Syracuse, N.Y. — Every Tuesday and Thursday, students gather in a plush new classroom on the Syracuse University campus to analyze sports.
They listen to Dr. Rodney Paul use words like “heteroscedasticity,” “regression diagnostics,” “weighted least squares” and “multicollinearity” to analyze the information they will consider to determine, say, what influences a minor league baseball team’s attendance or why one NFL offensive line performs better than another. There are dizzying charts and equations and graphics to absorb, a software program to help sort out the raw data and a room full of curious young people who are attempting to master this brave new world.
Since Billy Beane built his Oakland Athletics “Moneyball” empire based on discovering statistical diamonds in the baseball rough to compete with the game’s big spenders, emphasis on analytics has surged in sports. Web sites like kenpom.com and hoop-math.com have revolutionized the way sportswriters and fans analyze athletics. Last year, Rotoviz.com ran a list of more than 200 twitter feeds with analytical bents.
“Analytics in sports is a revolution that is happening right now,” said Patrick Winton, a student in SU’s Sport Data Analysis class and the president of SU’s baseball sabermetrics club. “People are looking at the game from a completely different point of view.”
SU, in an effort to tap what it believes will be a burgeoning industry, will offer a major in sports analytics in August 2017 from its David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. Michael Veley, director of the Sport Management program, said the idea surfaced after he vetted the concept with sports industry leaders like David Falk, the school’s benefactor and namesake, Brandon Steiner, the collectibles king, David Levy, the Turner broadcasting president, John Wildhack in his previous incarnation at ESPN and Russ Brandon, president of the Buffalo Bills. Those industry giants underlined what Veley had suspected: analytics will dominate future conversations about sports and SU’s sport management school could capitalize on the growing interest by offering a program to master the discipline.
SU, said Veley, wants to attract an “Ivy-League caliber kid,” perhaps 30 to 50 of these students per year, who will immerse themselves in a new language of sports and numbers to analyze and predict trends in athletics and other industries.
Dr. Rodney Paul sits in the back of his classroom at the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics and offers advice on students’ 5-minute sport analytics presentations. Oct. 11, 2016 Paul, whose background is steeped in economics, teaches the Tuesday-Thursday Sport Data Analysis class and presides over SU’s baseball sabermetrics club. This semester, each student in Paul’s class will study attendance trends for his or her assigned minor league baseball team with an eye toward showing those clubs how to improve attendance numbers. There is all sorts of data to consider, from specific promotions (fireworks!), to weather, to runs produced by the home team to outliers like a major leaguer joining the club for a rehab assignment.
Paul said a former student who did an independent study about the Florida Panthers’ attendance trends now works for that NHL team. But the beauty of the analytics class, he said, is its ability to encompass other industries, too.
“I didn’t want to do it if the only jobs that came out if it were working for teams,” he said. “I don’t know how many of those jobs there will be. I hope that all of them are able to live that. So in putting it together, I started thinking about the business side. I searched for business analytics and being able to model the curriculum on that. Because a sports team isn’t that much different from many other businesses, those skills translate pretty easily.”
“This pretty much applies to every industry. Everybody is trying to look at data to figure out what’s driving trends,” said Joey Weinberg, a student in the class. “People want to maximize their profit, so they use data to figure it out.”
A student in SU’s sport analytics class follows along as his classmates make a presentation. Oct. 11, 2016Make no mistake, though, Winton, Weinberg and Colby Connetta, all analytics class members and sabermetrics aficionados, hope to land jobs in the sports industry. None are math majors or math savants, though Paul and Veley said as SU moves forward with its sport analytics major, math proficiency will be an important component in determining which students are admitted to the program.
One class last week started with a saturation of numerators and denominators, variables and coefficients. But slowly, surely, the focus shifted to sports.
The class discussed how perceived scoring slants NFL viewership. They debated the ratings differences in successive Thursday night football games. In a subsequent class, students working in groups gave 5-minute presentations about their findings on various NFL positions — they broke down data on which running backs were the most valued, which quarterbacks performed most ably, which franchises had the best special teams.
It was a fantasy league participant’s dream.
Students come to the class from a variety of backgrounds. They’re history majors, journalism majors, technology types who love sports. Some are already working for coaches on SU’s campus. SU’s football program and women’s basketball program have class members crunching numbers. One of the class members is a men’s basketball team manager who occasionally operates the cameras in the Melo Center and cuts up film for coaches to watch.
Paul anticipates other teams or franchises will eventually reach out to SU seeking students to make sense of their sport-specific data. The possibilities, said Paul, are endless. On SU’s campus alone, he could forsee trying to figure out which players in SU’s football recruiting footprint are undervalued and fit into the Orange’s current pass-happy scheme. He could conceivably construct a model of Jim Boeheim’s recruiting patterns, create a sort of Boeheim recruit prototype:
“If we had a big enough data base and enough time, we could quantify what he looks for in a recruit. We could create an algorithm that is Boeheim. If we had every high school player in the country, had all their attributes, all the statistics and we could normalize it based on who you play, we would be able to construct a model of who he goes after as a recruit. Who does he make an offer to, then you’d be able to back out of that, what are the player attributes he’s looking for? If you’re trying to follow in the footsteps of Jim Boeheim and you’re trying to figure out why he made this decision or that decision, if you can quantify it, you can come up with a better way to think about it. Then you can look back and say, ‘Who did we have success with and why?'”
Just reading that paragraph might make you, or a coach with 40 years of experience, pause. Paul admits coaches, front office personnel and fans come at analytics from different perspectives, some embracing the discipline, others guided more by look and feel. He suggests a beneficial blending of both.
Syracuse University’s sport analytics class. Oct. 11, 2016His students last week used the Boston-Cleveland ALDS to debate theories and discuss probabilities. Red Sox manager John Farrell was a “hot topic,” for his various roster moves. Analysts can calculate the chances that a hit ball will be caught based on launch angle and bat speed. They can estimate how effective a reliever will be coming out of the bullpen in various situations.
SU’s sabermetrics club has entered renowned analytics competitions trying to solve such dilemmas as creating the perfect bullpen, constructing the best possible trade for Cole Hamels and formulating the probable free agent deals for Orioles pitcher Ubaldo Jiminez and Yankees catcher Brian McCann.
But as much as the aspiring analysts appreciate a deep stat dive, they also understand the simple joy of watching and drawing more basic conclusions.
“We don’t argue that numbers are the only way to go,” Connetta said. “You still need to have some nuance because ultimately, the game is played on the field or on the ice. You still have to view it from the field rather than the guys in the front office who have the math and the numbers. You put it all together and try to make the best decisions in terms of trades and free agents, stuff like that.”
