Applied Sports Science newsletter, April 10, 2015


Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for April 10, 2015

 

Inside Slant: The insanity of replacing Philip Rivers – NFL Nation – ESPN

ESPN, NFL Nation blog, Inside Slant from

This winter I was speaking with Steve Clarkson, one of the top youth quarterback tutors in the country, about the state of the position. After decades of squiring teenage signal-callers from high school to college and the NFL, Clarkson believes the art of quarterbacking has reached a crossroads.

In short, the NFL’s feeder system is providing mis-trained prospects. The spread offense might work at this level, but its quarterbacks can’t survive it long-term and aren’t equipped to adjust.

“It’s pretty clear that quarterbacks in a spread at the NFL level take a beating,” Clarkson said. “You can’t last playing quarterback when you’re exposed that way. … Something has to give. Either you find a way to train them to play in the pocket, or the position is going to become situational in 10 years, because they’re going to run out of them.”

 

The underrated gem that is Bazzy Muhammad | MinnPost

MinnPost from

… during the off-season, Bazzy embarked on a brutal six-week training regimen patterned after the program for Navy SEALs, and lost 15 pounds while adding strength and sculpting his torso. When I saw his 225-pound frame at Media Day at the beginning of preseason, I skeptically asked him how he could continue to be effective jousting with much taller and heavier opponents down near the hoop. I am stronger and quicker now, he replied, certainty in his voice.

And so he was. The percentage of Bazzy’s shots taking place within three feet of the hoop rose from 32.3 to 36.5 this season, while his accuracy on those shots leaped from 47.5 to 67.6 percent. Sure, some of those were uncontested layups and dunks accomplished by Bazzy running the floor in transition. But plenty of them also came when he flew past defenders and was able to muscle up shots down low.

 

Scenes From a Pro Day

The MMQB with Peter King from

The Pro Day has become a staple of the NFL’s draft season. But what exactly goes on at one? Lots of prying (before, during and after) and lots of stopwatches. And, in the case of the University of Maryland, an unusual visit from Bill Belichick
 

Jose Mourinho: ‘I have a problem. I’m getting better at everything’ – Telegraph

The Telegraph, UK from

… His first job was teaching children with Down’s syndrome and severe mental disabilities – “a big challenge”, he admits. “I wasn’t technically ready to help these kids. And I had success only because of one thing, the emotional relation that was established with them. I did little miracles only because of the relationship. Affection, touch, empathy – only because of that. There was one kid that refused all his life to walk up stairs. Another one that couldn’t coordinate the simplest movement – all these different problems, and we had success in many, many of these cases only based on that empathy.

“After that I was coaching kids of 16. Now I coach the best players in the world, and the most important thing is not that you are prepared from the technical point of view; the most important thing is the relationship you establish with the person. Of course you need the knowledge, the capacity to analyse things. But the centre of everything is the relationship, and empathy, not only with the individual but in the team. And to have that empathy in the team we all must give up something. It’s not about establishing the perfect relation between me and you; it’s about establishing the perfect relation to the group, because the group wins things; it’s not the individual who wins things.”

 

Forget Most Improved Player of the Year: Gordon Hayward is the Most Improved Player of the Last Half Decade

numberFire from

… How about this year, we make it a “lifetime achievement” award of sorts? Maybe look at someone who has improved incrementally every year he’s been in the NBA?

The lack of an extreme leap will always count guys like that out for this award, regardless of how deserving they may have been for a period longer than just one season. A perfect example of this is how Arron Afflalo has never won the honor, despite increasing his scoring average in each of his first seven seasons in the NBA (2014-15, his eighth, will mark the first year of his career where he didn’t score more points per game than the last). He didn’t explode any one season, but he worked on his game and showed marked improvement every single year. Still, he doesn’t have anything to show for his efforts and gradual amelioration, mostly because we came to expect it from him.

