Effectively Wild Episode 1475: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange (Football and Basketball)

December 26, 2019

Effectively Wild: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange

EWFI
In the first installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to ESPN’s Bill Barnwell about football (the American kind) and then ESPN’s Kevin Pelton about basketball (48:43), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more.

Audio intro: Superchunk, "Winter Games"
Audio interstitial: Ben Kweller, "Different But the Same"
Audio outro: Pernice Brothers, "How Can I Compare"

Link to The Hidden Game of Football
Link to FiveThirtyEight on the NFL not passing enough
Link to FiveThirtyEight on NFL teams running too much on first down
Link to Bill Barnwell on teams evaluating quarterbacks
Link to Kevin Clark on fourth-down conversion attempts
Link to Danny Heifetz on the origins of the NFL analytics movement
Link to Clark on the NFL’s analytics revolution
Link to Clark on bringing science to the NFL draft
Link to Football Outsiders site
Link to Kevin Pelton’s bio/archive
Link to PER Wikipedia page
Link to Pablo Torre and Tom Haberstroh on NBA biometrics
Link to Zach Kram on the NBA’s 3-point boom
Link to Haberstroh on load management
Link to Paolo Uggetti on Kawhi Leonard’s load management
Link to FiveThirtyEight RAPTOR projections
Link to order The MVP Machine