• Appreciate the usage of analytics and statistics in sports

• Designing lineups
• Power ranking of teams
• Determining future potential of draft picks
• Predicting outcomes of games
• Much more!

• Intially developed for calculating skill level in 1 vs. 1 games such as chess.
• Discovered by Arpad Elo
• Consists of a series of complicated formulas

Image acquired from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-we-calculate-nba-elo-ratings/

• Article by Dennis Lock and Dan Nettleton
• https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jqas.2014.10.issue-2/jqas-2013-0100/jqas-2013-0100.xml

In this article, the authors apply a machine learning algorithm, random forests, to update in-game probabilities before the next play begins in the NFL.

Here is an image from the stated article, showing the win probabilities before each play.

• Movie released in 2011
• Describes how analytics in used in baseball to build rosters using less money than big time franchises

Image acqurired from http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/baseball-analytics/

• Arguably longest application of data in sports
• Collecting past data and leveraging that to predict the outcomes of future games

Are some players closely related to others that they form groups or clusters?

Image acqurired from https://fastbreakdata.com/classifying-the-modern-nba-player-with-machine-learning-539da03bb824

There are many more applications of analytics in sports. This is just a few examples. In later lessons, we will give an introduction to machine learning, so you can do some of these independently.