MIT Sports Analytics Conference

Last year, as I embarked on my NFL sports statistics work, I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for the first time. A year later, after a very successful draft, I was invited to present an R workshop to the conference.

My time slot was up against Nate Silver so I didn’t expect many people to attend.    Much to my surprise when I entered the room every seat was taken, people were lining the walls and sitting in the aisles.

My presentation, which was unrelated to the work I did, analyzed the Giants’ probability of passing versus rushing and the probability of which receiver was targeted.  It is available at the talks section of my site.

After the talk I spent the rest of the day fielding questions and gave away copies of R for Everyone and an NYC Data Mafia shirt.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

plot of chunk plot-play-by-down

Continuing with the newly available football data (new link) and inspired by a question from Drew Conway I decided to look at play selection based on down by the Giants for the past 10 years.

Visually, we see that until 2011 the Giants preferred to run on first and second down.  Third down is usually a do-or-die down so passes will dominate on third-and-long.  The grey vertical lines mark Super Bowls XLII and XLVI.

Code for the graph after the break.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

plot of chunk make-graph

With the recent availability (new link) of play-by-play NFL data I got to analyzing my favorite team, the New York Giants with some very hasty EDA.

From the above graph you can see that on 1st down Eli preferred to throw to Hakim Nicks and on 2nd and 3rd downs he slightly favored Victor Cruz.

The code for the analysis is after the break.

Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

With the Super Bowl only hours away now is your last chance to buy your boxes.  Assuming the last digits are not assigned randomly you can maximize your chances with a little analysis.  While I’ve seen plenty of sites giving the raw numbers, I thought a little visualization was in order.

In the graph above (made using ggplot2 in R, of course) the bigger squares represent greater frequency.  The axes are labelled “Home” and “Away” for orientation, but in the Super Bowl that probably doesn’t matter too much, especially considering that Indianapolis is (Peyton) Manning territory so the locals will most likely be rooting for the Giants.  Further, I believe Super Bowl XLII, featuring the same two teams, had a disproportionate number of Giants fans.  Bias disclaimer:  GO BIG BLUE!!!

Below is the same graph broken down by year to see how the distribution has changed over the past 20 years.

All the data was scraped from Pro Football Reference.  All of my code and other graphs that didn’t make the cut are at my github site.

As always, send any questions my way.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.