Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 17, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

You are also invited to check out the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

… The discussion is more than a simple matter of debate, however. Finding challenges and playing time for young players has important ramifications for the national team, both in the current World Cup qualifying cycle — which continued Tuesday night with a 4-0 victory by the Americans over Trinidad and Tobago in Jacksonville, Fla. — and beyond.

“We would have loved some young ones to be further than they are right now,” Klinsmann said in an interview with ESPN last week, although he added, “There are a lot coming through different pipelines.”

While the generation that could one day replace Bradley and Dempsey and others has been slow to take its place in Europe, the new season has shown signs that the trend could be changing.

Chasing Ambien with beer to sleep. Forty-pound weight loss. Chest pains. To stay in football, Urban Meyer had to address his mental health. Now, to help America tackle the issue, Ohio State’s head coach opens up in a B/R Mag exclusive.

… “I think for a few years, I don’t think a lot of our players were working hard enough,” said [Ola] Malmqvist, who added that it has been the mission of USTA player development to change the culture within its program. “[The culture] needs to be more about hard work with a purpose. I think that’s part of it.”

Under the leadership of Martin Blackman, who took over the position of player development general manager for Patrick McEnroe in 2014, Malmqvist says that the USTA has developed a strong structure and expanded its partnership with the private coaching sector to reach players all over the country.

… The Cameroonian enters a league drastically different from the one that existed when he was drafted in 2014. Figuring out how a big complements his teammates is valued now more than ever, and most teams have filled their front lines with specialists, players who have defined, compartmentalized skills. It’s not as simple as finding the best low-post scoring machine like Jahlil Okafor or Greg Monroe. Some teams prefer an athletic rim runner and protector like Nerlens Noel or Bismack Biyombo. Others prefer floor spacers like Frank Kaminsky or Kelly Olynyk, as long as they are competent defenders. There is no right or wrong, just different ways of building.

There is, however, a give-and-take with specialists that teams have to account for; their strengths often come packaged with significant weaknesses. From a skills standpoint, the Sixers won’t be dealing with that kind of give-and-take with Embiid. He checks all the boxes as a supreme-level prospect on the same level of Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Davis.

… “I’m getting back into things,” Payne said. “I’m shooting, jumping around, running. Everything’s been going great.”

Less than two months after having Jones fracture surgery on his right foot, Payne showed no signs of distress at his Thunder Reading Timeout appearance at the northeast Oklahoma City school on Tuesday.

Will the second-year guard be ready to play when training camp starts Sept. 24? Jones fractures are typically diagnosed with a 6-to-8 week timetable for return.

If Payne is back next week, he’ll have returned a day short of eight weeks. He underwent surgery on July 25.

Nick Coleman might be the living embodiment of this young Notre Dame season. The cornerback’s first impression this season was, for lack of a better descriptor, nightmarish. Leave it to the Irish’s official athletics site to relay Brian Kelly’s thoughts on the sophomore’s state of mind in the fallout of that Lone Star letdown:

“We have a thing called CoachMePlus, which is a (online) dashboard where players rate their mood, with one being the lowest and five being the highest,” Kelly told UND.com. “Nick Coleman, for example, on Monday rated himself a one — and there were a couple of others.

“So I grabbed Nick and he was having a rough time of it. We had a good conversation about the growing pains you go through. Just having the opportunity to talk to him about the ups and downs of playing major college football at that corner position maybe helped him, based on what we saw today. So, yeah, there was some tweaking going on with our football players relative to their confidence — and it was important to see them go out and have some success this week.”

… “These guys have goals. They come here in part because we have the resources to help them attain their goals,” said Andrea Hudy, KU’s 13th-year assistant athletic director for sports performance. “They want the challenge and want to become better people, better basketball players and better athletes,” she added.

Hudy, who plans and conducts workouts, is known not only as a tough taskmaster, but one that believes in positive reinforcement.

This week, she tweeted a 10-second video of 7-foot, 275-pound Azubuike doing reps on the “10-foot plyo pull-up” in which he leapt to a bar 10 feet off the ground, did a chin-up, returned to the floor then repeated the motion several times.

As the television contracts continue to grow and the competitive seasons of sports get longer, the true “off-season training program” has all but become extinct. This phenomenon is not specific to college and professional athletes however; youth athletes feel more pressure to play year-round to help give them a chance to be “seen” and recruited. With that much of the calendar year set aside as in-season, does today’s athlete actually have time to train? … Due to the sheer volume of playing year-round, athletes become extremely specialized only for a specific task. While this repetition develops great strengths in a specific skill, it also further develops mechanical deficiencies.

