Nopesport Podcast: Recent Episodes
Alastair Brunton
If it's done more than once in the podcasting world, you might as well call it a tradition. It's time now for our second installment of our NFL season preview and once again, we'll spend this episode focusing on what many do not discuss: the coaching and the playbook. Kevin Braig, also known as Quant Coach, looks at coaching and play design, separates those contributions from that of the players' and determines the most efficient football teams and who is likeliest to be the most successful the rest of the way.
Pro football players have already started preparing for the upcoming NFL season, months before games actually begin. Fantasy football players are no different. The most prepared are keeping up with training camps across the country, projecting performances for key skill players and maybe even assembling personal draft boards. Daily fantasy sports may be less accessible and popular within the last couple of years, but there are signs season-long fantasy football has a more rabid following than ever before. After a couple of years of getting shut down, the National Fantasy Football Convention finally got off the ground this July in Dallas. I was fortunate enough to speak at a panel at the conference, devoted to the analytics of fantasy football. Also on this panel are: George Kondraske, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Jon Hartley, an economics contributor for Forbes Magazine and the Huffington Post, and Troy Brazell, CEO of Optima Sports Analytics.
I recently was in Stevens Point, Wisconsin to deliver a talk about sports analytics in television journalism. This discussion is essentially how I do my "day job" as the weekend sports anchor at Fox 4 in Dallas. I began with an observation: while other media have found ways to incorporate analytics into its sports coverage, television is noticeably lagging. This medium poses its own challenges highlighting quantitative analysis, but instead of ignoring it, there are ways to use the tools. At the Great Lakes Analytics in Sports Conference, I discussed three of these challenges and how to address them during reports.
The Dallas Stars are bringing back a familiar face, hiring Ken Hitchcock for a second tenure as their head coach. As with all head coaching changes, the team isn't just changing a person, it's changing a philosophy. Its last coach, Lindy Ruff, was an offense first person, and that is not a "bad" philosophy. As we've shown in our research, hockey teams can win emphasizing offense. But with so many injuries last season to forwards and not having necessary backups to win low-scoring games, the Stars are now emphasizing defense. Ken Hitchcock does just that.
We wrap up our unofficial series on the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference discussing something that may not seem analytical at all: team chemistry. What are the intangibles that make players work better together, how do you quantify and recognize the unspoken communication between athletes and how can a team maximize its chemistry by finding the right combination of people? To explain the theories behind quantifying team chemistry, I spoke to one of the study's authors, Kevin Roberts, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
It may not seem like a natural relationship: analytics and mixed martial arts. But one research poster at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference discussed how different fighting styles can be more or less successful in a given bout. Sean Hacket and John Storey put the research together. I wanted to ask a couple of UFC fighters about the research, so I spoke to the two competing in the main event at this May's UFC 211: Stipe Miocic and Junior Dos Santos.
Comparing soccer—as well as basketball and hockey players—has often been an inexact science. Some refer to their approach as the "eye" test while others use more analytical approaches. For instance, basketball has "wins produced per 48 minutes played", hockey has "goals versus threshold" and soccer has "goal probability added". But one of the problems one data scientist poses is it is difficult to compare athletes who play different positions, have different styles of play and may emphasize different skill sets. At the 2017 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Shael Brown, an undergraduate student at Dalhousie University in Canada, proposes a new metric based upon the PageRank algorithm, the way Google's search engine ranks websites in its results. His presentation discusses how players' "relative ranks" when it comes to the flow of their game, can better help us compare the best in each sport.
One of the more difficult things to quantify in football is how much a player's character matters for success. Not only is character defined differently by different people, anecdotal evidence does not seem to lead in any one direction. But there may be something concrete to consider in the NFL. Alex Piquero is a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas. In his research he has discovered players with a history of violent crime go on to commit more penalties on the football field than those who haven't. Recently I sat down with Professor Piquero to elaborate.
Going over the in-game decisions that cost the Dallas Cowboys a spot in the NFC Championship Game for the first time in more than 20 years.
Edward Egros goes by the numbers to see the differences between this game and the first meeting this season, and how much of a difference Dez Bryant can make, possibly avenging the loss from two years ago.
The Dallas Cowboys earned a first round bye in the playoffs and they'll be carefully watching Wild Card weekend. Who will make the best and worst playoff matchup once the Cowboys kick it off at AT&T Stadium? Edward Egros goes deep into the numbers.
We go inside the numbers and looks at the Cowboys approach for the regular-season finale and if it is the same approach previous Super Bowl champions had when they had to play an academic game.
We go inside the numbers for Sunday night's game between the Cowboys and the Buccaneers. Can Dak Prescott regroup from his worst game of his career? And can his defense continue exceeding expectations?
How much have the Cowboys changed since their first meeting with the Giants? What did New York do nobody else has been able to do? And Edward Egros offers his prediction for Sunday night's big game.
We get you ready for the Cowboys and Vikings. Why might the Cowboys not have as much 4th quarter success as they've had all season long? And can this Dallas defense do better at forcing turnovers?
It's Thanksgiving week and the Cowboys are facing the Redskins for the second time this season. How much will the first meeting reveal about the second? And who's expected to win?
When Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo left a preseason game with a back injury, many believed it would only be a matter of time before he returned. Instead, rookie Dak Prescott has led this team to an 8-1 record, currently the best in the NFL. Now it looks like, for at least the rest of this season, the Cowboys are sticking with Prescott. One argument is he has the "hot hand". But does the "hot hand" actually exist for an NFL quarterback? Is it a statistically significant phenomenon the Cowboys must adhere to, if they are going to compete for a Super Bowl? Alan Reifman is a professor at Texas Tech University and wrote about this phenomenon: Hot Hand: The Statistics Behind Sports' Greatest Streaks. You can follow him on Twitter @AlanReifman.
It seems like nearly every sport reports more advanced statistics than ever before. But one sport where that does not seem to be the case is auto racing, specifically NASCAR. While speed and finishes have always been readily available, new ways of evaluating drivers, teams and tracks do not seem to be as commonplace. I spoke to six-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson about it, as well as how he feels he and his team have innovated the sport.