Huskers Joining the Stats Revolution

[Saunders]

Nebraska is getting into the advanced analytics game.

 

The University announced Wednesday that it has hired Tucker Zeleny as its new Director of Sports Analytics and Data Analysis. He’ll direct a newly-created department charged with sifting through and analyzing the new forms of data related to athletic performance.

 

“Sports analytics is becoming a hot area,” Zeleny said in a statement. “There is a ton of data out there right now and with new sport technology being made available seemingly every day, there will only be more. Any additional information or advantage we can provide to the various coaching staffs, and to the department in general, is a huge positive.”

 

http://hailvarsity.com/news/tucker-zeleny-sports-analytics-data-analysis/2015/07/

 

 

 

[NUance]

 

Yeah!

 

 

 

Moneyball comes to DONU!

[Moiraine]

Should've been done sooner, imo.

[ColoradoHusk]

[Mavric]

 

The University of Nebraska Athletic Department has recently added Tucker Zeleny as the Director of Sports Analytics and Data Analysis. Zeleny joins Athletics after building an impressive resume in various areas at UNL.

Zeleny will head a newly formed department that will be in charge of working with Nebraska’s 24 varsity sports to collect, analyze and summarize data related to team and individual performance. Zeleny and his staff will also work with support staff areas within the department to collect, analyze and summarize data related to department operations.

“I am excited that Tucker has joined the athletic department and will be leading this newly created department,” said Steve Waterfield, Senior Associate Athletic Director for Performance and Strategic Research. “I have been impressed not only with Tucker’s analytical skills, but also with his ability to apply these skills in a practical, effective manner that gives Husker sports teams a competitive advantage. Our sports teams and departments stand to benefit significantly from the information Tucker and his staff will provide.”

Zeleny earned his doctorate in statistics from UNL in May of 2015. His dissertation involved multivariate time series on multiple time scales with applications toward weight lifting data collected by the Husker football team. Zeleny completed his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at UNL in 2010 before joining the statistics department as a teaching assistant. He completed his master’s degree in statistics in 2012.

[Mavric]

Consider Nebraska officially an “early adopter” in the college realm.[/size][/font][/color]

 

Zeleny is a home-grown product, hailing from Carleton, Neb. He’s got three degrees from UNL, receiving a B.S. in mathematics in 2010, an M.S. in statistics in 2012 and Zeleny completed his Ph.D in statistics in 2015.

 

If you’d like a taste of what Nebraska’s getting, you can find the abstract to Zeleny’s doctoral dissertation, “A new approach to modeling multivariate time series on multiple temporal scales”, you can do so here.

Hail Varsity

[BigRedBuster]

Cool. I love statistics and think (as long last you step back and also see the big picture) a manager can't have too many stats at his disposal to manage.

 

I'm sure I'll print off his dissertation and read it in the evenings.

[sho]

Interesting, analytics have been going strong in MLB for awhile. The Warriors were leaders in analytics in the NBA, and they just won the NBA title. I'm all in, another thing to help our coaches put the players in the best position to win.

[Treand3]

This is good.

[BigRedBuster]

Interesting.....I agree with him that it can be abused and over used while ignoring the human factor and big picture. But, that's the case with a lot of things.

 

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FABIAN WASHINGTONVerified account‏@FABEWASH31

My school (Nebraska) has hired an analytics analyst, I'm not a fan of this at all. Analytics forget about the guys are humans not robots.

[Moiraine]

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FABIAN WASHINGTONVerified account‏@FABEWASH31

My school (Nebraska) has hired an analytics analyst, I'm not a fan of this at all. Analytics forget about the guys are humans not robots.

 

 

*rolleyes* (at him not you)

 

They're a tool to use. A great one in fact. One that no program that can afford it should not use.

[NUance]

 

Interesting.....I agree with him that it can be abused and over used while ignoring the human factor and big picture. But, that's the case with a lot of things.

 

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FABIAN WASHINGTONVerified account‏@FABEWASH31

My school (Nebraska) has hired an analytics analyst, I'm not a fan of this at all. Analytics forget about the guys are humans not robots.

 

 

I envision this effort as being similar to Billy Beane of the Oakland Athetics and his sabermetric approach towards drafting baseball players. ("Moneyball" by Michael Lewis.) Billy Bean and his statistician Paul DePodesta (the Jonah Hill character) drafted and traded for guys on the cheap who could play ball but did *not* fit the mold of prototype ball players. Like Scott Hatteberg, the injured catcher who could hit but couldn't throw anymore. (They turned him into a first baseman, where he didn't need to throw as much.) Or Chad Bradford, the freakish sidearm pitcher. LINK Or the fat guy at the end who was a crazy good hitter, but couldn't run.

 

In other words, the sabermetric approach overlooks freakish traits and statistical norms to get guys who perform. Like recruiting a RB who runs a 4.9 forty but always seems to gain yardage. Or a 250 lb O-lineman who somehow is able to block bigger guys. (I just made up those two examples.)

Edited July 8, 2015 by NUance
I combined Mavric's thread with saunders' earlier thread of the same topic.

[Moiraine]

 

 

Interesting.....I agree with him that it can be abused and over used while ignoring the human factor and big picture. But, that's the case with a lot of things.

