Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – September 25th, 2018
Football: Next Gen Stats introduction to Completion Probability. Football Perspective has Some Thoughts On Interceptions. FiveThirtyEight’s Memo To NFL GMs: Stop Drafting Kickers. Football Perspective believes Something is Wrong With Andrew Luck. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective on The Improbability of the Cleveland Browns’ Winless Streak. FiveThirtyEight believes Jameis Winston Is A Better Quarterback Than Ryan Fitzpatrick. ESPN Chalk calculates How much every NFL QB is worth against the spread. Sean Clement article on Accountability to Adaptability.
College Football: Bill Connelly’s Week 4 Five Factors box scores. Football Outsiders’ FEI Week 3 Ratings and Kickoff Return Value.
Baseball: Baseball Prospectus Baseball Therapy: Fixing the Service Time Manipulation Problem. FanGraphs discusses Jacob deGrom and the MVP Precedent. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Run values by plate count, plate location, and swing/take. Beyond the Box Score figures the MLB has saved 40 seconds per game, on average, by taking away the intentional walk. Alex Vigderman at Bill James Online with his Minor League Defensive Runs Saved End-of-Season Roundup. FanGraphs finds The Worst DRS We’ve Ever Seen. Bill James identifies all players in baseball history who can reasonably be described as “successful five-tool players”. Mark Armour writes a follow-up to his post on the sharp reduction in star players who have passed their 35th birthday. Beyond the Box Score writes that Extreme contact hitters have had unexpected results.
Basketball: Justin Jacobs comes up with An Absurd and Effective Way to Combat Tanking and Make the Playoffs Insane. Nylon Calculus Breaks down age variance within NBA rosters. Justin Jacobs gives A simple introduction to stochastic tracking; cleaning up naive estimators from tracking data.
College Basketball: John Gasaway’s work shows Final Four teams are better at taking shots than at making them.
Hockey: FiveThirtyEight says The Sharks Got Scarier.
Golf: FiveThirtyEight explains How Tiger Woods Finally Put It All Together Again.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis examines whether Playing The Kids Actually Helps Teams Win in MLS. StatsBomb on How Defensive Pressure Impacts Shots. StatsBomb’s Shots Under Pressure Part 2: Headers.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin Tracks European Dominance With Fictional Laver Cups. Heavy Topspin looks at The Effect of the US Open Serve Clock.
Your moment of R: FCrSTATS tutorials to build data visualizations in R. Daniel Hadley uses Empirical Bayes #rstats package to estimate 3-point accuracy among @NBA players.
Conferences: The Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference will be held October 19-20 in Pittsburgh.