Sports & Fantasy Sports Blog

Author: Billy Jones Introduction If you're a football fan, you've probably been bombarded with tweets and comments about the NFL combine recently, the annual event is where top prospects showcase their skills in front of scouts, coaches, and analysts. One of the most talked-about segments from this year’s combine was the quarterback throwing drills, especially the deep ball section. Every year, the media and fans alike overreact to combine performances, but for me it had me wondering does throwing deep actually matter? Is it worth taking the risk of a long pass, or are shorter, more consistent throws the more efficient route? Is that assumption of short routes being more efficient even true? As a football analytics enthusiast, I was curious and wanted to investigate. In this first blog post, I'll do some visual investigation of the different types of passes thrown in the NFL. In later posts I’ll look at the efficiencies of passes by location. So, buckle up and get rea...

Author: Billy Jones Introduction Welcome to the fourth and final part of my blog series where I perform an analytical review for quarterback fantasy performance from 2022. In this blog, we will be wrapping up our initial review of the quarterback in the 2022 season through the lenses of a few classic statistical measures. Just like part 2 of this series, we will be using average and standard deviation to review the consistency of performers but instead today we will be looking at attempts and yardage (touchdowns are just too low volume – the results look very wonky). So, whether you're a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the world of fantasy football, this blog will provide valuable insights into the performance of quarterbacks in the 2022 season, so let’s get started! Statistics 101 (skip section if you read part 2 of this series) As we continue down our analytical review, we are going to use specific data science concepts as tools to help us gain insights. As referenced in ...

Author: Billy Jones Introduction Welcome back to my blog about football analytics (this is my first non-fantasy football blog). In this post, I'll be exploring a topic that I find incredibly fascinating, a statistical analysis of a sports statistic. Specifically, I'll be discussing how we can use regression and R-squared values to review a commonly used football statistic, completion percentage, and hopefully create a better statistic to predict player performance. So where did this come from? My favorite book of all time is “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis and in the book, Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics used on-base percentage as a competitive advantage over their competitor as on-base percentage had shown to be a more accurate measure of a player's offensive contributions than batting average. On-base percentage takes into account not only how often a player gets a hit, but also how often they get on base in other ways, such as...

Author: Billy Jones Introduction Welcome back to the third installment of my blog series where I perform an analytical review for quarterback fantasy performance from 2022. In this blog, we start to “take a look under the hood” of fantasy football player production. We will be exploring the relationships between data points that make up fantasy scoring that simple logic would assume are closely linked, such as rushing yards and rushing touchdowns, passing yards and passing attempts, and more. We will be using visualization tools to help us determine if these relationships actually exist and if there are any outliers or anomalies in the data and will comment on what this might mean about their performance in 2023. I'm particularly excited about this blog, as we start to get a little deeper into the realm of data science-y things. This blog touches on topics of correlation and anomalies, and how they can be used when evaluating player performance. These are easy concepts and ...

Author: Billy Jones Introduction Welcome to the second part of my blog series where I perform an analytical review for quarterback fantasy performance from 2022. In this blog, we will be continuing our review of the quarterback in the 2022 season through the lenses of a few classic statistical measures. In order to better understand the performance of quarterbacks, we will be utilizing the simple statistics of average and standard deviation to further understand 2022 player production. By doing so, we will hope to uncover trends and patterns in the data and gain insights into the quarterback fantasy production. So, whether you're a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the world of fantasy football, this blog will provide valuable insights into the performance of quarterbacks in the 2022 season, so let’s get started! Statistics 101 As we continue down our analytical review, we are going to use specific data science concepts as tools to help us gain insights. As referenced in th...