I’ve been thinking a lot about analytics lately. This really stems from two rather large datasets I’m crunching (cool stuff – read the research section updates in a couple months). At the same time I’ve been learning a tremendous amount about football (American football for any hooligans reading this) from Anthony Rouzier, a new friend who is interested in coaching college football. You start talking about sports and analytics at a cocktail party and immediately someone brings up Money Ball. Specifically, can we take the analytics principals in the book/movie/life and apply them to football? Or, more accurately, what are people already doing around football analytics? Turns out they are doing a lot. MIT’s Sloan School of Management has a sports analytics conference next week and Penn State’s very own head football coach James Franklin will be part of a panel on college football analytics. Sorry folks, the conference is all sold out so you’ll have to wait until next year.
I could go on and on with examples of football analytics from the web but I’ll just send you to a video on how the Dallas Cowboys brought analytics to football. And yes, that is from FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver has put together a pretty awesome team over there and they’re doing a lot more than predicting elections.
A very special thanks to Jason Acimovic for introducing me to this world and finding the Cowboys video.