Everyone (almost) agrees that the offensive line is crucial for the success of a team. However, evaluating the offensive line in NFL is still a mystery and underdeveloped. The offensive line has an important role in both the passing game (by protecting the QB from sacks and hits), as well as in the running game (by […]

Ranking and rating teams has been one of the major tasks in the sports analytics community. One of the most elegant approaches I have seen is the one presented by W. Winston in his book “Mathletics“. In this post I will adopt the general approach presented and add a few elements more. Our case study […]

Clock management is certainly a crucial task that the personnel of an NFL team has to work on and be prepared for. However, it should be obvious even to the casual fan that the teams are all using pretty much the same guidelines for clock management. In this article, I am not going to judge these guidelines […]

What attributes explain a team’s win-loss performance? Of course this is the holy grail of sports (hoops) analytics, since knowing the answer to this question will allow a team to create a plan that will exploit this knowledge.  The famous 4 factors from Dean Oliver are one such example, where a small number of statistics […]

How long should a playoff series be? This is a question that involves different dimensions ranging from practical/logistics (e.g., traveling, length of the series etc.) to ones related with the league objective (e.g., notion of “fairness”, value of upsets etc.). In this blog post I will make an attempt to show some of the tradeoffs […]