“There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race,” Bomani Jones said, of his experience in sports media. Photograph by Ben Sklar

Over the past decade, the ESPN host Bomani Jones has become an increasingly visible and popular commentator on sports—and on the commentary surrounding them. Jones, who is thirty-eight, received two master’s degrees in economics, from Claremont Graduate University and the University of North Carolina, and then began writing about popular culture and athletics. He joined ESPN in 2010, and today hosts the podcast “The Right Time with Bomani Jones” and co-hosts the TV show “High Noon,” which is known for broadening sports discussions to social issues that extend beyond the court or the field.

Last week on “High Noon,” Jones and his co-host, Pablo Torre, had a discussion about the increasing use of analytics in sports, particularly basketball, and its effect on the game, hiring practices, and racial dynamics in the N.B.A. The segment was a response, in part, to an interview I had conducted about these topics with the former N.B.A. and college-hoops star Jalen Rose, who is also a host at ESPN. Rose worried that advanced statistics were being overused in the N.B.A., in a way that diminished the status of former players and had an element of racial bias. Jones, similarly, said that N.B.A. front offices were trying to tell former players that “your knowledge is not good enough, because it has to be something that is quantifiable.” He also noted that, despite his economics training, the famed M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference had asked him to be on a panel about activism.

I spoke by phone with Jones on Thursday evening, before Game 6 of the N.B.A. Finals. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences in sports media, whether advanced statistics are making sports more efficient and less fun, and racism around high-level math.

What, exactly, happened with the Sloan conference invitation? Can you expand on that?

I had figured that, given some of the diversity issues surrounding this analytics debate, and, whether it’s true or not, the reputation that I have for being fairly bright, at some point I would be a person who would wind up getting a call about going to Sloan. And so [the co-chair] Daryl Morey reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in coming to the conference, and I certainly was. They asked me if I wanted to be on this panel on activism. This was two years ago. I admit, I was a little bit offended by that.

On one hand, I did understand why someone would call me to talk about that topic. But, on the other hand, I really thought that they would be calling me about this other stuff. Not that I was really excited about the idea of hanging out with basketball nerds, but it stood to reason that would be a reason that you would call me. And they did not. And so I let them know that I would like to be on something else. They did put me on different panel. I had a death in the family; I was not able to make it there. But I just couldn’t figure out logically how you decided that you were going to call some of these other people to be on these panels but you wouldn’t call me to be on this. Like, let’s forget about the fact that I got the degrees, right? And, not that I demanded an explanation for it, but no one ever explained that to me. [Morey did not respond to a request for comment.]

Is this something that you have generally felt, either from people in the media or from people who consume your work?

There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race. Within the industry, nobody’s really said anything like that to my face. But I do notice that people are very specific about my expertise on talking about matters of race. I don’t think that is an insult by definition, because I do think I’m pretty good at it and I think I serve a particular value in that role.

But, yeah, there’s always some people who just think I’m the race guy.

That fits into something larger that we’ve seen in the last couple years, which is that there are some ways of commenting on sports that are inherently seen as political, such as kneeling. And they are political. But there are other ways of commenting about sports that I also think are political, which we just kind of accept—or the commentators who comment about sports just accept—as the status quo.

You nailed what I was going to say in response, which is, the status quo is political. It’s just not seen as such, right? So the issue really isn’t so much the idea that you are being political as much as it is that you’re being disruptive, or subversive. Like televising the national anthem is political. Just sitting down during the national anthem is seen as a political act.

But standing with your hand over your heart—

Right, right. How could those not be political acts, if acting in defiance of them is, by definition, a political act? People use the term “politics” as an escape route. It’s just an excuse to get out of whatever discussion it is. I don’t even know what politics means in most of those contexts, because the things that are actually political, I don’t really think I spend a lot of time talking about them. But I think that there are matters of intellectual sincerity and human decency that I am going to talk about. No one ever accuses you of talking about politics if they like what you say. How about that?

I want to take a step back to talk about analytics and race. It seems to me that they are two somewhat separate issues, and I am curious if you think of them as somewhat separate. The first is what the increasing reliance on analytics will mean for a sport, or for the people who work in a sport. And the second is whether the analytics are telling us something valuable about whether your team, or my team, or someone else’s team, can actually win at the sport.

I think that what you say is correct. Now, I do think that the analytics serve a great value, if for no other reason than the statistics that we most commonly use cannot serve nearly as much value as people think they do. What they are, however, is simple. And they are easy for people to understand.

We are a society that is generally afraid of math, and we’re particularly afraid of math at high levels. If you’ve ever had to try to teach anybody anything related to math and that person thought they weren’t good at it, they just shut down on it. If someone isn’t good at English, they don’t stop speaking English. And so, as a result, I do feel like there are people—some of them are former players, some of them are just observers of the game—who reject some of these statistics when, in reality, most of the stuff we’re talking about isn’t really that complex. Like, at least in terms of what the public gets with analytics. A lot of that stuff is just changing the denominator, using rates instead of using raw numbers.