It’s a great time to be a sports fan – and an even better time to be a sports and data fan as these two worlds continue to meld together. For the last couple of years nearly every conversation about sports, analytics or both had to have at least one
After the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one thing’s clear: here at SAS, we love football (soccer in the US!). To wrap up the popular 2014 World Cup data visualization series on the SAS Visual Analytics Community, we created a presentation that’s chocked-full of interesting insights. From the trillions of pieces
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
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 Gut feel and experience have been replaced by analytical insight and predictive modeling.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
Over the last few posts, Lee Ann has been exploring how to marry business strategy with day to day pricing decisions. This week, I’m going to take this discussion in another direction by describing how pricing decisions are made, and the importance of strategic pricing in another industry – sports.
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
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