 

User Actions

Follow

FABIAN WASHINGTONVerified account‏@FABEWASH31

My school (Nebraska) has hired an analytics analyst, I'm not a fan of this at all. Analytics forget about the guys are humans not robots.

 

 

I envision this effort as being similar to Billy Beane of the Oakland Athetics and his sabermetric approach towards drafting baseball players. ("Moneyball" by Michael Lewis.) Billy Bean and his statistician Paul DePodesta (the Jonah Hill character) drafted and traded for guys on the cheap who could play ball but did *not* fit the mold of prototype ball players. Like Scott Hatteberg, the injured catcher who could hit but couldn't throw anymore. (They turned him into a first baseman, where he didn't need to throw as much.) Or Chad Bradford, the freakish sidearm pitcher. LINK Or the fat guy at the end who was a crazy good hitter, but couldn't run.

 

In other words, the sabermetric approach overlooks freakish traits and statistical norms to get guys who perform. Like recruiting a RB who runs a 4.9 forty but always seems to gain yardage. Or a 250 lb O-lineman who somehow is able to block bigger guys. (I just made up those two examples.)

 

That's one of thousands of other things they could end up doing in a much improved way from what they were doing before. I'm sure they'll improve on analyzing all of the weightlifting data too. I don't know how connected this is with the brain research stuff but here's a dissertation from someone else in the stats department:

 

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3689706/

 

"National awareness of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) has recently increased due to higher incidence among military personnel, as well as to high profile lawsuits and rule-changes in North American professional sports. TBI affect both short-term and long-term brain and behavior mechanisms associated with cognitive deficits which are commonly measured using Event-Related Potential (ERP) data. Unfortunately, sophisticated methodology for ERP data analysis has not yet been established. In this dissertation, I present novel approaches to modeling ERP data in the context of spatio-temporal Gaussian random fields with the purpose of aiding TBI diagnosis in college athletes."

[NUance]

 

 

 

Interesting.....I agree with him that it can be abused and over used while ignoring the human factor and big picture. But, that's the case with a lot of things.

 

User Actions

Follow

FABIAN WASHINGTONVerified account‏@FABEWASH31

My school (Nebraska) has hired an analytics analyst, I'm not a fan of this at all. Analytics forget about the guys are humans not robots.

 

 

I envision this effort as being similar to Billy Beane of the Oakland Athetics and his sabermetric approach towards drafting baseball players. ("Moneyball" by Michael Lewis.) Billy Bean and his statistician Paul DePodesta (the Jonah Hill character) drafted and traded for guys on the cheap who could play ball but did *not* fit the mold of prototype ball players. Like Scott Hatteberg, the injured catcher who could hit but couldn't throw anymore. (They turned him into a first baseman, where he didn't need to throw as much.) Or Chad Bradford, the freakish sidearm pitcher. LINK Or the fat guy at the end who was a crazy good hitter, but couldn't run.

 

In other words, the sabermetric approach overlooks freakish traits and statistical norms to get guys who perform. Like recruiting a RB who runs a 4.9 forty but always seems to gain yardage. Or a 250 lb O-lineman who somehow is able to block bigger guys. (I just made up those two examples.)

 

That's one of thousands of other things they could end up doing in a much improved way from what they were doing before. I'm sure they'll improve on analyzing all of the weightlifting data too. I don't know how connected this is with the brain research stuff but here's a dissertation from someone else in the stats department:

 

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3689706/

 

"National awareness of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) has recently increased due to higher incidence among military personnel, as well as to high profile lawsuits and rule-changes in North American professional sports. TBI affect both short-term and long-term brain and behavior mechanisms associated with cognitive deficits which are commonly measured using Event-Related Potential (ERP) data. Unfortunately, sophisticated methodology for ERP data analysis has not yet been established. In this dissertation, I present novel approaches to modeling ERP data in the context of spatio-temporal Gaussian random fields with the purpose of aiding TBI diagnosis in college athletes."

 

 

Yeah, the sabermetrics I mention is but one of dozens of uses for statistics in football (or any other sport).

 

If you haven't seen Moneyball or read the book, I'd highly recommend them both. Read the book first if you can. It provides a lot of insight into the movie. (It was practically required reading in the Pentagon a few years back. lol)

[Mavric]

It’s a newly-created department, one that Steve Waterfield, Nebraska’s senior associate athletic director for performance and strategic research, doesn’t believe exists at any other NCAA Division I institution.

“He’s my Billy Beane, I guess,” Waterfield said, referring to the Oakland Athletics general manager who became famous for using applied statistical analysis -- or sabermetrics – in evaluating players.

What Zeleny and his staff (yet to be determined) will do exactly is still being developed, Waterfield said.

Collecting, analyzing and summarizing data could involve anything from delving into individual player statistics to studying Nebraska’s success rate on certain third-down plays to helping athletic performance to, yes, even recruiting.

“We’re still trying to figure out which direction this is going to take,” Waterfield said. “But we see a lot of different areas, and one of them is looking at it from a macro-athletic sense of what trends for each of our sports is indicative of overall success, or current success for those teams that are deemed successful from a won-loss standpoint.”

 

LJS