Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – September 11th, 2018
Football: Football Perspective analyzes How Long Do Coaches Last After Adding First Round QBs? The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective’s Machine Learning Analysis Of The NFL: Predicting New Playoff Contenders. FiveThirtyEight: The Rams And Bears Spent Big On Non-Quarterbacks. Will They Regret It? Football Outsiders’ 2018 DVOA Projections. Football Perspective points out The Opposite Trends of Field Goals and Turnovers. FiveThirtyEight says For A Passing League, The NFL Still Doesn’t Pass Enough. Drew Pasteur’s recent research (aided by Wooster students), which looked at improving metrics for evaluating NFL punters.
College Football: Bill Connelly finds Changing kickoff rules really isn’t changing college football much. Fancy Stats says Michigan football has improved under Jim Harbaugh. Seriously..
Baseball: FanGraphs Uses Contact Quality to Sort Out the AL Cy Young Mess. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Naive Models 1, 2, 3 for fielding: where you Stand. Beyond the Box Score examines The largest DRA-RA9 differences in baseball: overperformers. Dave Fleming at Bill James Online discusses What a pitcher’s past can tell us about their future. FanGraphs on Defense, Contact Quality, and the NL Cy Young. The Hardball Times writes that It’s Physics – The Batter’s Grip Doesn’t Matter. SABRStatAnalysis blog posts on What A Drag It Is Getting Old and Should Players Hit With Backspin? The Data Might Surprise You. The New York Post reports the Next generation of sports nerds are ready to take over baseball.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus wonders Why aren’t you using pbpstats.com? Ryan Davis has uploaded the latest copy of his NBA stats database.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis Builds a System for Assessing Player Value. American Soccer Analysis’ Playoff Seeding Probabilities Model. StatsBomb asks Are Manchester United and Burnley Just Regressing to the Mean? American Soccer Analysis on The case for pulling the goalie in soccer and the math behind Ben Olsen’s madness.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin looks at Gender Differences in Point Penalties. Heavy Topspin on The Right Amount of Serve-and-Volley. FiveThirtyEight says The Serve-And-Volley Works, But Women’s Tennis Players Aren’t Using It.
General: Michael Lopez posts part 3 in a series on Lessons hidden in sports betting markets.
Your moment of R: Evan Oppenheimer’s R for Hockey Analysis — Part 1: Installation and First Steps.
Conferences: The Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics September 10-14 in Dublin. The 4th annual Football Analytics and Performance Summit is being hosted September 12-13 in Prague. The Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference will be held September 14-15 in Ottawa. On September 24th in Durham (NC), the SPEIA Basketball Analytics Summit.