… how exactly does a film session get our brains back on the right track, and how can you relay that information to athletes? We talked with Haskell and fellow Nebraska psychologist Brett Woods to find out.

Overcoming Personal Bias

Try as we might to remain objective, our emotions simply don’t allow it. The way we think and feel in the moment affects our ability to accurately recall it later.

“Our emotions can sometimes override our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for evaluating performances, more of the logistics of evaluation,” Woods said. “That can color your perception of the event and your memory, your recall is more shaded by your emotional evaluation of the performance rather than the actual event that took place.”

… Matt Birk, Harvard class of 1998, and a six-time Pro Bowler in the NFL, was part of Murphy’s first class. Before Murphy, Harvard football was an afterthought, or, as Birk called it, a “mild inconvenience,” to the players; just 12 of the 36 players who came in as freshman finished all four years with the team. “It was bumpy early on,” Birk told me. “[Murphy] had a way of challenging us so that we wanted to earn it the hard way. We relished the fact we’re playing football and that we were competing for grades.”

“He brings a professionalism,” said Kyle Juszczyk, class of 2013 and now a Baltimore Ravens fullback. “He commands a room. He’s a guy you want to perform for. He doesn’t give compliments easily, so when you get one, you’ve earned it.”

His coaches and players have their entire 12-months planned out for them, including games, practices, and strength training; He assigns a voluntary reading list that ranges from finance to history. He’s embraced progressiveness in the sport of football, eschewing live tackling and blocking during the season to further eliminate unnecessary risks.

… The team has 12 kiosks – nine in the players’ lounge and three near the cafeteria – designed to collect information on each player every morning. Each player steps on a scale to record his weight. Then, he’s asked four general questions, such as, “How sore do you feel?” The player responds using a 1-to-10 scale.

Then, the player takes a seat and attaches a sensor to his small finger to measure his heart rate variable (HRV).

… “I think right now in a lot of MLS’s coaches’ heads a young player is 22 to 25, but a young player is 16 to 19,” Friedel says. “I think these coaches would be surprised at how good these young players would be if you gave them 10, 15, 20 games. And yes they’re going to make mistakes along the way, but I bet they’ll be surprised at how good some of them can be.”

Friedel doesn’t accept as an excuse that MLS coaches would be taking a risk by fielding young Americans.

“There’s no relegation,” he says. “Of all the leagues in the world, your coaching job is the most stable in MLS. I’m not saying that every single young player they put on the field is going to be great. I’m saying if you had the right person in charge of development at your academy, with a population we have in the United States, there would be a few young players on each club playing more than they do now.”

… Kelly has long studied circadian rhythms and sleep cycles for maximum game time performance, and this is just the latest in a long string of interesting choices.

Kelly urges players to get fully ten hours of sleep a night, as much to let the body heal from intense training as to conserve strength. As I note in my book Controlled Chaos, this is based on a lot of science, including a Stanford study that showed varsity basketball players who increased sleep to ten hours a night improved their three point and free throw shooting percentage by an astonishing 9 percentage points each.

The coach was recently asked about the team’s unusually intense practices on the day before a game. Most NFL teams just have a walk-through, aiming to let bodies rest of for game day performance.

Chip holds a high-speed practice, which then-Eagles cornerback Cary Williams complained about in 2014. (It should be noted that Williams was declining and is out of the league now.)

Kelly got the idea at the University of Oregon, which has a world-class track team. Trainers of some of the Olympic class runners there, perhaps informed by Nike research, told him that it was crazy to have athletes rest up for a day or two before a big performance.

This study assessed kinematic differences between different foot strike patterns and their relationship with peak vertical instantaneous loading rate (VILR) of the ground reaction force (GRF). Fifty-two runners ran at 3.2 m · s?1 while we recorded GRF and lower limb kinematics and determined foot strike pattern: Typical or Atypical rearfoot strike (RFS), midfoot strike (MFS) of forefoot strike (FFS). Typical RFS had longer contact times and a lower leg stiffness than Atypical RFS and MFS. Typical RFS showed a dorsiflexed ankle (7.2 ± 3.5°) and positive foot angle (20.4 ± 4.8°) at initial contact while MFS showed a plantar flexed ankle (?10.4 ± 6.3°) and more horizontal foot (1.6 ± 3.1°). Atypical RFS showed a plantar flexed ankle (?3.1 ± 4.4°) and a small foot angle (7.0 ± 5.1°) at initial contact and had the highest VILR. For the RFS (Typical and Atypical RFS), foot angle at initial contact showed the highest correlation with VILR (r = ?0.68). The observed higher VILR in Atypical RFS could be related to both ankle and foot kinematics and global running style that indicate a limited use of known kinematic impact absorbing “strategies” such as initial ankle dorsiflexion in MFS or initial ankle plantar flexion in Typical RFS.

