HSAC is a student-run organization at Harvard College dedicated to the quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management. This blog features the original contributions of Harvard undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and affiliates. HSAC does research for several sports-related publications and companies. Please contact us at harvardsportsanalysis@gmail.com if you have any questions or want more information.

NFL Draft Efficiency Before and After the Rookie Wage Scale

By Kevin Meers

With the new collective bargaining agreement came the rookie wage scale and a lengthy discussion of how the rookie wage scale would change draft strategy. Using salary data from www.spotrac.com, this analysis presents two models for rookie contract value based on overall pick drafted before and after the new CBA. Combining these models with my previous analysis of Career Approximate Value (a metric from www.profootballreference.com), I present a model for CAVOA/dollar both before and after the 2011 CBA to see how the rookie wage scale affected draft efficiency. (Note that throughout this post, salaries are in tens of thousands of dollars.)

Let’s start by modeling rookie salaries before the 2011 CBA. Salaries peak at the first overall pick, and rapidly decline until pick 34, after which salaries stay fairly constant. This sharp change makes a corner in the salary curve, so we need two equations to accurately model rookie salaries:

Belichick and Brady Address the Media: A Statistical Report

by Ben Blatt and Andrew Mooney

You can also read this post on the Boston Globe’s website here

Bill Belichick and the postgame podium are notorious for being a lethally boring tandem. Week after week, he stymies reporters with concise non-answers, vague summaries, and robotic praise of players, giving them nothing of substance to write about his team.

Belichick’s public persona may be as inscrutable as his gameplans, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to break it down, as he would do to an opposing offense. To get a more in-depth look at the man, we analyzed Belichick’s speaking patterns from the transcripts of his post-game press conferences this season and, for purposes of comparison, gave the same treatment to the more media-friendly Tom Brady.

We started by looking at how long each of them is willing to stand in front of the podium. There’s actually not much variation between the two; Belichick answers questions with an average of 72 words, whereas Brady’s answers average 60 words. However, the difference in the two personalities becomes apparent when we split these averages up by wins and losses. Brady’s answer length barely changes; after a win, his average response length is 59 words, as compared to 62 words following a loss. Belichick is quite a bit less eager to talk to the media after a defeat. Though he averages 82-word answers following a win, he cuts his responses to an average of 25 words after a loss, less than one-third of his post-victory average.

Nothing Has Changed About NFL Injuries: Update

By Kevin Meers

(Huge thanks to TeamRankings for providing the data used in this post)

Last November, I wrote a post on how the lockout did not significantly affect injuries in the NFL this season. Now that the regular season is over, I wanted to take another look. The much discussed lock out could have exacerbated or limited the mounting “wear and tear” and “buildup of cuts and bruises” that develop throughout the season. In reality it did neither. There was almost no difference in injuries this season when compared to the past two years. For various reasons, there has been a lot more attention paid to the injuries that did happen. That increased attention has made it appear that there were a lot more injuries this season, despite efforts by the NFL to limit concussions and hits on defenseless players. If the league is serious about reducing injuries, that attention needs to focus on prevention going into next season.

As the graph below clearly shows, injuries this season are almost exactly the same as the past two years. This constant level of injuries suggests that neither the lockout nor the recent rule changes have had any significant effect on the number of injuries in the NFL.

Drafting Quarterbacks

by Kevin Meers

Using my previous analysis of career approximate value (CAV) on how to value draft picks, this study analyzes how the results apply to the quarterback position. As the five-month debate on what the Colts should do viz. Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck is just beginning, these findings can help inform the Colts’ decision. As with the entire draft, quarterbacks selected first among quarterbacks and earlier in the draft have more expected upside and more expected value. The following analysis looks at the quarterback position in terms of both order drafted and overall pick.

Let’s first look at quarterbacks by order drafted. Both the upside and expected value of the first overall pick stand out here. The upside of drafting the first overall quarterback taken is two and a half times greater than the downside; these both fall very rapidly as more quarterbacks are drafted. Here’s the graph:

The Exams and Christmas Letdown Myth

This ten day period before New Years marks a pause in the frenetic college basketball schedule. Teams take time off for exams and the Christmas holiday, often not playing games for ten days at a time. Yet almost every team in college basketball will play at least one, if not two games during the post-exams/Christmas period.

Conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence holds that these breaks, and the distractions around this time of year, can lead to letdowns, especially for favored teams. In fact, just last week Pittsburgh lost to Wagner, #4 Louisville trailed at home to both College of Charleston and Western Kentucky, Michigan struggled with Bradley, and Kansas lost to Davidson. All of these teams were heavily favored at home. Jeff Goodman summed up this view succinctly, tweeting that “Louisville’s players look as though they have already left for Christmas. Down early to WKU but Cards should come back.”

But do BCS home teams really perform worse than usual during this exam break? Do they schedule easier competition to account for poorer play?

How Much is Albert Pujols Getting Overpaid?

By Chris Bruce

Big news hit the baseball world yesterday as the Los Angeles Angels announced a $254 million, 10-year contract for 31-year-old Albert Pujols, a strikingly large contract for such an old player, even if Pujols is still a perennial all star and MVP-candidate. It’s pretty clear that the contract is long and a lot of money for a player so late in his career, but just how much is he getting overpaid? Let’s take a look.

To get a sense of what the rest of Pujols’ career will look like we can examine how other top players’ performance typically drops off at the end of their career. Looking at other top first basemen from the past, we can map out a typical trajectory for a player in Pujols’ position, and then make a reasonable estimate of what will happen for him.

Tebow is Still Producing Miracles: An Update

By Chris Bruce and Andrew Mooney

A couple weeks ago we did some analysis on Tim Tebow, attempting to explain how he’s been winning games despite his poor statistical performance. Simply put, he has been performing poorly overall but has saved his best for the most crucial game situations. After a couple more wins from Tebow, we thought it deserved another look.

A word on the methods used: each potential game situation (down, distance, and yard line) carries with it a certain number of expected points –– the amount of points, on average, a team scores (or allows) from that position, based on NFL play-by-play data. Similarly, every play in a football game adds (or subtracts) these expected points by altering the game situation. For example, a 1^st and 10 on one’s own 20 yard line is worth 0.4 Expected Points, and a 1^st and 10 on the 20 yard line of the opposition is worth 4.0 Expected Points. A 60-yard bomb on first down following a touchback, then, would be worth 3.6 Expected Points Added, the change in Expected Points generated by the play’s outcome. This last statistic, EPA, is what we used to evaluate Tebow’s raw numbers, free of the context of timing within the game.

More Chaos: Predicting The Final BCS Scenarios

By Chris Bruce and John Ezekowitz

Last week we debuted our BCS prediction model, using it to predict what would happen in the BCS rankings under certain scenarios for the week’s games. Turns out there wasn’t too much chaos as all the favorites at the top of the rankings won, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see some interesting scenarios play out this weekend. Below we let you know how the race for the BCS championship will likely play out depending on the results of the SEC Championship between LSU and Georgia and the Bedlam between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. For each scenario we show the probability that it will occur, according to TeamRankings predictions, in parentheses.

Scenario 1: LSU and Oklahoma State win (49%)

Despite all the talk about an LSU-Alabama rematch in the BCS Championship, our model predicts that Oklahoma State will actually leapfrog Alabama if they win this weekend. (While we predict Oklahoma State will be ahead of Bama, the two teams had overlapping confidence intervals in our model – meaning that we can’t predict this result with high confidence). This result is at odds with what we predicted last week because Alabama’s BCS score dropped further than expected, despite beating Auburn handily. That drop put Oklahoma State within striking distance for a shot at the National Championship game. Potentially, the voters were already showing a little bias against an LSU-Alabama rematch and docking Bama accordingly. Oklahoma State still has quite a bit of room to move up in the polls, but to overtake Alabama they’ll need to beat them in the computers as well. Given that 5 of the 6 BCS computer rankings had Oklahoma in the top 6, a victory over Oklahoma would likely do the trick.

The Biggest Over and Under Achievers in the NFL

by Kevin Meers

The lists below are based on my previous analysis on the NFL draft using the Career Approximate Value from www.pro-football-reference.com.

The Overachievers

How to Value NFL Draft Picks

Commissioner Roger Goodell at the NFL Draft

by Kevin Meers

Through 12 weeks of the season, most franchises in the National Football League know whether they are in the playoff hunt or if they need to start prepping for the draft: The Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers have almost clinched playoff berths while the Indianapolis Colts have just about locked up the number one overall draft pick. As the Superbowl hopefuls get excited for playoff runs, most of the league has to sit and wait for April. For five months, most teams have to sit and wait. They are on the outside looking in, watching the playoffs on TV. Eventually, only one team will win while the rest of the league can do nothing but watch. That team will be the undisputed winners, and everyone else will have officially lost.