Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – February 25th, 2020
Football: Football Perspective built an NFL Playoff Seedings Monte Carlo Simulation model. Football Perspective examines Air Yards and YAC By Position. PFF’s Timo Riske Investigates learning curves from college football to the NFL, historical draft success at defensive positions and offensive positions. PFF’s Kevin Cole identifies The most important NFL Combine drills by offensive position. Football Perspective’s 2019 Concentration Index: Which Offenses Spread It Around The Most? Kegan Abdoo has scraped and cleaned XFL data.
Baseball: FanGraphs analyzes wOBA by launch angle. Ben Clemens with We Provide Leverage: A Thought Experiment and One Last Refresher (On Strikeouts and Walks). Tom Tango Introduces NaiveWAR. Bill James takes Three Looks at the MVPs. Baseball Prospectus Cold Takes: Making Home Field More Advantageous. Mark Simon talks about Defensive Runs Saved. FanGraphs takes A Quick Look at Their Playoff Odds. Baseball Reference now has Box Scores Since 1904 & Play-by-Play Since 1918 . FanGraphs offers For Your Begrudging Enjoyment, a Batted Ball Refresher.
Basketball: FiveThirtyEight describes How Jayson Tatum Changed His Game And Became A Star. FiveThirtyEight writes You Don’t Need The NBA Draft For Talent. Just Ask The Raptors.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Hoop Vision Weekly: San Diego State + A Loaded Slate (HV Weekly: 2/21/2020). Eli Boettger writes Maryland can’t shoot, and it might not matter and How to solve the ‘Stephen F. Austin problem’. FiveThirtyEight points out The Best Dayton Men’s Basketball Team Ever Is Also The Most Dunkalicious and BYU Is Scorching The Nets From Even Farther Back.
Hockey: FiveThirtyEight says NHL Coaches Have Been On Thin Ice All Season.
Soccer: Janan Ganesh questions if Liverpool’s machine football will conquer America. StatsBomb Unpacks the League One promotion race.
Check out these Pythons: Jared Andrews’ v0.2.0 of kenpompy has been released, adding scraping of FanMatch pages.
Your Moment of R: Pranav Nagarajan’s tutorial on scraping tables from dynamic webpages such as Sports Reference. BaseballWithR on the history of exploring baseball data with R. Lee Sharpe has updated his code for using nflscrapR data.
Conferences: The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is March 6-7 in Boston.