There is a powerful, profound line in the United States Marine Corps Manifesto entitled, Earned — Never Given: “You will not be measured by how much you have, but by how much of yourself you’re willing to give.” It’s a mindset that has monumental implications in the USMC’s daily commitment to honor, duty and courage.

That hard-hitting statement also applies to athletes and coaches, even though the bottom lines are not matters of life and death. As strength and conditioning coaches, we must hold true to the standards that provide the basis for the art of our craft.

The strength and conditioning field is at a high point regarding the influx and utilization of evidence-based data. As recent as 25 years ago, though science was certainly testing the credibility and reliability of the various procedures and protocols in place, there was still a relative paucity of substantial scientific research. Today, peer-reviewed journals from many different fitness-related disciplines are inundated with new material. The sports science industry has become more than an adjunct luxury; it has now burgeoned into a must-have commodity.

In light of all of this, I’m still reminded of the words of the former Cincinnati Bengals’ strength and conditioning coach Kim Wood: “Strength training is as much an art as it is a science.”

… futurology is a murky business, and predicting which developing trends are going to be silver bullets and which will be blanks is very difficult.

This uncertainty is why Team Sky expose themselves to as many ideas as possible — from hosting start-up competitions for budding sports technologists to arranging for Sir Dave Brailsford to spend several days in California meeting companies developing some of the most ‘out-there’ ideas.

From devices that clamp electrodes on the head to improve the ability to learn, to real-time sensors that can look deep inside a rider’s body and see what’s happening to their muscles and metabolism, not all of the blue-sky stuff will make it to the pro peloton or the mass market.

The relentless drive to understand and improve cycling performance is accelerating. As Brailsford said after his sojourn in Silicon Valley: “You can never run out of marginal gains.”

… or a whole host of reasons — not the least of which is the sneaking mistrust we all have of all computers in high-stress situations — technology is slow to work its way into the hands of coaches and players, even when there seem to be obvious benefits.

“People are fearful that if I try something and it looks stupid, it could mean my career,” said Nick Watanabe, a professor of sports administration at the University of Mississippi. “But those who are doing it are the ones who are getting a competitive advantage.”

NFL players and coaches, for example, used to look at dozens of photographs between possessions of how the other team’s offense or defense was lining up. Staffers carried around thick binders and ran to and from printers after every play retrieving the latest images.

Then in 2014, Microsoft partnered with the league to replace the binders with Surface Pro tablets.

New radio technology from researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst allows small and low-power devices like wearables to run by piggybacking on power from larger devices with which they communicate.

Calling their technology “Braidio” for the braid of radios that can be connected, Professor Deepak Ganesan and graduate students in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass said their method for offloading energy could extend battery life hundreds of times in some cases for mobile devices such as fitness trackers and smart watches.

The technology itself is fairly simple, using a Bluetooth Low Energy-style active radio modified using a few additional off-the shelf components, researchers said in a paper, “Braidio: An Integrated Active-Passive Radio for Mobile Devices with Asymmetric Energy Budgets,” provided to Design News by Ganesan. The result is a low-power, tightly integrated, low-cost radio that can operate as an active and passive receiver, they said.

A trend is starting to appear, fitness trackers sales continue to rise, while smartwatches start to dwindle. IDC’s second quarter wearable sales report continues the trend, revealing a 48 percent rise in basic wearables and a 27 percent decline in smart wearables.

Fitbit retained the top spot in the wearables market. It sold 5.7 million fitness trackers in Q2, a 28 percent year-on-year (YOY) growth. Xiaomi also retained its second place, but only had 2.5 percent growth YOY.

Apple, the only company in the top five that only sells ‘smart wearables’, noticed a significant decline in wearable sales. Sales dropped from 3.6 million in the same quarter last year to 1.6 million this year, a 56 percent downturn.