One player that is unmistakably going down the Afflalo path is Gordon Hayward. He might not win this year’s MIP award, but his steady refinement of his game over all five years of his career-to-date has been impressive and deserves some kind of recognition.

 

Growing Up and Burning Out

Pacific Standard from

… For three weeks the NCAA athletes play in this tournament, one of the most popular sporting events in the world, and for many, when it ends, so do their competitive basketball lives.This is likely not the case for Kentucky’s 7’1” Willie Cauley-Stein however, whose tournament run came to a close on Saturday night when his Wildcats were upset by the Wisconsin Badgers. Cauley-Stein is widely anticipated to be a first round selection in this summer’s NBA draft and, like the rest of his cohort, he’s expected to be dedicated to the game around the clock. Last week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Cauley-Stein, who has also expressed a desire to work in fashion, questioned this trope.

“You got to be interested in other things,” he said. “If you focus on one thing, you’re going to eventually like—you’re going to get bored with it or you’re going to get burned out on it. My grandparents have taught me that since I was younger, just to be involved in a whole bunch of different things so you don’t get burnt out and you know what you like to do and what you don’t like to do.”

 

RIVER PLATE

The Original Coach from

On the northern edge of Buenos Aires, on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, resides a giant of Argentine club football: Club Atlético River Plate. The history of the sporting club runs deeper than just football as the club accommodates a variety of sports, but its success in domestic and continental competition suggest that the River of Silver yields golden footballers.

Since its founding in 1901, River Plate has amassed 36 Primera División titles, eight national cups including Argentina’s oldest football trophy, the Copa Campeonato, two Copa Libertadores titles, along with a host of South American tournament titles, making it the most successful club in Argentine football.

 

Seeing the forest for the trees

Google+, Research at Google from

There has been rapid progress in advancing the state of the art of detecting and classifying objects in static images, automatically learning complex features in pictures without the need for manually annotated features. But what about videos?

Extending convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on static images to videos can be challenging – slight differences in object pose/context in individual frames of a video can change the predicted class/confidence outputs of these networks. Would incorporating information from long video sequences allow for a global “big picture” view, and enable better video classification?

Today on the Google Research blog, software engineers +Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan and +George Toderici report on two approaches that not only show that learning a high level global description of the video’s temporal evolution is very important for accurate video classification, but that these approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance in both the Sports-1M (http://goo.gl/mU75vh) and UCF-101 (http://goo.gl/AYV54D) benchmarks.

 

Complete Guide to Bar Speed Trackers • Strengtheory

Strengtheory blog, Carl Valle from

In the last year, we hit the tipping point of sensor technology in the weight room, and finally those in the strength game have something for them. For decades, the endurance crowd enjoyed their toys, specifically GPS watches and heart rate monitors, but the average gym rat that takes his or her lifting seriously was always an afterthought. It made sense since more people will show up and “participate” in a 5K road race, but only a small amount will do a powerlifting or weightlifting meet. Right now, three players are going to be the leaders in force output measurement tools, and I expect to see a lot of evolution of these products in order to capture and keep customers.

In this article, I will step backward and give a perspective of the value of getting bar tracking data and paint a picture of what is essential and what is just marketing hype. I have used all three devices: Kinetic Performance’s Gymaware, the Push Band (Push), and the Bar Sensei (Assess2Perform). Each company has strengths and weaknesses, and it’s up to the user to decide what is best for his or her situation. Also included in this article are some practical considerations in adding what Bryan Mann has coined “Velocity Base Training,” or looking at bar speeds to help manage workouts more precisely.

