Page Rank Sports Ranking System and graph theory in Sports
Development of a page rank sports ranking system is not a new idea. In fact, it gets to the heart of a central question in…
View ArticleWhat is Data Leakage in Machine Learning?
Nearly every data scientist or sports analyst has learned a painful first-hand lesson about data leakage. Let me paint a picture. You come up with…
View ArticleWhat are Pythagorean Wins and Pythagorean Expectation?
All sports analytics tries to predict the true quality of a team. One of the simplest models to do this is the technique called Pythagorean…
View ArticleWhat is FIP in Baseball?
FIP in baseball is the result of a relatively new analytics push to separate pitcher impacts from defense impacts. FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching.…
View ArticleWhat is the Best College Basketball Conference?
It’s a fun argument, especially between fans of different teams, to determine the best college basketball conference. I love this topic of conversation for two…
View ArticleSave your Ace by Shifting Your Pitching Rotation
Sabermetrics and baseball analytics are all about questioning traditional wisdom with data. We challenge traditional wisdom, long held beliefs. This is precisely why sabermetrics are…
View ArticleMulticollinearity in Sports and NBA Box Plus Minus
Sometimes terms and ideas in math can be quite a mouthful. We have things like endomorphisms and psedofunctors in category theory as well as homoscedasticity…
View ArticleNEW Data Jocks NBA Model: The Sparse Impacts Model
The Sparse Impacts Model (SIM) is the second iteration of The Data Jocks’ NBA model. Some NBA models assign ratings to teams. An entirely different…
View ArticleSparse Impacts Model: Test and Evaluation
In the article here, we introduced the sparse impacts model. This NBA model is our attempt at creating a simple yet effective way to predict…
View ArticleNBA Christmas Day Preview 2023
Quick notes…. Use these links to skip ahead to your favorite game…Bucks @ Knicks; Warriors @ Nuggets; Celtics @ Lakers; 76ers @ Heat; Mavs @…
View ArticleWhat is EPA in the NFL? All about Expected Points Added
Expected points in the NFL is the amount of points a team is expected to score on the current drive. Expected points added or EPA…
View ArticleApplications of Measures of Central Tendency in Sports
We all remember the measures of central tendency from middle school: mean, median, and mode. All we heard about was mean, median, and mode, but…
View Article2024 College Football Playoff Format: How Format Affects Winners
The 2024 college football playoff format is changing yet again. In this sport, it seems like no matter what you do, somebody feels like they…
View ArticleThe Stats Behind Back to Back NBA Games
We constantly hear announcers or pundits talk about players resting because of back to back NBA games. If we’re resting players, it must be because…
View ArticleAugmenting NFL Scores to Improve Model Accuracy
Sometimes the final score doesn’t tell the whole story of an NFL game. In fact, usually this is the case. The final score can change…
View ArticleImplied Vegas Ratings
It feels like no matter how hard anyone tries, nobody can beat Vegas ratings. No matter what model you look at or which year you…
View ArticleDoes NFL Time of Possession Matter?
In the NFL, fans often focus of time of possession as an important indicator of how the game is going. The common consensus is that…
View ArticleBuilding a Baseball Elo Model using Betting Data
We’ve discussed previously how to use Vegas data to build models for NFL games. Can we build a baseball Elo model using the same ideas?…
View ArticleImproving our Baseball Elo Model with Better Pitcher Rankings
In a recent article we posted, we talked about how to build a baseball Elo model and the ins and out of how that worked.…
View ArticleThe Odds of a Perfect Bracket are Higher Than You Think
If you treat every game as a coin flip, the odds of a perfect bracket in the NCAA March Madness tournament are roughly in 1…
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