Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – October 16th, 2018
Football: Football Perspective analyzes Yards Per Target vs. Yards Times Targets: Which Stat Is Better? Football Outsiders’ 2018 ALEX: The Early Results. FiveThirtyEight says The Chiefs’ Defense Is Worse Than Their Offense Is Great. Football Perspective Data Dump: Passing First Down Rate and Completion Percentage.
College Football: Bill Connelly’s Week 6 Five Factors box scores. Football Perspective’s Week Seven (2018) College Football SRS Ratings: Alabama Is A Touchdown Better Than The Rest. Football Outsiders looks at Schedule Strength in College Football. Massey-Peabody projects the College Football Playoff field.
Baseball: FanGraphs: The Yankees Have a Lot of Payroll to Use. Baseball Prospectus’ Flu-Like Symptoms: Breaking Down the Attendance Breakdown. FiveThirtyEight says The Brewers Are The Rare Team To Win The Offseason And The Actual Season. Beyond the Box Score article on Swing paths: the next frontier in baseball analytics?. The Hardball Times analyzes Umpires Ejections and Player Ethnicity. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Hidden Secret of Barrels. The Hardball Times on Using Fly Ball Distance to Find Sleeper Prospects.
Baseball Playoff Coverage: Beyond the Box Score: The Astros are the best team left. FanGraphs says The Most Unhittable Pitch Is in the Astros Bullpen. FiveThirtyEight: Alex Bregman Is Not Interested In That Crap Out Of The Zone. Beyond the Box Score believes Erik Kratz has been a big boost to the Brewers pitching staff. Baseball Prospectus ALCS Preview—Astros vs. Red Sox and NLCS Preview—Dodgers vs. Brewers. Beyond the Box Score writes that Two of the best players in the championship series represent last year’s slow-moving offseason. FanGraphs points out that the Brewers Pass Over Ace to Gain Advantage.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus Defines 23 offensive roles using the NBA’s play-type data. Ben Falk blog post on How to Watch Basketball. Thomas Bassine examines Is the Celtic’s 3-Point Percentage Defense for Real? A Statistical Perspective. Bassine also analyzes whether the 76ers Really Gain 2.3 Points of Net Rating from Poor Opponent Outside Shooting in 2017-18. The Orlando Sentinel’s Chris Hays writes that the Orlando Magic trust length, analytics will help them win.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s video on whether You Can Become a Good Rebounding Team Overnight.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis’ Expected Possession Goals GameFlow: Taking a Ride Into the Danger Zone. StatsBomb’s Shots Under Pressure Part 3: Shooting Locations. American Soccer Analysis on Reinventing the passing wheel: What determines a good passer?
Check out these Pythons: Justin Jacobs’ Intro to Pandas tutorial.
Your moment of R: BaseballWithR tutorial on Visualizing AVG Distributions. Luke Benz makes A few bug fixes to ncaahoopR to reflect slight changes in HTML of ESPN pages. Evan Oppenheimer on The Depths of dplyr — R for Hockey Analysis, Part 3.
Conferences: The Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference will be held October 19-20 in Pittsburgh. On October 26th in London is the UK Sports Analytics Conference 2018.