As a low scoring sport, soccer has relatively more random outcomes. This project examines the English Premier League team Everton’s results from the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons to determine the cause in the observed drop in performance. We find that Everton’s drop off was due mainly to structural factors. Factors which include the departures of the manager and three star players that were worth a combined $50 million.…Read More
Over the past 20 years, baseball has reduced the rate of stolen base attempts and devalued baserunning. Our project examines team level baserunning statistics to discern if there is a correlation between a team’s baserunning and its winning percentage. A factor, BsR, was created that includes all plays on the basepaths. BsR was found to correlate with team winning percentage; better baserunning results in a slight advantage.…Read More
In tennis, players alternate who serves in each game. Often players can hold their serving game while breaking your opponent’s serve is far more difficult. Our project examines how important break points are and how break point percentages affect the outcome of a match. Winners were found to have a higher break point percentage by 14.0%, and there is a slight variation across surfaces.…Read More
In the NFL, when playing in poor weather (cold and/or windy), teams often choose relatively run-heavy gameplans. We examine how different NFL weather conditions impacted the effectiveness of both run and pass plays. Using data from nflfastR, the Expected Points Added (EPA) per play from all plays between 2014-2021, was assessed over different temperatures and wind speeds.
As the wind speed increases, passing plays become less effective while rushing play remain roughly constant. As temp increases, passing becomes more effective, while rushing gets worse.…Read More
As a low scoring sport, soccer has relatively more random outcomes. This project examines the English Premier League team Everton’s results from the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons to determine the cause in the observed drop in performance. We find that Everton’s drop off was due mainly to structural factors. Factors which include the departures of the manager and three star players that were worth a combined $50 million.…Read More
The Liaoning Flying Leopards won the Chinese Basketball Association championships in the 2017 and 2021 seasons. In both 2018 and 2019, the Leopards kept their 2017 lineup but lost to the Southern Tigers. In the past, people thought the 2017 team was better because the team was unstoppable on offense. Comparing the 2017-18 Flying Leopards to 2021-22 – we are analyzing whether the basketball league CBA’s 2022-21 season Flying Leopards is the best championship team in their franchise history using three distinct metrics: turnover ratio, TS%, efficiency differential. The 2020-21 Leopards had a lower offensive efficiency, but their defensive efficiency got better, thereby, having a higher efficiency differential. The 2022 Leopards have a more flexible squad and they are the best team in franchise history.…Read More
The Zero-Running Back (RB) draft strategy is to ignore RB until around the 6th round, and to draft the leftover RBs (usually consisting of high upside players or backups that might play or can be used for trade value). Instead focus high draft rounds on WRs, TEs, and QBs in the early rounds of the draft. We simulated fantasy football drafts over the 2010 to 2021 seasons to determine the efficacy of the zero-running back draft strategy. From our data, the Zero – RB doesn’t work optimally and it is suggested that the Fantasy Football draft process is based primarily on luck; random year to year variation in player productivity.…Read More
The NFL MVP award is chosen each year by a panel of 50 sportswriters who are selected by the Associated Press. As the MVP is chosen by humans who do not necessarily base their decision on statistics, but on watching all the games and talking to coaches and players, it is natural to wonder whether there is a mathematical rule that can describe the MVP selection process. Hence in this paper, we create a logistic regression model to predict the NFL QuarterbackMVP. Our algorithm predicts the correct Quarterback MVP in each year since 2003 except 2009 and 2015. In 2009, our model chooses Brees over Manning, and in 2015, our model chooses Palmer over Newton. Perusing articles from 2009 and 2015 reveals that many people in the media agreed with our model that Brees and Palmer were snubbed.…Read More
Traditional methods of computing WAR (wins above replacement) for pitchers are based on an invalid mathematical foundation. Consequently, these metrics, which produce reasonable values for many pitchers, can be substantially inaccurate for some. Specifically, Fangraphs and Baseball Reference compute a pitcher’s WAR as a function of his performance averaged over the entire season. This is wrong because not all runs allowed have the same impact in determining the outcome of a game: for instance, the difference in impact between allowing 1 run in a game instead of 0 is much greater than the difference in impact between allowing 6 runs in a game instead of 5. Hence we propose a new way to compute WAR for starting pitchers: Grid WAR (gWAR). The idea is to compute a starter’s gWAR for each of his individual games, and define a starter’s seasonal gWAR as the sum of the gWAR of each of his games. We find that gWAR highly values games in which a pitcher allows few runs (0 or 1).…Read More
Successful NCAA Division I Football (FBS) programs can recruit better high school players and they also produce players that are highly drafted into the NFL. This work explores which FBS programs are better at developing their players for the NFL draft, factoring in player recruiting quality. Recruiting class rating data from 247Sports.com was combine with Draft data from CollegeFootballData.com. Ohio State, Alabama and Penn State were found to be the best programs at developing their players for the NFL draft.…Read More
