Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – July 2nd, 2019
Football: Rishav Dutta’s paper: Unsupervised Methods for Identifying Pass Coverage Among Defensive Backs with NFL Player Tracking Data. Michael Lopez and Derrick Yam’s work: A causal estimate of fourth down behavior in the National Football League. Lee Sharpe visualizes 2009-18 NFL Series Data. Jack Heneghan and Michael Herron’s JQAS article on the Relative age effects in American professional football. Football Perspective’s Guest Post: 4th Quarter Comeback Percentage. Football Outsiders’ 2018 Offensive Personnel Analysis. Football Perspective looks at NFL Field Goal Rates From 2014 to 2018. Football Perspective finds the Worst Records Of Super Bowl Champions Through X Games.
College Football: Football Study Hall Power ranks college football’s recruiting monopolies.
Baseball: FanGraphs has More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About First-Inning Scoring. Beyond the Box Score writes about Inefficient Swinging Strikes: Looking into how pitchers suppress their strikeout numbers. FanGraphs believes We’ve Reached the Point of “Too Many Homers”. Baseball Prospectus’ Flu-Like Symptoms: NL Managers, Strategy, and Bench Utilization. Travis Sawchik writes There Are More Shohei Ohtanis On The Way. FanGraphs posts The All-Star Starters By WAR. Andrew Kyne looks at Which hitters reach favorable counts. FanGraphs’ 2019 Pitcher Projections: Where Did They Go Wrong?
Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Predicting injury recovery for Klay and Durant. FiveThirtyEight analyzes Where This Summer’s NBA Free-Agent Class Ranks. FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO NBA Player Projections.
Soccer: StatsBomb on The weight of World Cup pressure. FiveThirtyEight wonders whether he U.S. Can Women Keep Up Their European Conquest.
Hockey: Hockey Graphs Evaluates Nordic Drafting – A Potential Market Inefficiency.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin: Net Play Has Declined, But This Isn’t Why.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR’s Prediction of 2019 Home Run Count. New function added to the development branch of baseballr that automates downloading, parsing, and formatting event and roster files from Retrosheet.
Conferences: In Athens, Greece on July 1st to 3rd is the MathSport International Conference. On July 6th in Los Angeles is StatsBomb’s Introduction to Analytics for Professional Football and on the 7th is Coaching and Analyzing Set Pieces. The Joint Statistical Meetings 2019 are July 27th to August 1st in Denver.