Assistant Teaching Professor, Director of Carnegie Mellon #SportsAnalytics Center stat.cmu.edu/cmsac @CMU_StatDS
Pittsburgh, PA
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Excited to share that I'm working on a book: 'Statistical Methods in #SportsAnalytics'! This is the culmination of my education, research, and experience in teaching #statisticalthinking and modeling in #sportsanalytics! Thanks to Rob & @CRC_MathStats for the opportunity!
Delighted to have signed a contract with @Stat_Ron for an exciting new book on '#Statistical Methods in #SportsAnalytics' to be published by @CRC_MathStats in 2027! Watch this space for updates. statthinksportsanalytics.sub… #DataScience #RStats @CarnegieMellon
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Tackles are flawed statistics. Thanks to Quang Nguyen (@qntkhvn), Larry Jiang, and Meg Ellingwood in this year's #BigDataBowl - we have created a new defensive metric based on halting the ball-carrier's forward progress: Momentum-Based Fractional Tackles kaggle.com/code/tindata/mome…
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I find it hard to believe that 10 years ago I graduated high school to begin @CarnegieMellon - now I'm incredibly excited to share I will be an Assistant Teaching Professor @CMU_Stats! I owe everything to my amazing advisors, mentors, friends, & family for all of their support!
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It's because the majority of individuals saying you should work unpaid are white men that only hire other white men from their alma mater with rich parents that paid for their entire college education and are debt-free. - my TED talk.
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Extremely excited to share the latest #sportsanalytics research with @CMU_Stats @FranciMatano @leerichardson09 Taylor Pospisil @stat_sam and @PittTweet @kpelechrinis Nick Granered - #GoingDeep: Continuous-time within-play valuation using #BigDataBowl data arxiv.org/abs/1906.01760
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The framing of "analytics" in this manner, leads me to believe that both you and the coach that you spoke to have no idea what that word means
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Students in my #sportsanalyics class are going to complete critiques of analysis they read online throughout the semester, initial list of potential sites so far (I won't have a comprehensive list but I'd greatly appreciate any recommendations)
Does anyone have a list of #sportsanalytics websites by sport? I don't mean in terms of data, but rather articles (e.g., Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus for baseball, and so on)
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Here it is, #nflscrapR research by @stat_sam @bklynmaks and myself has led to this - #nflWAR : A Reproducible Method for Offensive
Player Evaluation in Football -explaining our full approach to estimating WAR in football and how to extend it with more data stat.cmu.edu/~ryurko/pdf/nfl…
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It's official: @kpelechrinis and I are launching a new #statsinsports #sportsanalytics podcast @OpenSrcSports! Think of the podcast as a public reading group with each episode dedicated to a single paper featuring an author as the episode's guest!
#HelloWorld Listen to the "Open Source Sports preview!" ⚓ anchor.fm/open-source-sports…
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Congratulations to Dr. Ron Yurko @Stat_Ron on his @CMU_Stats PhD defense on “Selective Inference Approaches for Augmenting Genetic Association Studies with Multi-Omics Metadata”! Co-advised by Kathryn Roeder @RoederKat and Max G’Sell. #cuethestarwarsgifs
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SAVE THE DATE: @CMU_Stats #CMSAC22 will be returning October 28-29! Stay tuned for more #sportsanalytics content coming soon... (rumor has it a #BigDataBowl / player-tracking data related workshop led by a CMU professor could be in the works) #statsinsports #datascience #rstats
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And it's in - @kpelechrinis and I have officially submitted our entry for the #BigDataBowl: A ghosting framework for evaluating defender ability to limit YAC kaggle.com/ryurko21/evaluati…
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Here's how you win in the #NFL - you throw the ball better than the other team. Run the ball better than the other team? Eh who cares... you don't outscore your opponents if you can't throw - all I'm using is the difference between a team's EPA/Att for OFF and DEF from #nflscrapR
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Major personal news: after much consideration I’ll be officially following @AB84 from Pittsburgh to Oakland to join #Raidersnation as an Data Science and AI specialist for Coach Gruden! @nflscrapR will be removed from GitHub today including all of the data #endofanera
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Courtesy of @SethWalder, all of the "analytics" folks working for football teams...
A coach told me earlier today that analytics was just a way for people who never would have gotten jobs in football to get jobs in football. To understand that is to understand why they get so defensive whenever anyone questions analytics.
