Pomona Sprout, Headmistress Hufflepuff.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Insight Consulting Group (ICG) is pleased to respond to your request, “How can Hufflepuff Lead Hogwarts in Quidditch?”. This is our first contract with the wizarding world – most of our current clients constitute muggle-majority owned businesses – and we were eager to apply our analytical expertise to the wizarding world.
Although we are muggles and 9 and ¾ tracks apart from wizarding folk, we nonetheless see the evolution of many muggle sports as being highly instructive to where Hufflepuff needs to take its quidditch game to capture the Hogwarts cup. The parallels here may be best illustrated by Michael Lewis’ classicMoneyball. Moneyballchronicles the evolution of baseball, a muggle sport that also involves hitting a ball. Whereas prior to Moneyballscouts evaluated potential prospects by how good their swing looked, post Moneyball-era managers saw these efforts to gauge performance as subjective, unreliable, and open to bias. Slugging percentage and on-base percentage became validated as statistically rigorous predicative metrics – and far more reliable than if a scout had a ‘good feeling’ about a prospect.
Quidditch at Hogwarts in many ways is muggle baseball pre-Moneyball.That a player looks like a ‘seeker’ or a ‘beater’ likely causes Hufflepuff and every other house to miss non-typical prospects who may exceed the performance of prototypical Quidditch players. We would recommend opening tryouts up house-wide, implementing a sabermetric-style approach and using empirical assessments and time-trials to limit any natural bias in the evaluation and selection of potential Quidditch players.
If this recommendation focuses on the recruitment of Quidditch players, the next recommendation centers on strategy on the pitch. Put very plainly, once the Golden Snitch is released, everything else ceases to matter. Because catching the snitch is worth 150 points – 15 times as much as scoring a goal – AND causes the game to end, this makes catching the snitch paramount and easily makes it worth it to surrender several goals in pursuit of the snitch. Current Hufflepuff strategy (and strategy of all houses) is the same, regardless of whether the snitch is on the pitch. This is akin to if soccer teams (another muggle sport) played a 1-3-4-3 formation regardless of the score and game time remaining. Although Quidditch rules specify there can be only one Seeker, they say nothing about hindering the opposing seeker’s quest for the Snitch. Such an all-hands-on-deck defensive effort is critical. Excepting heartthrob Viktor Krum’s snitch catch for Bulgaria, no major Quidditch game has transpired where the team that caught the Snitch lost the game.
Focus, strategy and statistics. With these three beacons Hufflepuff will soon arise as a Quidditch power and honor the great Hufflepuffs of the past – Newton Scamander, Cedric Diggory (gone too soon) and the eponymous Hufflepuff herself, the great Helga Hufflepuff.
Thank you.
Jonathan Remose
Lead Intergalactic Consultant, ICG
