Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – May 12th, 2020
Football: Rishav Dutta, Ronald Yurko and Samuel Ventura’s paper on Gaussian mixture models for NFL pass coverage with tracking data was accepted for publication in JQAS. PFF’s Kevin Cole examines Josh Allen, Sam Darnold and the elusive third-year breakout. Football Perspective offers a Draft History: A Look At The Rise And Fall Of Players From HBCUs and AFL vs NFL: The Drafts (1961-1966). Football Outsiders’ 2020 Free Agency Cost-Benefit Analysis. FiveThirtyEight wonders Will NFL Rookies Suffer Without Minicamps? Probably Not. The SIS blog looks at Dome-Field Advantage: How much does weather affect quarterback play? PFF’s Seth Galina shows How NFL defenses can “steal” early downs. Timo Riske’s PFF Data Study: The answer to the Buccaneers’ kicking woes is to avoid kicking field goals altogether.
Baseball: FanGraphs’ prep series: Wins, Runs, and Pythagoras. FanGraphs says NL Teams Stand to Lose out If There’s a Universal DH in 2020. FanGraphs Introduces KBO Stats. The SIS blog republishes A Closer Look at Defensive Aging Curves.FanGraphs on Mike Trout and the Greatest Offensive Decades in History.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Regression to the mean can even fool NBA coaches. FiveThirtyEight’s Neil Paine writes Scottie Pippen Was The GOAT Of NBA Sidekicks.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Hoop Vision Weekly: Solving Basketball LIVE, BLOBs, & Dick Bennett. Todd Golden’s webinar on Analytics in Basketball.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis with Breaking Goals Added. StatsBomb’s Data History of the European Cup: 1989, AC Milan 4-0 Steaua Bucharest. Sam Gregory and Devin Pleuler’s Demystifying Tracking Data Webinar. American Soccer Analysis has a piece on Goals Added: How a Computer Watches Nicolas Lodeiro Play Soccer. Friends of Tracking continues its series of videos on working with soccer analytics data.
Cricket: Tinniam Ganesh’s R package yorkr analyzes women’s One Day International and International T20.
General: FiveThirtyEight points tries to gauge What It Would Take For Sports Fans To Feel Safe.
Check out these Pythons: Andrew Puopolo has a few notebooks that focus on Random Forest for xG, and comparing its strengths/weaknesses to logistic regression .
Your Moment of R: Parker Fleming’s scripts and data for a causal inference approach to returning production in college football.. Beyond the Box Score’s Kenny Kelly continues Learning R: Able to label.
Conferences: The Sounders FC 2020 Sports Science Virtual Seminar will be on Wednesdays May 6, 13 and 20. Hockey (Analytics) Night in Canada takes on soccer May 16th.