Site News: Movin' on up in 2014!

Last year, I set a New Year's resolution to do more analytics work, including 60 blog posts. I got through 15.

But it's not all bad! Two big pieces of news for 2014:

• I will be attending the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference again this year.  I submitted an abstract to the research paper competition, which was accepted.  Unfortunately, the results of my research disproved my hypothesis, and the whole thing's come crashing down.  Ordinarily, that means you would see it repurposed here as a blog post but...
• I've been hired as a contributing writer to Beyond the Box Score, "a saber-slanted baseball community", where I will be writing articles on a regular basis.

I'll keep this blog open for non-baseball stuff, but most of my writing will appear over there.

Best wishes to all my reader(s) for a happy and healthy 2014!

Site News: One Month 'Til Sloan...

A little while ago, I wrote about an Evolution of Sport proposal that I submitted to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Today I found out that the proposal was not selected for this year.

But that's the extent of the bad news. I will still be at the conference in Boston this March, and will be tweeting all weekend (and maybe writing a recap once it ends). I also get a couple free blog posts out of it. I'll be posting the first half of my talk Friday, and the conclusion on Monday. For now, here's the abstract, which was at least competent enough to get me into the second round of the competition:

The championship of the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision is determined by the formula established by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Under this system, schools affiliated with smaller conferences (e.g., Boise State and Tulane) are hindered by their strength of schedules. The non-conference games played by these schools are typically determined years in advance, but the conference games are announced a few months before each season. The scheduling of these conference games is dominated by fixed divisions based on geography; as a result, schools from smaller conferences with BCS aspirations are often saddled with suboptimal conference schedules, forgoing games against superior in-conference opponents in order to play weaker schools in the same arbitrary division. To prevent this, we propose non-automatic qualifying conferences use a relegation-style system to assign teams to each division. In defense of this, we show that year-to-year records in major college football programs are strongly correlated, such that last year’s top teams are more likely to be this year’s top team. We further demonstrate that such a system would have significantly improved the conference strength of schedules for several previous BCS contenders. This proposed system will therefore give schools from non-AQ conferences the greatest chance to make a major bowl game, resulting in greater revenues and exposure for the conference as a whole and each of its member institutions. We conclude by showing that similar schemes could be used to improve the reputation of teams in other sports, including the so-called “mid-major” conferences in NCAA Division I basketball.

Of course, I welcome any and all feedback on this topic.

Site News: FoS at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Quick update: I recently submitted an abstract to the Evolution of Sport section of the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference, held in Boston March 1-2, is two days long and features a plethora of notable sports journalists, sabermetricians, and front office personnel.

And maybe yours truly.

I found out today that my abstract has been accepted into the second round. The next step is a video submission fleshing out my idea, which will be judged by the panel. If they approve, I get 15 minutes on stage at the conference.

I don't know how much of my proposal I can share, so I'll keep it under wraps for now. If it gets accepted, you can see it at the conference, or once they upload the video to their website; if it doesn't get accepted, I'll write it up and post it here.

Until then, I'm working on analyzing the recent Red Sox signings of Mike Napoli and Shane Victorino. Did the Red Sox overpay? How do these contracts compare to those of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, which the Red Sox took great pains to pawn off on the Dodgers?

Wish me luck!