Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – August 14th, 2018
Football: Kostas Pelechrinis’ Skill Curves in the NFL: Unlocking the Interactions between Passing & Rushing. Adam Steele blog post: QB Defensive Support: Part 2. Football Perspective finds Red Zone Performance Makes Up About 19% Of A Team’s Record. FiveThirtyEight on whether Retread Coaches Like Jon Gruden Ever Work Out. Ed Feng put together The football analytics resource guide – the top 9 killer articles. Michael Kist Plants the MEAT flag; a new way to look at turnover margins and explosive plays. Football Perspective on How To Get A Lot of Receiving Yards.
College Football: Football Study Hall outlines The synergies of the optimal college football offense. Bill Connelly writes that A.J. Brown is terrifying, and other things advanced stats can tell us.
Baseball: Nate Freiman at FanGraphs writes that The Minor-League Strike Zone Is Objectively Different. Baseball Prospectus Baseball Therapy: Reimagining the Defensive Spectrum. Beyond the Box Score examines Can the Home Run Derby help swings? FanGraphs evaluates The Red Sox’ Shot at the Win Record. The Hardball Times article on The Hoffman Generation. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Catch Probability: CF v Corner OF and Fielder Roles. Fancy Stats says Jacob deGrom’s season shows why wins are a stupid stat for pitchers. Mark Simon on The Diamondbacks’ Amazing Defense. FanGraphs Ranks Baseball’s Center-Field Camera Shots (2018 Update).
Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Player types by shot selection. Deep Motion blog post on Simulating Basketball with AI. Nylon Calculus: Color-mixing and lineup synergies.
Soccer: FiveThirtyEight discusses Who’s The Favorite And Who’s A Sleeper In The English Premier League? American Soccer Analysis: Why is Atlanta’s Attack so Dangerous? Ruthless Consistency.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin writes that Maybe, Finally, The Next Generation is Here. Heavy Topspin quantifies The Cost of a Double Fault.
Your moment of R: Luke Benz releases ncaahoopR a new R package for working with NCAA Basketball Play-by-Play data. Ben Dilday introduces GeomMLBStadums – an rstats package to draw MLB stadiums and produce spraycharts in ggplot2. Ryo Nakagawara’s Part 3 of his series on Visualizing the World Cup with R. FC rStats releases fc.rstats v1.0 – A package with various functions that help people working with OPTA and ChyronHego data.
Conferences: The Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics September 10-14 in Dublin. The Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference will be held September 14-15 in Ottawa. 2018 RITSAC Slides, Workshop, and Streams are now available.