 

What are the Differences in Injury Proportions Between Different Populations of Runners? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. – PubMed – NCBI

Sports Medicine from

BACKGROUND:

Many runners suffer from injuries. No information on high-risk populations is available so far though.
OBJECTIVES:

The aims of this study were to systematically review injury proportions in different populations of runners and to compare injury locations between these populations.
RESULTS:

A total of 86 articles were included in this review. Where possible, injury proportions were pooled for each identified population of runners, using a random-effects model. Injury proportions were affected by injury definitions and durations of follow-up. Large differences between populations existed. The number of medical-attention injuries during an event was small for most populations of runners, except for ultra-marathon runners, in which the pooled estimate was 65.6 %. Time-loss injury proportions between different populations of runners ranged from 3.2 % in cross-country runners to 84.9 % in novice runners. Overall, the proportions were highest among short-distance track runners and ultra-marathon runners.
LIMITATIONS:

The results were pooled by stratification of studies according to the population, injury definition and follow-up/recall period; however, heterogeneity was high.
CONCLUSIONS:

Large differences in injury proportions between different populations of runners existed. Injury proportions were affected by the duration of follow-up. A U-shaped pattern between the running distance and the time-loss injury proportion seemed to exist. Future prospective studies of injury surveillance are highly recommended to take running exposure and censoring into account.

 

When letting players know about analytics is a good thing — 21st Club Limited

21st Club Limited from

When is it appropriate for a club to let footballers in on the team’s analytics research?

This question came up in a conference here in Toronto last March in which I was a panelist. Other speakers included the director of analytics for the NBA Jason Rosenfeld and assistant GM for the New York Giants Kevin Abrams—in other words, people who generally knew whereof they spoke. Someone on the panel raised the familiar problem of players “running up the numbers”: by informing players of favourable metrics—sprint speed perhaps, or shot volume—you run the risk they will attempt to artificially inflate them to improve their prospects.

There are some delightful examples of this in football. Blake Wooster, co-founder of 21st Club, recalled to me the story of David Ginola’s time at Aston Villa, a player who, in the early days of Prozone, was scolded by his then manager John Gregory on his failure to run higher distances (though Ginola was wise enough to know that intensity, not quantity, was the key in sprints). “Even David James, our GK, runs more than you!” Gregory apparently told Ginola. So, naturally, whilst the ball was on the other side of the pitch, the keeper James would jog back and forth along the touchline to ensure Ginola would get another earful from the gaffer!

 

Ready, Set, Statcast: What the New Data Stream Can Teach Us About MLB

Grantland from

Sometime this spring, Major League Baseball Advanced Media completed the installation of Statcast, its long-anticipated everything-tracking technology. The system is now active in all 30 parks, and the petabytes of records it generates by capturing the physical position of every player, pitch, and batted ball many times per second are accumulating somewhere on MLBAM’s massive servers.

Thus far, the sexier components of Statcast have kept a low public profile. Statcast’s official account hasn’t tweeted a new stat-enhanced video since Alex Gordon stopped at third, and we haven’t seen any sign of the baserunning and defensive data that should shed some light on two of the most mysterious areas of a fairly well-quantified sport.

But despite the lack of fanfare and the features that remain under wraps, Statcast’s soft launch has been better news than most statheads had allowed themselves to hope for, given the commissioner’s caginess about the time frame for releasing raw data online.

 

Why Soccer’s Most Popular Advanced Stat Kind Of Sucks

Regressing from

Count the number of shots a player or team takes, multiply it by .095. Congratulations, you’ve just been spared the scores of hours it takes to build an Expected Goals model. Crude, yes. But, ultimately, it’s probably not much worse than what’s out there because Expected Goals is kind of garbage. … But again, the models that are trying to calculate ExpG—one here, here (with a little more information here), here, and here, and several more at the tip of a Google search—are likely terrible. And they can be terrible for different reasons.
 

Steelers GM Kevin Colbert, Baltimore’s Eric DeCosta on drafting late | The MMQB with Peter King

The MMQB with Peter King from

No pick in the top 10? No problem. Roster architects from two of the NFL’s most consistently successful franchises—Pittsburgh general manager Kevin Colbert and Baltimore assistant GM Eric DeCosta—share insights into their draft-day strategies for picking late in Round 1
 


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