong to them while serving their core fans less and less.

The NFL’s product on the field doesn’t have the same optimization problems as the NBA or MLB. But there’s a version of this story where they erode the thing that made them unbeatable—not by changing the game, but by changing who the game is for.

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Sports works as a vehicle for human connection because it resists the things that have consumed everything else in our lives. Our feeds are optimized. Our recommendations are optimized. Our entertainment is optimized. Sports, at its best, is the place where the wrong thing can happen. And we get to talk about it together.

The optimization of sports isn’t coming from bad actors. It’s coming from rational ones—front offices, leagues, broadcasters, and players all following the data to its logical conclusion. The tanking team isn’t evil. The load-managed star isn’t lazy. The NFL chasing its next billion isn’t villainous (to some). They’re all just following the incentives to where they lead. The problem is that where they lead, in every case we’ve looked at, is a worse product. Not worse by the metrics. Worse in the way that actually matters—less to talk about, less to argue over, less to feel.

Sports is the last American monoculture. The last thing we all watch, argue about, and gather around together. Mike Tirico seemed to agree when he signed off the Winter Olympics:

“For all the young people out there, those dreams are formed now. Go chase them and go get them, because our country loves sports and it brings us together unlike anything else. And if you didn’t know that…you saw it in Team USA Hockey.”