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Update on where this #sportsanalytics articles list is at now if you're curious
Students in my #sportsanalyics class are going to complete critiques of analysis they read online throughout the semester, initial list of potential sites so far (I won't have a comprehensive list but I'd greatly appreciate any recommendations)
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Congratulations to @CMU_Stats Ron Yurko @Stat_Ron on his successful PhD proposal on “Selective Inference Approaches for Augmenting Genetic Association Studies with Multi-omics Metadata”! Co-advised by Kathryn Roeder @RoederKat and Max G’Sell #cuestarwarsgif
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Very excited to announce new #NFL #sportsanalytics paper (arxiv.org/abs/2305.10262) #HereComesTheSTRAIN #GetStrained, building upon original #BigDataBowl work by @statsinthewild0 @qntkhvn (nitter.app/qntkhvn/status/1611437…) with the following key updates: [1/4]
Check out the #BigDataBowl 2023 submission by @Zero_Gregs (formerly known as @StatsInTheWild / @FatGreggy) and myself.
We propose STRAIN, a simple and interpretable metric for evaluating pass-rushers.
kaggle.com/code/statsinthewi…
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Major #nflscrapR update is live! New functions for gathering games and scraping ALL of the NFL API’s play-by-play data meaning player ids for everyone involved in tackles, pass defense, laterals, etc #nflscrapR #rstats #moredatamorefun github.com/maksimhorowitz/nf…
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#Steelers only need 10 more field goals to take the lead #NextGenStats
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For anyone that wants an easy intro to making R packages (which you basically should do for any big project in R), check out this simple step-by-step guide by @leerichardson09 - I have it open every time I'm making a new one #rstats #CUDAS github.com/leerichardson/lee…
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Late night blog post time - first in a series on Bayesian data analysis building towards full Bayesian multilevel models featuring everyone's favorite WR @TeamJuJu #BayesianBabySteps #rstats #blogdown #nflscrapR stat.cmu.edu/~ryurko/post/ba…
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Tweets like this are a reason why I dislike a lot of football analytics twitter and discouraged to participate in it, this isn’t constructive (and I’m still not even convinced the analysis about Rodgers is appropriate) - twitter “dunking” is a waste of time, I’m done with this
The funny thing about the 49ers winning by rushing for ~300 yards in this game is that people can't even use it to try to dunk on analytics twitter because 2 of the beliefs of analytics twitter is that this year's Packers were frauds and that Rodgers isn't good anymore, and, well
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This comment is insulting to everyone actively working on interesting questions in sports... what defines a quality pitch? a quality swing? an effective pass rush? etc.
We have more data now because of technology, and we also have far better understanding of statistics in sports
The fact is that the development of real understanding about the essential questions that form the game--all games--has essentially stopped. No one really works on them or writes about them. At some point, our field must find the courage to set the decimal points aside,
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The #BigDataBowl was awesome, I'm incredibly proud of the work and presentations by our @CMU_Stats students! Big thanks to @StatsbyLopez, Ally Blake, @DataWithBliss, and the rest of the #NFL crew responsible for hosting an incredible event at the #NFLCombine
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Okay - @quarto_pub is amazing and SOOOO much easier to use for making an academic website, this was super easy to put together and more importantly will be simple to update: stat.cmu.edu/~ryurko/ #quarto #rstats
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#NFL teams featuring Carnegie Mellon alumni as analytics staffers (all made the playoffs this year!):
- Rishav Dutta #Browns
- Sarah Mallepalle #Cowboys
- Toby Junker #Lions
- Shravan Ramamurthy #49ers
#sportsanalytics #TartanProud
Long overdue refresh of the NFL analytics staffer list after an offseason with plenty of movement.
As always, this is to the best of my understanding based on both what teams list and conversations with analytics folks around the league.
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We need a #sportsanalytics retraction watch, because this is a great retraction candidate - an example of data analysis without any notion of statistical thinking, that will mislead the broader public in making conspiratorial conclusions (this gif applies to the whole thread)
The NFL pushed the panic button 🚨
They have a ref in their rotation who is a MASSIVE edge to road teams
Road teams win at the #1 highest rate with him...
He penalizes home teams in ways no other ref does... and...
He's calling the Chiefs road game
sharpfootballanalysis.com/be…
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I can confidently say, from all levels of baseball I have ever watched, this is the worst play I have ever seen in my entire life
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Anyone in #sportsanalytics community put together a list / repository of various publicly available data sources across different sports? Like I'm thinking different #rstats and python packages, websites to export CSVs, etc - any help appreciated!
