Expected Value

Eric Eager is a senior data scientist at Pro Football Focus, and he co-hosts the PFF Forecast Podcast. In this episode, we’ll discuss…

- Takeaways from the AFC and NFC title games
- What makes the Chiefs so difficult to defend
- How good the Chiefs and 49ers defenses are
- Super Bowl bets that look appealing
- What PFF does and what he does there
- How teams use PFF data
- The rise of analytics in the NFL
- His career path through academia to PFF
- Advice for aspiring data scientists

Show links
- Follow Eric on Twitter: @PFF_Eric
- Eric’s bio and home page
- PFF Forecast Podcast
- Is the Chiefs defense for real?
- How the Chiefs & 49ers made the Super Bowl

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Mike Sando is a senior NFL writer at The Athletic, and he’s one of the most open-minded and analytically-minded national NFL writers, as well as a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s election committee. In this episode, we talk about…

- The Divisional Round and conference championship games
- Mike’s career path from Whitworth to ESPN to The Athletic
- How football data has changed over the past two decades
- How he uses stats and analytics in his writing
- Advice for aspiring journalists about media, analytics & other skills
- How teams’ use of data has evolved & what they can/will do with NGS data
- How numbers are used in the Hall of Fame election process
- His favorite Super Bowl experience

Show links
- Follow Mike on Twitter: @SandoNFL
- Mike’s writing at The Athletic
- Mike’s Divisional Round recap & title game preview
- Whitworth alumni profile

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Paul Sabin is a Senior Sports Analytics Specialist at ESPN, where he works on various metrics as part of ESPN’s Sports Analytics group. In this episode, Paul will discuss…

- What his job entails at ESPN
- The college football title game, through the lens of metrics like Total QBR and Football Power Index
- Creating the Player Impact Rating
- Challenges of capturing a human element in ESPN’s College Playoff Predictor
- Communicating uncertainty
- Midseason takeaways from ESPN’s Basketball Power Index
- How an engineering class pushed him toward a stats career
- Advice for people entering the sports analytics industry
- Being a Nationals fan during their World Series run

Show links
- Twitter: @SabinAnalytics, @ESPNStatsInfo
- ESPN’s Sports Analytics home page
- Football Power Index
- College football Total QBR
- College football Player Impact Rating
- Basketball Power Index
- Midseason BPI takeaways

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James Tippett is the author of The Expected Goals Philosophy: A Game-Changing Way of Analysing Football. Among the topics discussed in this episode:

- His initial exposure to expected goals
- What prompted him to write this book
- An overview of the expected goals statistic and how it’s calculated
- Using expected goals both descriptively and predictively
- Reaction to Brentford’s rise as an analytics club
- How expected goals is used in English media
- What’s next on the soccer analytics front
- Attending an all-time great sporting event

Show links
- The Expected Goals Philosophy on Amazon
- Twitter: @JamesTippett, @xGPhilosophy
- Twitter thread with chapter-by-chapter summary
- Book excerpt: Do clinical finishers exist?
- Book excerpt: What do Lionel Messi and Ryan Fraser have in common?

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Spencer Anderson is the Director of Basketball Analytics for the Indiana Pacers, and he’s one of few sports analytics people with both a master’s degree and a law degree. Among the topics covered:

- His career path to his current job
- What he does with the Pacers
- State of analytics in the NBA
- Keys to communicating data
- Load management in the NBA
- Where to eat in Iowa City

Show links
- Follow Spencer on Twitter: @spencejanderson
- Summer internship opening with the Pacers
- NFL’s Big Data Bowl

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A Senior Research Analyst at Sports Info Solutions, Mark Simon is as passionate and knowledgeable about baseball as anyone you will meet, and he is one of 12 voters for the Fielding Bible Awards. Among the topics covered:

- Mark’s career path to ESPN and Sports Info Solutions
- Communicating data to former players
- Advice for people looking to advance in the sports media and analytics industries
- Defensive Runs Saved
- How he votes for the Fielding Bible Awards
- His favorite final out of a World Series

Show Links
- Mark on Twitter: @MarkASimonSays
- Mark’s articles on The Athletic
- Mark’s Yankees Index book
- 2019 Fielding Bible Awards & voting breakdown
- Updates to Defensive Runs Saved
- Sports Info Solutions
- Sports Info Solutions baseball podcast
- 2020 Bill James Handbook
- Mark’s personal web site
- Mark recites all final World Series outs since 1954

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Mike Goodman is a soccer writer and managing editor of StatsBomb.com, and last week he wrote a good piece entitled, “A case study on using data to prepare to administer the eye test,” reacting to an MLS playoff game in which data and the eye test seemed to differ. Mike is one of the better writers at bringing together data and a tactical eye, and then producing easy-to-understand articles that appeal to a broad audience. Among the topics covered…

- Why and how he wrote that piece
- Bridging the proverbial gap between analytics and the eye test
- How he approaches data when watching a game and when unfamiliar with a team
- Keys to using numbers well in writing
- What he hopes to see from player-tracking data
- His favorite things about living in Latvia

Links Mentioned in this Episode
- Follow Mike on Twitter: @TheM_L_G
- Original StatsBomb.com article
- Steve Zakuani tweets that inspired the article
- Explaining post-shot expected goals: OptaPro, StatsBomb
- StatsBomb conference panel with Vosse de Boode (Head of Sports Science and Analytics at Ajax)
- Jāņi in Latvia

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Asmae Toumi is the editor-in-chief of Hockey-Graphs, a site that analyzes and visualizes the NHL, and she’s a prominent member of the online hockey analytics community. Among the topics discussed.

- How to get started in the field
- Challenges of hockey analytics
- What puck- and player-tracking data might do for the sport
- Hockey-Graphs’ mentorship program
- Her love of both R and Brad Marchand

Links Mentioned in This Episode
- Follow Asmae on Twitter
- Hockey-Graphs
- Meta Hockey
- NBA Stuffer
- Evolving H ockey
- HockeyViz
- Charting Hockey

Listen here or wherever you get podcasts: Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

Taylor Twellman has been ESPN’s lead soccer analyst for nearly a decade, and he provides perspective on using data in television and communicating with non-analytics types. Among the topics discussed…

- The objective information he looked for as a player
- His prep process for broadcasting a game
- What makes a stat good and useful for him
- Challenges of working information into a soccer broadcast
- What’s interesting about expected goals
- What he wishes he could quantify and what he’d like to get from player-tracking data

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Jeff Bennett oversees ESPN’s Stats & Information Group, which produces statistics and analytics that power all of ESPN’s platforms. Having been at ESPN for 25 years, Jeff’s career parallels the rise in sports data and analytics, and he is one of the most influential people in mainstream sports stats over the last quarter century. In this podcast, he discusses…

- What ESPN’s Stats & Information Group does
- How his interest in sports and numbers developed
- Joining the ESPN research team and working shows like SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight
- Starting the Sports Analytics team
- Developing metrics like Total QBR
- Working with the NFL’s NGS data
- The future of sports analytics