Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – February 18th, 2020
Football: Dan Morse’s QB Comparison Tool. Football Perspective looks at Why Passer Ratings Have Become More Compressed. Football Outsiders examines The Effect of Scrambles on DVOA. PFF’s Timo Riske warns Why sprinting to the podium at No. 2 overall with Chase Young on the card might be a bad idea. PFF’s Kevin Cole introduces A new valuation metric for edge defenders: PFF Plus/Minus. Football Outsiders weighs in on XFL Conversions: As Easy as 1, 2, 3? Football Perspective’s 2019 Era-Adjusted Passer Ratings. PFF’s Anthony Treash says The Rams and Cardinals showed why NFL teams should never invest in running backs.
College Football: Logan King with NCAA Transfer Players to Watch in 2020. PFF’s Anthony Treash believes Mike Leach and K.J. Costello could cause chaos in the SEC with the Air Raid offense.
Baseball: FanGraphs finds Some of the New Roster Rules Are Garbage. Ben Clemens on The Hypothetical Value of an Ideal, Frictionless Banging Scheme. Travis Sawchik has 5 Questions For MLB (That Don’t Involve Sign-Stealing). Baseball Prospectus’ Moonshot: Parity Is Likely To Take Another Hit In 2020. Dave Fleming On Mookie Betts. Baseball Prospectus on PECOTA, Vegas, and Win Totals Disagreement.
Basketball: Forbes article: Diana Ma, This Laker’s Data Scientist Is NBA’s Best Kept Secret. FiveThirtyEight writes The Raptors Weren’t Supposed To Be This Good This Year.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Hoop Vision Weekly: One. More. Month. (HV Weekly: 2/14/2020). Ken Pomeroy explains Why Stephen F. Austin has a stronger bubble case than anyone gives it credit for. FiveThirtyEight says Sabrina Ionescu Has Somehow Gotten Even Better. Eli Boettger points out Parity leading to record number of new March Madness contenders. FiveThirtyEight finds Kansas’s Udoka Azubuike Has Found The Formula For Efficiency: Dunk A Lot.
Soccer: A StatsBomb Investigation ponders Are the Foxes at risk of getting caught? FiveThirtyEight: Without Manchester City (For Now), The Race To Make The Champions League Is Wide Open. American Soccer Analysis on CBA Talk: Players miss opportunity to take a fair share of league revenues. Paul Riley’s post On Goalkeeping Data, Scouting and Evidence Based Coaching.
Check out these Pythons: Kevin Kraege blog post on Win probability analysis and using it to interpret one-score games and season win totals. Darryl Blackport made a python package for working with tracking stats on the NBA site.
Your Moment of R: Scott Nestler released an R package, called wncaahoopR, based on the ncaahoopR package from Luke Benz but for NCAA Div 1 Women’s Basketball . Nicholas Shoemaker Introduces nflscrapR model PBP data back to 1999 with WP, EPA R-models attached and newly regression-tested. BaseballWithR teaches Predicting AVG using xBA and a Multilevel Model.
Conferences: The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is March 6-7 in Boston.