Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – March 26th, 2019

Football: Jacob Davis finds NFL coaches are so, so predictable. Benjamin Robinson begins a series of blog posts using a data-informed approach to predicting the draft using mock draft data called “Grinding the Mocks”. Football Perspective publishes 2019 Salary Cap Info and Concentration Index, Without QB1s. FiveThirtyEight writes that Gronk Was The Most Efficient Receiver We’ve Seen. Football Perspective says Rob Gronkowski Was An Outlier In Yards per Reception. Football Perspective’s Running Back Heat Maps – 2018 Season.

Baseball: FanGraphs Pitch Framing and WAR Update. Ben Lindbergh about how the rise of the opener is changing WAR. BeyondTheBoxScore examines how FanGraphs’ new framing data compares to Baseball Prospectus’ and StatCorner’s. The Hardball Times on The Increasing Importance of Pitcher Height. Andrew Kyne tries to identify which catchers get strikes at the top of the zone. Mark Simon lists the Overachieving & Underachieving Hitters in 2018. Tom Tango’s WOWY Framing, part 1 of N, part 2 of N: with or without Bartolo and part 3 of N: run value of a called strike.

Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Can a defense influence ball movement? Part II. Nylon Calculus on Signature games and the MVP race.

College Basketball: FiveThirtyEight ponders Is Virginia Too Slow? The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective on A Method to the Madness: Predicting NCAA Tournament Success. Nylon Calculus with an article on Using VORP to pay college basketball players.

Soccer: SaturdaysOnTheCouch on Scouting A Defense, Part One: Finding Yardage. StatsBomb is Solving England’s Creativity Issue.

Tennis: Stephanie Kovalchik blog post on WTA Head-to-Head Effects.

Hockey: RJ Weise’s post on Slot Shots (using GIS to define what zones players shoot from).

Your moment of R: BaseballWith R’s code for Visual Count Effects.

Conferences: April 12-13 is the SPEIA Basketball Analytics Summit in Durham, NC.