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BREAKING NEWS:
Applications are now open for @CMU_Stats Summer Undergrad Research Experience! stat.cmu.edu/summer/
Program theme #DataScience in #SportsAnalytics aka #CMSACamp!
Set for *in-person* Jun 6 - Jul 29, w/ provided housing, plus a $4000 stipend!
Deadline: Mar 23rd!
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Top 25 players in 2017 NFL season based on #nflWAR methodology, of course Russ #1, only non-QB is Antonio Brown but is ranked 25th... Jameis Winston's air WAR > total WAR because of his negative rush WAR, full paper details here arxiv.org/abs/1802.00998 #nflscrapR #rstats #dataviz
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This is literally how my dad taught me how to play baseball - looking at series of baseball cards
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TL;DR no
The Panthers are paying Christian McCaffrey. Now the question is whether he’ll be worth it.
@rileymcatee: therin.gr/RGy978d
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A couple years ago I would spend time just churning out several plots using @nflscrapR EPA/WPA - try to tweet it at popular folks like @minakimes @billbarnwell hope for some retweets etc to promote @nflscrapR and to be honest it felt like I was just yelling in an empty room
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Excited to share that 'Swinging, Fast and Slow' is now available on arXiv! arxiv.org/abs/2507.01238
I had a blast collaborating with @saberpowers on this and learned a lot from him in the process (plus I finally wrote a baseball paper!) #MLB #Statcast #sabermetrics
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BIG NEWS: @CMU_Stats @CMUAnalytics is hosting the first ever #CMSAC Reproducible Research Competition! Requiring the use of publicly available data and access to all your code/analysis - we're hoping to make #sportsanalytics research reproducible! #CMSAC18 cmusportsanalytics.com/confe…
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Are you looking closely? Adding another to the #dataviz class example repository
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Narrator: it was
#NESSIS (this is the density curve I talked about on @WMoneyball @bcmassey @adiwyner)
Not gonna lie, but I feel like I made the best GIF I will ever make in my life for #NESSIS19 #staytuned
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Adding to #dataviz class examples
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I'm cheering for the #DetroitLions this year to win it all - someone is going to write a book one day about their #sportsanalytics group w/ #BigDataBowl, PFF, #CMSAC (I remember Paul Ibrahim presenting a poster as a high school student at our conference!), & #CMSACamp connections
100% yes. We saw a big increase in going for it on 4th the season after the 2017 Eagles won the Super Bowl.
Heck we even saw a big increase after the Ravens' (regular season) success in 2019 while going for it a lot, and they didn't even win a playoff game
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For the love of humanity, can individuals covering this story please replace "homeopathic" with "pseudoscientific" from now on
#Packers QB Aaron Rodgers received homeopathic treatment from his personal doctor to raise his antibody levels and asked the NFL to review his status. The NFL, NFLPA and joint docs ruled him as unvaccinated. Now, he has COVID-19.
More here: nfl.com/news/packers-qb-aaro…
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Thank you for letting us know how privileged you were in life to be able to take an unpaid internship with a NBA team in college
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Is that who I think it is in front of him? @CowboysStats
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Great time today w/ Simon Fraser #sportsanalytics group discussing '#NFL Ghosts: A framework for evaluating defender positioning using high-dimensional conditional density estimates' - fantastic virtual speaker series w/ all talks available online: sfu.ca/sportsanalytics/Semin…
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Also I updated my #nflscrapR data repository so all playoff games and statistics are now available to download easily as well github.com/ryurko/nflscrapR-…
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Problem prevalent in #sportsanalytics discourse: overconfidence and misunderstanding of expectation, coupled with lack of respect and understanding of variance
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*Published Statistician Kate Douglass!
KATE DOUGLASS STRIKES GOLD IN THE 200M BREASTSTROKE. 🥇🇺🇸
#ParisOlympics | 📺 NBC and Peacock
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Second #blogdown post in my #BayesianBabySteps series - intro to using Laplace approximation to model #NFL score differentials, determining the value of passing efficiency relative to rushing with EPA from #nflscrapR and the effect of strong priors #rstats stat.cmu.edu/~ryurko/post/ba…
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Congrats to the finalists, runner-ups, and honorable mentions from the 2024 Big Data Bowl! #BigDataBowl
kaggle.com/competitions/nfl-…
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This is the part I can't stop thinking about - like if you seriously continue to think the US healthcare system doesn't need a radical overhaul while living through all of this then either you're rich or just so far gone in terms of political vitriol
.@edyong209: “A country that, 7 months into a pandemic, still cannot ensure that its healthcare workers have enough gowns and gloves and protective equipment is not going to be able to distribute a vaccine in an efficient way. It simply isn’t.”
