Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – July 30th, 2019
Football: Timo Riske’s PFF Data Study: Examining the passing game with route heat maps. Football Outsiders’ Play-Action Defense 2018. Jon Becker identifies The Best Deep Passers In 2018. John Kinsley’s guest post at Football Outsiders on the 2018-19 Deep Ball Project. FiveThirtyEight writes that An NFL Team Will Probably Go From Last Place To The Playoffs. Could It Be The Jets? Ted Nguyen at The Athletic writes that Teams don’t have to establish the run to win games, and the analytics proves it. But the run isn’t dead, either.
College Football: Bryce Rossler examines Reactive Play-calling in NCAA.
Baseball: FanGraphs offers A Different Way of Looking at Home Run Rate. Baseball Prospectus’ Flu-Like Symptoms: The Great Pinch-Hitting Resurgence of 2019. Neil Paine at FiveThirtyEight: Can We Play NBA Jam … With MLB Teams? Also, Neil lists The Teams That Should Be Buying And Selling At This Year’s Baseball Trade Deadline. FanGraphs’ Farm System Rankings Are Now on THE BOARD. The Hardball Times on Creating Aging Curves for Statcast Metrics. An interesting look by Jon Becker: The Best at Taking HBPs Like a Champ. Danielle Sebring presents her work on Catching Trout” – classifying MLB players.
Basketball: Ben Taylor’s video analyzes Is the midrange shot dead? The surprising math behind basketball’s least efficient attempt. Nylon Calculus: How can we visualize a player’s shooting gravity? FiveThirtyEight ponders Is The NBA’s Small-Ball Revolution About To End?
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Hoop Vision Weekly: Individual Defense. St. Lake Tribune article on the New BYU basketball hire, an analytics specialist.
Hockey: Hockey Graphs on Why Possession is the Key to Zone Exits. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective writes about The “Value” of Short-handed Goals. Hockey Graphs’ Introduction to the Transition Project.
Soccer: StatsBomb Calls For Research Proposals For Its Inaugural Innovation In Football Conference.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin’s New Feature: Forecasting the Next Major.
Your moment of R: Ben Baldwin’s Tutorial on using nflscrapR in R.
Check out these Pythons: @deryck_g1’s introduction to working with nflscrapR data in Python.
Conferences: The Joint Statistical Meetings 2019 continues through August 1st in Denver. Also in Denver, on August 2nd is the Rocky Mountain Symposium on Analytics in Sports. The Saberseminar will be held August 10-11 in Boston.