Sports on Paper

In this episode, I was joined by the winners of the Big Data Bowl 2021, although we recorded this well before the results were announced. We talked about their project called Weighted Assessment of Defender Effectiveness which uses tracking data to allocate credit to individual defenders in coverage on pass plays. We touch on what it was like to work on a data project with others virtually during a pandemic before going deep on methods for defensive target probability over expectation (dTPOE) and defensive catch probability over expectation (dCPOE), and ideas for credit allocation. 

I was joined by Alex Stern, a current data science master's student and football analytics researcher at the University of Virginia. We talk about his Big Data Bowl project that goes to beyond the box score to quantify the value of defensive backs. The work extends upon the winning Big Data Bowl project from last year to include some cool Bayesian hierarchical models.

I was joined by Charlie Gelman, a recent computer science and stats graduate from Duke.  We talk about his Big Data Bowl project about defensive backs playing in press man coverage. Bonus segment at the end about wrestling analytics.

0:24 Intro, background

4:00 Paper 

54:00 Wrestling analytics

I was joined by Dani Chu, a graduate student in statistics at Simon Fraser University and part of the team that won the NFL's inaugural Big Data Bowl. We talk about his fascinating research done on NFL tracking data to identify routes. We also speculate and think wishfully about the metrics that could be developed if the tracking data were to ever become public.

My guest today is Kanaad. He is a friend of mine from Berkeley, and he is a Cavs and RL enthusiast.  We talk about a fascinating paper from the 2018 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The main idea is that by modeling each possession as a Markov Decision Process, it becomes easy to build a simulator that can help us answer questions like "How much more efficient would a team be if they took 20% fewer midrange shots early in the shot clock?"