Harvard Sports Analysis Collective

Released from the NFC’s glamorous Cowboys and snatched up in a hurry by the AFC’s equally glamorous Bills, Terrell Owens found himself a fresh start at the age of 35. But given last year’s production, Football Outsiders’ Bill Barnwell asks, Is T.O. Done?

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Each year, the NFL decision makers gather in Indianapolis to watch players cavort about in spandex.  Even though all the players participating have appeared in dozens of college games and hundreds of plays, scouts (and fans) insist on hard “data” to determine their value.  The most widely reported test during the combine is the 40 […]

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In Super Bowl XXXVI, New England kicker Adam Vinatieri’s 48-yard field goal attempt sailed through the uprights, clinching a world championship for the Patriots. Nearly eleven years before Vinatieri’s kick, Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal attempt in Super Bowl XXV famously missed “wide right” and earned the Buffalo Bills their first of four straight Super […]

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In the 2008 NFL season, several teams had success with multi-back rushing systems. The Giants used the combination of Earth (Brandon Jacobs), Wind (Derrick Ward), and Fire (Ahmad Bradshaw). The Panthers used DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart. The Titans used Smash (LenDale White) and Dash (Chris Johnson). All three of these teams ranked in the […]

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I just came across a nice little article, Analytics in Football, https://www.technologyreview.com/computing/20132/page1/  It is from February last year but I still encourage you to check it out.  There is also a link to a football analytics book, which looks interesting and which I plan to check out.  http://thefootballscientist.com/scientific_football/Details/Scientific_Football_2007
The article also says the following, something that […]

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 It would be absolutely absurd to start the Super Bowl with anything that resembled a surprise.  Why do it?  What could one gain?  The Super Bowl is simply a normal football game, and the teams who have already made it this far know how to win football games; they must have won a bunch in […]

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My below response is regarding an HSAC discussion about ‘proportional point-spread hypothesis’ that we’ve been having over the past several days.  It started as follows: Professor Morris, inspired by the early lead Arizona took over the Eagles, posed a question regarding point spreads, specifically, how the points should be thought of as being distributed over […]

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As you know, the Patriots “need help” in order to reach the playoffs, partly because they hold no tie breakers if they tie another contender in the standings.
If we assume NE beats Arizona (home) and Buffalo (away) they’ll be 11-5 (that’s no slam dunk, maybe around 50%?), what then is their chance […]

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Hosted by the Harvard Office of Career Services (OCS) and the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (HSAC), the NFL came to campus to hold a recruiting and information session for Harvard students. 

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Each year, immediately after the draft, a variety of media sources publish their draft grades. Basically, these grades tell the readers if the team did a good job at picking the players that were conventionally popular (because if a team picked a player that they liked, but nobody else did, that would be immediately […]

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