The Football Analytics Show by The Power Rank and Ed Feng

Mike Goodman, Senior Soccer Editor at CBS, joins the show to talk analytics and Euro 2020 played in 2021. He explains expected goals (xG) as a tool to analyze players and teams before discussing new frontiers in soccer analytics. Then he breaks down the top 4 contenders to win Euro at the quarterfinal stage: Belgium, Italy, Spain and England. Finally, we talk about a sleeper Euro team and the long term prospects for the US men's national team.

Bud Elliott, national recruiting analyst and betting expert at 247Sports, joins the show to talk college football win totals and futures. He describes the objective and subjective process he uses in evaluating college football win totals. He also talks about his indispensable tool in looking at national championship futures. Among other teams, we discuss Florida State, Penn State, Oregon and Michigan as well as impact freshmen for the 2021 season.

Dan Szymborski, baseball analytics expert and writer for FanGraphs, joins the show to talk about his work in data analytics. As a baseball fan, he started doing calculations at the age of 10 and was active on Usenet groups in the 1990s. This later led to his ZiPS projection system for baseball players, and Dan describes how this works. He also talks about more recent work with StatCast data and which team will win the 2021 World Series.

Sarah Bailey of the Los Angeles Rams joins the show to discuss her work in football analytics. She describes her transition from a Masters of Statistics at Simon Fraser University to working for an NFL team. Then she talks about the three different areas she has worked on for the Rams. Other topics include baseball analytics, the NFL lifestyle and running.

Matt Waldman, creator of the Rookie Scouting Portfolio (RSP) and senior writer at Footballguys, joins the show to talk about the 2021 NFL Draft. In creating the RSP, he watches hours of tape, which gives him a strong take on the QB that should be the 3rd overall pick. In addition, he describes why a surprise QB is rated better than Zach Wilson, the presumed 2nd pick in the draft. Finally, he tells some great stories about the reach of his RSP.

Julian Packer, a professional sports bettor and founder of BetStamp, joins the show to discuss how to bet props in basketball and football. He describes how he uses his software background to model props. Then he talks about how he avoids getting his bets limited by sports books, a common problem for winning bettors. Finally, he tells us about BetStamp, his app for tracking bets.

Colin Davy, data scientist at Facebook and two time winner of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Hackathon, joins me to talk about his custom golf model for the Masters. He describes how he uses Markov Chains to predict the outcome of golf and how this differs from the Strokes Gained approach. He predicts which golfers have the highest probability to win the 2021 Masters. Finally, Colin talks about how he used data to become a Jeopardy champion.

Jordan Sperber, analytics expert and founder of Hoop Vision, joins me to discuss college basketball and the Final Four. He describes how a study on match ups in college basketball led him to early success in analytics. Then he shows how he combines analytics and strategy in breaking down Houston, Baylor and Gonzaga.

Ed Feng breaks down the 2021 NCAA tournament bracket by a surprising metric: the preseason AP poll. He explains why this poll from months ago still matters. Then he looks at Gonzaga's potential toughest opponent, the region that might be wide open, and the toughest Round of 32 games for 1 seeds.

Edward Egros takes a unique look at the bracket by asking these questions:

• How have one and done players fared in the tournament (Oklahoma State and Cade Cunningham)
• The impact of travel (Purdue)
• Whether coaching matters (Michigan State and Tom Izzo)

He ends with a team that could win the tournament despite a lack of history.