Sarang's latest effort, The Angel Critique, is an odd but timely book. Set mostly in Michigan, the book follows T'Quan Phillips, a star football player in his first season for the Detroit Lions, with periodic flashbacks to his time at the University of Michigan and, earlier, playing high school football in his hometown of Flint. As the novel opens, Phillips enjoys something approaching hero status in Michigan, where he led the Wolverines to a national championship and where he is the Lions' only hope for a successful season. It barely catches the reader's attention when Sarang casually mentions that the University of Michigan's computer system has been hacked and its academic records breached. There are far more exciting events to consume our attention, like Phillips' outrageously good 17 touchdowns with only 1 interception during the first five games, all of which the Lions win.
But things fall apart quickly for Phillips once one of his undergraduate papers is made public between game 5 and game 6. The paper focuses on students in inner-city schools and finds that they learn best when they play an active role in deciding how the topic they are studying is presented (I'm simplifying—the actual finding is hard to encapsulate). At first, the paper is downloaded by football fans eager for any insight into their star player, but soon it attracts broader attention on social media, especially Twitter.
That's where it comes to the attention of Murray Angel, an NYU statistician who writes a blog post pointing out flaws in Phillips' methodology. The problem is not so much that Phillips engaged in "p-hacking" (tailoring the numbers to reach a conclusion that crosses the 0.05 "significance" threshold for p-values) or "fishing" (trying many theories until one reaches the significance level, like this)—Angel doesn't find any indication of these things. But the study suffers from what Angel calls the "garden of forking paths": Phillips had too many degrees of freedom. That is, he could have analyzed his data in many different ways, and the particular way he chose to do so was probably shaped by the data itself. This undermines the strength of his conclusion and calls into doubt whether it has any real value. Nevertheless, the paper earned Phillips a B+ and helped him pass the class and ultimately graduate from the University of Michigan, all of which is now cast into doubt in the minds of the public.
Once they've absorbed Angel's bombshell critique, outraged Lions fans turn on Phillips with a vengeance, even as he delivers stellar results on the field. After each victory, during postgame interviews, sports reporters only want to talk about the Angel critique. Ultimately, after a 9-1 start to the season, the Lions have no choice but to bench Phillips, and the team finishes out the season at 10 and 6, barely missing the playoffs. Although his contract will last for two more years, Phillips knows that he will never play another game for the franchise. His career in professional football is effectively over, and because of the ignominious way in which it ended, he is unlikely to get a job in sports writing or broadcasting.
The Angel Critique is unsettling because it shows how our heroes so often fall short of our expectations. Whether it's performance-enhancing drugs, domestic abuse, or the garden of forking paths, our athletes often disappoint us off the field. So why do we keep investing our hopes in them? Why do we insist that they share our values and our politics? Why are we so crushed when they turn out to be deeply flawed?
These are questions that are roiling the world of professional sports, and so Sarang's work is yet again essential to understanding the times we live in.
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