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 my region of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) one of the most anticipated times of the year has arrived— the NCAA basketball tournament. This is a great time of year for me, because I get to combine several of my passions. For those who don’t live among crazed college
Experiencing a major sporting event in person is a hard-to-describe experience for a fan. When your team is winning, a feeling of euphoria rolls through the stadium or arena. I have hugged and high-fived complete strangers when a game-winning shot goes in or someone scores a game-winning touchdown in the
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 Gut feel and experience have been replaced by analytical insight and predictive modeling.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
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
Revenge of the Nerds was so 1980s. Now it's a new world order: math geeks and athletes are working together. I'm not talking just about what happens when data nerds observe, analyze, and predict sports outcomes -- as they do in March Madness with their "bracketology". That's compelling, but your
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
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