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And now @nflscrapR has been used in a @WSJ article - we (@bklynmaks @stat_sam and me) are pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished with this #rstats package, it’s a great lesson on sharing your work, code, AND data so ANYONE can use it (students, journalists, fans, hobbyists etc)
It's not just your imagination: Seahawks games are actually the nuttiest. Here's the the data to prove it. wsj.com/articles/seahawks-ga…
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Great read from Kevin - for all the discussion about Shanahan's decision making, Mahomes being inevitable, etc., the turning point of the game (objectively and subjectively) was a punt that hit Darrell Luter Jr's foot followed by Ray-Ray McCloud III failing to pick it up
The three fumbles were the highest impact plays of the game, two going against the 49ers and for the Chiefs
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Looks like you can now access online the official publication of the culmination of @nflscrapR research #nflWAR by @stat_sam @bklynmaks and myself, as it officially heads to print - crazy to think how long ago it was now as I start PhD year 3 @CMU_Stats degruyter.com/view/j/jqas.20…
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Had a blast this week teaching #rstats to the @WhartonSB @WMoneyball students, the students were chanting “pipe it” (#tidyverse %>%) while taking this photo - really an amazing group and program @adiwyner @skdeshpande91
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BREAKING NEWS:
#CMSACamp is back! Applications are now open for @CMU_Stats Summer Undergrad Research Experience! stat.cmu.edu/summer/
Program theme is once again #DataScience in #SportsAnalytics!
Set for Jun 5 - Jul 28 w/ provided housing + $4000 stipend!
Deadline: Feb 26th!
#CMSACamp is back! Join @CMU_Stats this summer for eight weeks of statistics, data science, and sports! Work with professional sports organizations! Housing plus stipend included! Applications due Sun Feb 26 stat.cmu.edu/summer/ #datascience #sportsanalytics #CMSAC #letsdothis
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Initial advice I've recently been giving people whenever they ask me about entering #sportsanalytics:
1) Make a twitter account and follow @StatsbyLopez @nnstats
2) Look here hanic-analytics.com/
3) Find and work on a project that interests you, then promote it like crazy
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Yup this happened #micdrop @Bbl_Astrophyscs dropping the news that #MLB used leftovers for 2019 post-season instead of 2019 regular season balls #CMSAC19
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Never received my PA mail-in ballot, went in person, was mocked by people for requesting a mail-in, and waited until they allowed me to do a provisional - I voted for people I care about since as a white male US citizen I'm privileged to not be affected by the outcome #GoVotePA
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MAKE THIS DATA PUBLIC
A source gave us unprecedented access to 73,000 MLB scouting reports. @BenLindbergh will break down his findings in a three-part series this week. First up, how good are scouts at projecting success? theringer.com/mlb/2019/3/4/1…
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This is what a #sportsanalytics class looks like @CMU_Stats w/ Bayesian state-space modeling in Stan following the class Glickman & Stern model... a fun, simple example for #NFL team ratings in the Patrick Mahomes era (2018-present) #dataviz
Going to cover the classic Glickman
& Stern (1998) model in #sportsanalytics class next week with Stan demo, naturally @StatsbyLopez & co. already did this (in BUGS) statsbylopez.netlify.app/pos…
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Just found out we won the student poster prize at #NESSIS! All credit goes to Riccardo (stat.cmu.edu/~rfogliat/ was busy in London w/ ML fairness) and Natalia! Such a fun project about the wild world of Ultra Trails, check out Riccardo's package here github.com/ricfog/ScrapITRA
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This is essentially the main reason why I find events, such as the Sloan conference (yes I’m more than willing to call it out), to be problematic - they’re creating such a high barrier to entry propagating an obvious problem in #sportsanalytics, it needs to be inclusive #dobetter
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Excited to share my first @PNASNews publication with my advisors Max G'Sell, Kathryn Roeder, and Bernie Devlin: 'A selective inference approach for false discovery rate control using multiomics covariates yields insights into disease risk' pnas.org/content/early/2020/…
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Hat tip to @benbbaldwin @mrcaseb and others that created #OpenSourceFootball as a great resource for some deep dive resources: opensourcefootball.com/ (this is severely underused!) #sportsanalytics #rstats #dataviz
Holy crap, @nflfastR makes it easy to calculate quantities that you want. Thank you, @benbbaldwin, @Stat_Ron and everyone else that has made this possible. Download the csv files here: github.com/nflverse/nflverse…
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I made another football data package... world football that is - introducing #fcscrapR which allows you to easily grab, for any match on ESPN with commentary data, shot attempts, substitutions, cards, fouls! Including #WorldCup matches like #SRB #CRC github.com/ryurko/fcscrapR
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Presenting Markov Model of Football by @keithgoldner of @numberFire in class, so I reproduced his paper's original absorbing Markov chain with 09-17 play-by-play data with #nflscrapR - code to construct the transition matrix and basic calculations here github.com/ryurko/nflscrapR-…
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This has definitely been the most frustrating part of seeing media reaction to the forecasts - "the worst-case 95th percentile projection is nowhere near reality so these models are awful!"
