Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – August 28th, 2018
Football: ESPN’s Seth Walder writes that Player tracking data is next step in NFL’s analytics revolution. Football Perspective analyzes Pass Efficiency By Pass Direction. FiveThirtyEight: If Le’Veon Bell Can’t Get Quarterback Money, What Running Back Can? Football Outsiders’ 2017 DVOA by Routes: Defense. Football Perspective on Weight, Defensive Players, And How Not All Tweeners Are Created Equal.
College Football: Football Study Hall’s advanced football stats FAQ for high school coaches. The Daily Progress with a piece on Measuring grit: UVa class aims to help football program find right recruits with analytics.
Baseball: Nate Freiman at FanGraphs examines What Are Pitchers Throwing with Runners on Base? FiveThirtyEight says The A’s Changed Baseball Once. They May Be Changing It Again. Beyond the Box Score says It’s time to consider that baseball is trying to de-juice the ball. Mark Simon at Bill James Online finds Catcher Framing and Winning In Sync. FanGraphs on The Battle Between Payroll and Parity. The Hardball Times on Pitch Movement, Spin Efficiency, and All That. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Fielder Roles, part 2 (roles and functions). FanGraphs on Strength of Schedule and the Pennant Races.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus looks at how many possessions will the new shot clock rule impact. Ben Falk’s 2017-18 Answers: Plus-Minus Machines. Nylon Calculus: Nylon Calculus: Offensive balance and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. Nylon Calculus proclaims Manu Ginobili the greatest bench player ever. Nylon Calculus ponders Nylon Calculus: Which players deserve more shots on offense?
College Basketball: Fancy Stats says RIP, RPI: The NCAA has a new ranking system for college basketball teams.
Hockey: Hockey Graphs tries to answer Are Teams getting Lucky on Rushes? Vancouver Courier article: Why Quality of Competition doesn’t matter to analytics experts anymore.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis Ranks the Wingers. StatsBomb: I Think We Broke Denmark.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin on The Victims of Tiebreak Pressure. Stephanie Kovalchik Introduces the concept of ‘plus-minus’ to tennis.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR’s R code for Probability of Hit Given Three Variables. Evan Oppenheimer releases R “elite” for scraping hockey data from EliteProspects. Jake Flancer’s NWHL scraper.
General: Michael Lopez starts a 4-part series on Lessons hidden in sports betting markets.
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.