When I started working at business analytics leader SAS, I had no idea I’d be helping the Great Britain Rowing Team plot their way to Olympic glory. While I haven’t, yet, got in a boat and started rowing, I have started working with them on how they can make better
In this blog post, I put some classic rock song data under the SAS Analytics microscope, to see if I could get a better picture of exactly what is considered 'classic rock' these days... Michael Raithel recently pointed me to an interesting article/study about 'classic rock' music, and invited (or is
The old saying KISS (Keep It Simple) can be applied to just about anything, including sports analytics. Here I use SAS to create some simple charts to analyze a winning soccer team... To get you into the right mood, here is a picture of my friend Jennifer's dog, who loves soccer :) In
Michele Ensor recently posted a wonderful blog with a graph of the 2014 Winter Olympics medal count. I'm going to further refine that graph, making it an Olympic graph ... on steroids! :) Here is Michele's graph: First, let's give it a few simple cosmetic changes. I always like to have
Over the last few years, the main qualifications for a general manager of a sports team have changed dramatically. Gut feel and experience have been replaced by analytical insight and predictive modeling. If Billy Beane started the trend with his Moneyball approach to team building, GMs like Daryl Morey (Houston
Since mead is becoming popular in movies (such as Thor and The Hobbit), and even as an emerging industry in real life ... what better example to use for some SAS graphs! And who knows - this might even turn you into a mead drinker! But first, to get you in the
Every day of the year is an official 'national day' for something - here's a SAS chart to help you find which bizarre 'national day' falls on your birthday! I recently read an article that lists weird and unconventional national days. It was very interesting, but I found the data
Two years ago, Brad Pitt starred in Moneyball, an Academy Award-nominated story about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane bringing the power of advanced analytics to the sport. Beane wasn’t the first to use statistical analytics to build a successful team and keep its payroll in check. Baseball and political
Are you an NFL fan, or curious about analyzing social media data? -- Well, in either case, this blog's for you! I recently read a fascinating Facebook article that included a U.S. county map showing which NFL (U.S. football) team had the most 'likes' in each county (based on ~35 million
A big part of "winning" these days (be it sports or a business) is performing analytics better than your competition. This is demonstrated in awe-inspiring fashion in the book (and movie) "Moneyball." And on that topic, I'd like to show you a few ways SAS can be used to analyze sports data
Everyone in the world has their attention turned towards the Olympics this week, so what better topic to tie in to a SAS/GRAPH blog than that?!?! I had seen a graph on the guardian website that I thought was interesting, so I decided to try to create my own (slightly different)
In this informative webcast, professors Jay Coleman and Mike DuMond discuss the 2012 Dance Card, revealing this year’s accuracy rate in predicting at-large selections to the Men’s Division I NCAA Tournament. The professors review the top 70 teams in the Dance Card, identify one team that may indicate a conference
If you like college basketball and the bracketology talk around the NCAA Tournament, you don’t want to miss an in-depth webcast with Dance Card professors Jay Coleman and Mike DuMond, taped earlier this morning. The professors discuss the 2012 Dance Card accuracy, the methodology behind the Dance Card, and identifying
Once again NCAA men’s basketball is peaking – and so is talk of brackets and bubble-busters, bad calls and buzzer beaters, what-ifs and what the … happened? Dance Card Roundup Official Dance Card site SAS Dance Card blog series NCAA Tournament Meet the Professors Jay Coleman Bio Allan Lynch Bio
As part of my research for a sascom magazine article about how sports teams use analytics to hone performance and win games, I interviewed Jeff Ma, the former MIT student who inspired the New York Times best-seller Bringing Down the House and the movie 21. Ma now uses his analytic
