This paper evaluates the per-play impact of special teams on the winning percentage of NFL teams compared to offense and defense. Employing data from the 1999-2022 NFL seasons in the nflfastR database, we developed a new calculation for Expected Points Added (EPA) to accurately assess the contribution of special teams plays, including punts, kickoffs, and ...Read More

Building on the work of Cade Massey and Richard Thaler in 2005, this paper investigates changes and trends in the market for National Football League draft picks over the past 40 years. This period has seen significant advancements in the way NFL franchises approach the draft, including the Jimmy Johnson trade value chart, first employed ...Read More

The study is based on the correlation of high value football transfers, and the change in market value of those transfers for their new clubs. Analyzing pre covid data, from seasons 2017/18 to 19/20, a comparison has been made for the change in market value of the top 10 valued transfers, for goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, ...Read More

The main goal of this project is to use modern machine-learning techniques to analyze field hockey player performance. Field hockey is a relatively heretofore unexplored application, and there would be a great benefit in building a model to predict players’ ability to score under different conditions. We have scraped public data from Northeastern’s 2023 field ...Read More

Modern Portfolio Theory aims to optimize risk-adjusted returns by identifying assets and creating portfolios with the highest Sharpe Ratio. Generally, there are two strategic approaches to optimizing risk-adjusted returns: maximizing returns or minimizing volatility. In traditional financial literature, it is generally understood that forecasting the future returns of an asset by using its historical returns ...Read More

A survey was conducted with 48 female participants (athletes n = 27, nonathletes n = 21) from a rural high school in Utah to determine the correlation between mental health literacy and grit. Each participant completed the modified Multicomponent Mental Health Literacy Measure (MMHLM), shortened Grit-S scale, challenge and commitment constructs from the Mental Toughness ...Read More

In the National Football League (NFL), team salary caps mean money spent on players on one position reduces the ability to spend resources on others. Salary cap hits for kickers in 2023 ranged from under $1M to almost $6M, with cash salaries exhibiting an even wider range ($9M). Kickers have been primarily judged on the ...Read More

Streakiness and baseball go hand in hand, but accurately measuring streakiness and consistency in sports is difficult. While studying hitting streaks is an old idea, relatively few works have examined streaks for hitters at the pitch outcome granularity, or for pitchers more generally. Furthermore, little is understood about how streaks correlate with more traditional player ...Read More

Defensive plays on the football field require the effort of 11 players. However, defensive statistics only credit one or two defenders for the play’s end result (sack, tackle, interception, etc.). Our project focused on the off-ball contributions of the oft-ignored nine or ten others. In particular, we focused on a vital skill to stop the ...Read More

Given the access to valuable play-by-play data through the 2024 Big Data Bowl, we decided to investigate the force generated by tackles. We hypothesized that the force of the tackle is meaningful in tackling success and sought to quantify it accurately. By modeling this metric, which we will refer to as “force generated at the ...Read More

The quarterback of a football team is typically described to be the leader of an offense as their performance and playstyle can highly impact the characteristics of an offense in comparison to other positions. The aggressiveness of a quarterback in terms of their tendency to pass deep in any certain play can be determined by ...Read More