New Posts at the Community Site

Don't miss Andrew Foland's 5-part tour de force on how to incorporate pre-game estimates of win probability with the in-game estimates. Awesome job, and I really appreciate the time Andrew has put in. This is something I've been asked to do for a while. I think it's a great idea, and I developed a very similar method to do it.

However, I would be reluctant to make it the 'official' WP or WPA model. If the Patriots have a game against a weaker opponent pegged as a 70/30 match-up, and Tom Brady plays lights-out, should he only get 0.30 WPA instead of 0.50 WPA? Should he be penalized for being favored pre-game?

Bryan Davies expounds on the go-for-the-2-point-conversion-twice strategy teams should be employing when down by 2 TDs.

Jim Glass on the eight stats he hates most.

Thanks to everyone who has made the Community Site such a success this season, and to editor Ed Anthony in particular. Keep the posts coming!

More Good Stuff at the Community Site

This past week the Community site received some interesting contributions.

Jim Glass continues his look at 'Big Win %' (A team's record in terms of beat-downs and close wins.) He also forecasts what this might imply for this season's playoffs.

Steven Buzzard asks if short passing success is the key to winning.

James Deyerle compares FG % vs Expected FG %.


Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. We're getting some real quality stuff lately. Thanks again to Ed A. for editing the Community site.

Interesting Posts over at the Community Site

This past week the Community site received some interesting contributions.

Jim Glass looks at whether the close-game/clutch-play narrative is backwards.

Ian Simcox measures just how big an effect strength of schedule can have on a team's regular season W-L record.

Karl Berthold looks at the effect Mike Martz has had on his teams over his career, both as head coach and as offensive coordinator.

Bruce D. introduces a novel type of team-rating system. It's based on points scored and allowed, adjusted for strength of schedule and for lucky plays. Bruce has also been keeping us up to date on which teams have benefited the most by lucky and unlucky plays. That is, high-impact plays that tend to be non-repeatable, such as kick returns for touchdowns blocked field goals, fumble returns, etc.

Many thanks to Ed A. for editing the Community site.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Community Re-Launched

About a year and a half ago, I launched Advanced NFL Stats Community, a site where anyone could contribute a post. It received a few dozen submissions, some more interesting than others, and it was a great start. Unfortunately, the time I devoted to reformatting the articles and their tables of data took away time I wanted to spend on other projects. I decided to gradually let the site fade into the background.

But one of my goals continues to be helping building a collaborative community of football stat heads without “premium” content or “proprietary” black-box stats, and I’d like to offer readers a platform for sharing ideas and analysis. In the recent off-season, I completed a long-standing goal of building an open NFL play-by-play database suitable for research and making available to everyone. Immediately, readers started parsing the data, adding fields for various things, and  sharing their insights in the comments section of the post.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Adv NFL Stats Community

I get emails periodically from fellow stat-heads asking me to review some football research. Often they’re professors or statistics students writing an academic paper, or an amateur enthusiast like me. There have also been a number of guys who have started up a website very similar to mine, and have asked for a link to their sites which I’m always happy to do. Very often however, they aren’t able to sustain the effort and the sites go dark after a few weeks.

I thought a good idea would be to provide a place where stat-heads can post their own research. Ideally, this would be a place with an existing readership base that can review and comment. It would be a place where we could exchange ideas and even data. Unlike some other stat-oriented sites, it would become a collaborative open community without “premium” content or “proprietary” black-box stats.

So today I’m announcing the creation of Advanced NFL Stats Community, an adjunct site where stats guys can post their own research, analysis, or even just ‘fact-backed’ opinions.

The call goes out. Everyone is invited, and I won’t filter posts that disagree with my own theories. If you’ve done some of your own research and want to share it or find out what other people think, send me what you’ve got and I’ll be happy to add it. Or if you’re trying to build readership for your own stats site, that’s fine too. Just shoot me an email at the address in the About | Contact page in the menu above, or you can post a submission directly to the site by emailing hatch113.statscommunity@blogger.com.

To get the ball rolling, I’m going to make two of my primary databases available for anyone to use as a basis for research. Both my team statistic database and my game result database for the 2002 through 2007 seasons are now published. These are the databases I use for my primary efficiency regression models for team rankings and game predictions.

My only request is that if you use the data for other purposes you credit this site. Lots of other data can be found all across the web, at sites such as nfl.com espn.com, and myway.com and can be easily copied into Excel (Copy/Paste Special/Text).

Welcome.