other RESEARCH PROJECTS
Take That for Data: Decoding Identity, Sport, and Technology
In 2017, David Fizdale, head coach for the Memphis Grizzlies, sat down for a post-game press conference following a first-round playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs. Fizdale, in his first season as a head coach, praised his team's effort in the 96-82 loss but spent most of the presser admonishing the officiating crew. He notes the number of times his players went to the free throw line versus their opponents, the most staggering statistic being Kawhi Leonard's 19 free throws compared to the Grizzlies approaching the free throw line a mere 15 times for the entire game. "I'm not a numbers guy," Fizdale says, "but that doesn't seem to add up." He then argues that the "numbers" speak to the disrespect of his roster and his own status as a newer face in the association — this is something he sees beyond the box score. "I know Pop's got pedigree, and I'm a young rookie, but they're not going to rook us," Fizdale declares, accentuating his raucous reading of the referees with a final phrase, "Take that for data!"
Fizdale runs down the numbers and then reads them through the political and cultural norms of the league — whiny players get more calls (whereas he describes Mike Conley as having "class"), and seasoned coaches get heard as they scream on the sidelines for calls. To understand the Grizzlies' loss solely through how many times they got to the line would be to miss out on crucial aspects of the game itself. The phrase rapidly circulated across the sports Twittersphere, ripe for spreadability through memes and headlines. Shea Serrano of The Ringer published an article titled “Twenty-five Completely Reasonable Uses of David Fizdale’s ‘Take That for Data’" while the Memphis Grizzlies promptly printed shirts with the phrase available for purchase at their arena.
Beyond its lifespan across social media, the phrase seemingly reflects a growing contention in sport between the so-called "eye test" — that is, the cultural and embodied knowledge acquired through participating and experiencing sport — and the use of advanced technology through analytics, wearables, and artificial intelligence to predict and enhance sports performance. This book is located at the intersection of these tensions, many of which have intrigued me for some time. I am grateful to David Fizdale for providing the backdrop to this project and an apt title to boot.
We speak of smart homes, cities, and cars, but in sports, there is a growing emphasis on smart equipment, teams, and arenas. Algorithms inform how rosters are created, while sensors live beneath arena floors, shifts that feel inevitable given the technological takeover that permeates our lives. Far beyond the bounds of Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” approach, advanced sporting technologies have dominated headlines, whether rebuked by former athletes turned halftime analysts or the source of concern following the hacking of a pro team’s data. The techno turn in sports is driven by the following questions — who owns it, who can access it, and how can it be used? It has opened entirely new markets for fans to consume sport and a range of technology to quantify athletic achievement like never before. There is also a lot of money to be made in this new age of analytics. The gamblers, previously camped out at the Vegas books with their spreadsheets, are no longer found solely in smoky spots on the Strip. New media technology allows sports gambling to thrive globally, especially in the world of daily fantasy sports (DFS), visible in the rabid advertising campaigns and eventual "inside trading" allegations involving FanDuel and DraftKings and, more recently, through the explosion of legal sports betting in the United States. The technology that drives the current sports gambling landscape affects how fans engage with athletes and creates new scandals that make the 1919 White Sox bribery fiasco feel like child’s play.
Whether seated behind scouts at the NFL Combine, nestled next to analytics gurus working to build better data for women's sports, or located inside sports science labs aiming to reduce injury risk, this book constantly confronts how notions of race, gender, class, and ability reinscribe historical understandings of identity while also offering new openings to challenge the status quo.
In each of these chapters, I consider the role of advanced sporting technologies through André Brock’s critical technocultural discourse analysis (2018), considering these information and communication technologies (ICTs) through a critical cultural lens to unpack articulations of power in the hardware and software of these technologies and the sociocultural practices of its users. Ultimately, Take That for Data aims to contribute to examinations of this new quantitative landscape in a decidedly qualitative way and unpack current understandings of labor, identity, and technology as they intersect with athletic performance.
THE SOUND OF VICTORY: MUSIC, SPORT, AND SOCIETY
The Sound of Victory (SOV) is an interdisciplinary, multi-platform project dedicated to investigating the deeply-intertwined relationship between music and sport. Led by Courtney M. Cox and Perry B. Johnson, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Media at Risk and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, SOV interrogates the historical intersection of music and sport to further explore questions of citizenship, community, history, and culture, with a particular focus on issues of authenticity, identity, belonging, space/place, mythology, inclusion/exclusion, power and political economy. Bridging interdisciplinary research projects, multimedia productions, and public events, SOV seeks to foster connections between faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from UO, USC, and beyond, with key actors from across the music and sporting industries. SOV works to address key gaps in music and sport knowledge by providing resources for researchers, students, and educators, and sharing new insights into the historical connection between music and sport through the publication of research, and the organization of related programs, panels, and events.
SOV considers such questions as: What is the historical relationship between music and sport? How do musical and sporting intersections (in)form historical and contemporary understandings of space and place? How can we reimagine the “politics of play” through examinations of music and sport? How can an interrogation of music and sport together offer us new understandings of culture and history? How does the study and analysis of music and sport—as intertwined spheres of entertainment—offer an under-researched entry point for new theoretical and intellectual contributions to such fields as: Music, Sport, Communication, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Performance Studies, Media Studies, and Feminist Theory?