There's a difference between what the models said and "what the models said" as interpreted by the media, which often emphasized worst-case scenarios rather than the broader range of possibilities they articulated, some of which were conditional on there being no distancing, etc.
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Fun first full day with @WMoneyball students teaching #rstats, seeing how passionate the students are, along with our @CMU_Stats summer program students visiting Dan Fox and #Pirates analytics tomorrow, reminded me of the most ridiculous email I’ve ever sent... but it worked
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Thank you to @asmae_toumi for being vocal about this - the leaders of @SloanSportsConf need to be held accountable and actually address this prevalent problem to fundamentally change its culture - you are limiting accessibility to #sportsanalytics
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While this is obviously a limited view of QB performance, old man Russell Wilson is a clear upgrade over Kenny Pickett (and probably a better passer than Fields without the need of trading picks) - I'm intrigued by Russ in a heavy play-action Arthur Smith #Steelers offense
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Pretty big deal in the world of sports right?
BREAKING: The FTC just banned non-compete agreements.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a final rule making it illegal for bosses to make workers sign noncompetes in any scenario, and voiding nearly all existing noncompetes.
This is a game changer for American workers.
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From now on if you intend to cite the @nflscrapR EP, WP, #nflWAR models, please use the official JQAS citation #PUBLISHED w/ @stat_sam @bklynmaks degruyter.com/view/j/jqas.ah…
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Congrats to Rishav Dutta @rishavd64! His work on using Gaussian mixture models for #NFL pass coverage with #BigDataBowl tracking data was accepted for publication in JQAS! He worked incredibly hard, transforming this paper from its first version: arxiv.org/abs/1906.11373
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Excited to share the 1st #CMSAC notebook in this year's #BigDataBowl: Down, set, hut! Explaining variability in snap timing on plays with motion! Inspired by talking w/ @schwartzsteins - Quang Nguyen (@qntkhvn) and myself modeled snap timing variability kaggle.com/code/tindata/down…
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Going to cover the classic Glickman
& Stern (1998) model in #sportsanalytics class next week with Stan demo, naturally @StatsbyLopez & co. already did this (in BUGS) statsbylopez.netlify.app/pos…
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What truly blows my mind about this, is the context with professional athletes regarding all the other supplements, crap, etc. they take with well known side-effects that can be pretty awful - and yet they won't get vaccinated???
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Cole Tucker is reminding me how much I love baseball #LetsGoBucs #MOREFUN
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Competing in #NFL #BigDataBowl? Check out our updates to #GoingDeep available on @arxiv here: arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01760.pdf Improved model performance with better covariates and demonstrated the use of RFCDE for continuous-time @nflscrapR EP and WP values
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Open Source Sports is officially alive on Substack: opensourcesports.substack.co…
This will be a free newsletter where I highlight and translate the latest #sportsanalytics research in academic journals that the broader public may not be aware of: opensourcesports.substack.co…
See you there!
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Changepoint detection anyone? Definitely feel like that’s an under appreciated topic in sports statistics...
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Spent some time updating my CV and website, and finally decided to start blogging to share more info about my projects and what I’m learning #mistakeswillbemade #blogdown stat.cmu.edu/~ryurko/post/fi…
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Excited to share @CMU_Stats #BigDataBowl Coaching Track submission by MADS students Shane Hauck, Marion Haney, Devin Basley, & Vinay Maruri in collaboration w/ @TartanFB @CoachRyanLarsen @CoachGibboney: No Edge No Chance kaggle.com/code/devinbasley2…
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Extremely excited to share the latest #sportsanalytics research with @CMU_Stats @FranciMatano @leerichardson09 Taylor Pospisil @stat_sam and @PittTweet @kpelechrinis Nick Granered - #GoingDeep: Continuous-time within-play valuation using #BigDataBowl data arxiv.org/abs/1906.01760
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