Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – August 20th, 2019
Football: Mitchell Wesson’s work on Team Strength Exclusion Bias in Expected Points Models. Pro Football Focus Data Study: Coverage vs. Pass Rush Revisited. Football Outsiders’ 2018 DVOA by Routes: Receivers. Football Perspective on Gerald Riggs, the 1991 Redskins, and Simpson’s Paradox. FiveThirtyEight ponders Are Tight Ends As Valuable As They Used To Be? and Are We Sure Aaron Rodgers Is Still An Elite Quarterback? In an ESPN+ article, Aaron Schatz lists The best (and worst) NFL QBs at everything. From FiveThirtyEight, Sorry, Running Backs. Even Your Receiving Value Can Be Easily Replaced.
College Football: On ESPN.com, Paul Sabin & Seth Walder Introduce a new way to rate college football players.
Australian Rules Football: A paper Comparing subjective and objective evaluations of player performance in Australian Rules football.
Baseball: FanGraphs writes that In 2019, Team Payroll and Wins Are Closely Linked. Baseball Prospectus Flu-Like Symptoms: If July Were the First Month of the Season (The Players). FanGraphs examines batter behavior in 3-0 counts. Beyond the Box Score goes over Several home run records that will fall this season. FiveThirtyEight Built The Most Average Team In Baseball. The Hardball Times with Under Pressure: The Psychology of Clutch. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective finds the Biggest MLB All-Star Starting Roster Snubs of the Last 10 Years. Alex Vigderman reviews Saberseminar 2019. FanGraphs says We’ve Reached Peak Position Players Pitching.
Basketball: Tom Haberstroh looks at the top NBA ‘DNP-Rest’ candidates for 2019-20.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Ingredients of a Banner Season (Hoop Vision Weekly: 8/18/19).
Hockey: Hockey Graphs’ Expected Goals Model with Pre-Shot Movement, Part 3: 2018-2019 Data and Part 4: Variable Importance. Hockey Graphs on The Most Boring Possession in Hockey: Exploring What Happens after NZ Faceoff Wins.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis presents With Or Without You (WOWY): a plus-minus alternative for soccer. Benoit Pimpaud with a piece on PassSonar: Visualizing Player Interactions in Soccer Analytics. StatsBomb on Three Serie A midfielders who could make the leap with new clubs in 2019-20.
Tennis: Stephanie Kovalchik examines Possible Effects of Abolishing First Service or Advantage Points.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR tackles What’s Causing the Home Run Explosion? Jason Lee shares code to put your NFL team’s schedule on a map.
Check out these Pythons: Nathan Braun publishes Learn to Code with Fantasy Football. Covers: Python, Pandas, SQL, Webscraping, APIs, data visualization, modeling, machine learning.. @deryck_g1 shares code on his (work-in-progress) NFL rankings system based on opponent adjusted EPA/play.
Conferences: The Australia Sports Analytics Conference is August 23rd in Melbourne.