Latest Posts
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Should Pato O’Ward Have 2-Stopped at Mid-Ohio?
After Pato O’Ward’s poor qualifying effort which had him starting 25th at Mid-Ohio, the broadcasters in the NBC booth stressed that he had to “do something different”. And sure enough, the McLaren driver’s pit wall opted for a 3-stopper instead of the favored and eventual race-winning 2-stop strategy. Despite these setbacks, O’Ward still finished with
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Did Alonso Have A Chance to Win Monaco?
Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin ended up making a crucial mistake as the rain started to fall, opting for a set of Medium compound tires as everyone else jumped on the Intermediates. It ended up costing him an extra pit stop just a lap later and the approximately 25-second delta along with it. Had he
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Thoughts From The 2023 Indy 500
Indycar got lucky with Kirkwood’s tire The tire that flew off Kirkwood’s car weighs about 22 lbs. and was traveling upwards of 200+ mph when it detached and careened (thankfully) over the grandstand and into the concourse. That impact could have been deadly for spectators. Just look what it did to a car it hit.
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Why Don’t NFL Teams Pay NBA Players to Block Kicks?
Recently I listened to an episode of Freakonomics Radio where they talked about specialization in the NFL. Specifically, they were talking about how the long snapper position has become something that NFL teams specifically draft for and pay upwards of $1 million a year to have on their 53-man roster. This got me wondering: what
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2021 Update: Third Down Conversion Rate by Distance to Go
After the 2020 season, I wrote an article about third down conversion rates after adjusting for how many yards the team had to earn on that third down. The reason for this was because too often on broadcasts a team’s third down conversion rate is shown without any regard for how many yards the team
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StatRdays: The Easiest Model You’ll Ever Make
This year, we’ve been participating in the CollegeFootballData.com prediction contest, where each week you predict the actual spread of the game. You’re judged on a variety of factors like your outright picks, picks against the spread, absolute and mean-squared error. Two areas that we are performing very well (1st and 2nd, respectively), are MSE and
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Tuning an In-Game Win Probability Model Using xgboost
A few weeks ago, we started tweeting out the post-game win probability plots for every FBS college football game. They were a nice addition to our Saturdays, but there were some issues. Namely, we’d get a lot of plots like this: Now, to be fair, this was a back-and-forth game that ended 70-56 in favor
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Week 12 Elo Win Probabilities
ACC Big Ten Big-12 Pac-12 SEC American Conference USA Independents MAC Mountain West Sun Belt ACC Big Ten Big-12 Pac-12 SEC American Conference USA Independents MAC Mountain West Sun Belt
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Week 11 Elo Win Probabilities
ACC Big Ten Big-12 Pac-12 SEC American Conference USA Independents MAC Mountain West Sun Belt ACC Big Ten Big-12 Pac-12 SEC American Conference USA Independents MAC Mountain West Sun Belt
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Week 11 Elo Rankings
It was another week of great night games, as LSU took Alabama to the brink of defeat, and Louisville was about five yards and some better cleats away from beating Clemson. Here are the latest rankings. Texas A&M moved into the Top 5 with a win over Auburn, while Michigan State slid after a loss
Staturdays 