Latest Posts
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IndyCar Poised for A Breakthrough Season
When F1 defiantly denied Andretti’s bid to enter the series, it rubbed a lot of open-wheel race fans the wrong way, not only in the US but abroad. Then, F1’s season-opener in Bahrain put fans to sleep, with only 10-cars finishing on the lead lap, Verstappen finishing 22 seconds ahead of the field (or rather…
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Pebble Beach Weather Leads to Favorable Odds
I just recently started following the PGA Tour, and even more recently started dabbling in betting on golf. Thankfully, there’s a site called datagolf.com—probably one of the greatest sports statistics and betting sites I’ve come across—which makes it very accessible to get started. They offer live finishing odds for every player in every tournament. For…
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Unhappy in Happy Valley
Fans and reporters were not pleased after PSU’s loss to Michigan. After Penn State fell to Michigan 24-15 last Saturday, a reporter questioned James Franklin on his two-point conversion attempt in a now-viral video. The situation was this: Penn State just scored a touchdown and was down 9, with 1:59 remaining in the game. They…
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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…