… Labs processing genetic information on our behalf do generally take steps to protect privacy by anonymizing and safeguarding the details. But most direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies also admit that fully anonymizing genetic information is a practical impossibility, and in any case, many either share genomic data by default, or encourage their customers to allow it. In part, this is because vast collections of DNA data could lead to very real advances in medicine, allowing researchers to uncover patterns and linkages across millions of genetic samples, improving their ability to diagnose and treat common ailments like cancer and heart disease, as well as rarer illnesses that are still poorly understood.

But they also could be used — or misused — for a variety of reasons. Some experts, for example, worry that genetic information could be exploited for identity theft. Using the same databases, marketers could also target individuals with particular diseases — or in a more unnerving scenario, those whose genetic information suggests they are likely to develop certain illnesses in the future. And in all these cases, individuals might well have little control, given that a cousin, sibling, or other relative sharing DNA information on an ancestry website could unveil telling insights into a whole family’s health issues.

Despite these concerns, the virtues of pooling genetic information are frequently extolled — as are the sort of privacy safeguards that many consumers might assume are ironclad.

… On the face of it, the Nike+ Edition looks like a simple paint job, but there’s a little more to it. You do still get all the same Series 2 Watch features including built-in GPS and a waterproof design (up to 50 metres). It’s available in 38mm and 42mm watch case options but it also comes with a band that’s made of the same elastomer material found on the Apple Watch Sport band.

Apple worked with Nike to design the strap that features a perforated finish that will apparently make it more durable and offer a more breathable fit when you’re out getting a sweat on. It also looks a whole lot like the strap that Nike used on its Nike+ SportWatch made with TomTom many moons ago. Like the standard Watch, you can change the straps out in the same way as you could on the first Apple Watch.

… Jason Mihalik, co-director of UNC’s Matthew Gfeller Sports-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Center believes the spike in injuries is also the result of kids getting too serious too soon.

“I think that’s really a growing function of the one-sport athlete, where a lot of young athletes are specializing perhaps too soon in a single sport, and we’re seeing a lot of overuse-type injuries that we haven’t seen previously,” he said.

More than 200,000 concussions or head injuries were treated in emergency rooms, or 7 percent of injuries. The rate jumped to almost 30 per 10,000 people in 2013 from just under 2 per 10,000 players in 1990.

BAD ACTORS: Drug-resistant Shigella, which causes painful diarrhea, is among the pathogens that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers to be a “serious” threat to public health.

Background: Increased interest in using platelet-rich plasma (PRP) as an augment to rotator cuff repair warrants further investigation, particularly in smaller rotator cuff tears.

Purpose: To examine the effectiveness of PRP application in improving perioperative pain and function and promoting healing at 6 months after arthroscopic repair of small- or medium-sized rotator cuff tears.

Study Design: Randomized controlled trial; Level of evidence, 1.

Methods: This was a double-blinded randomized controlled trial of patients undergoing arthroscopic repair of partial- or full-thickness rotator cuff tears of up to 3 cm who were observed for 6 months. Patients were randomized to either repair and PRP application (study group) or repair only (control group) groups. The patient-oriented outcome measures utilized were the visual analog scale (VAS), the Short Western Ontario Rotator Cuff Index (ShortWORC), the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons (ASES) form, and the Constant-Murley Score (CMS). Range of motion (ROM) and inflammatory and coagulation markers were measured before and after surgery. Magnetic resonance imaging was used at 6 months to assess retear and fatty infiltration rate.

Results: Eighty-two patients (41 males) with a mean age of 59 ± 8 years were enrolled; 41 patients were included in each group. Both the PRP and control groups showed a significant improvement in their pain level based on the VAS within the first 30 days (P < .0001), with the PRP group reporting less pain than the control group (P = .012), which was clinically significantly different from days 8 through 11. The PRP group reported taking less painkillers (P = .026) than the control group within the first 30 days. All outcome measure scores and ROM improved significantly after surgery (P .05), retear (14% vs 18% full retear; P = .44), or fatty infiltration rate (P = .08).

Conclusion: The PRP biological augmentation for repair of small- to medium-sized rotator cuff tears has a short-term effect on perioperative pain without any significant impact on patient-oriented outcome measures or structural integrity of the repair compared with control group.

A group of researchers studying how impacts affect the brains of high school football players also are analyzing the deficiencies of conventional football helmets and coaching strategies to reduce injury.

The Purdue Neurotrauma Group is led by Eric Nauman, Thomas Talavage and Larry Leverenz. They can speak about the potential health effects of repeated head impacts and ways of improving safety for high school football players.

Nauman is a professor of mechanical engineering, basic medical sciences and biomedical engineering. Talavage is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering and co-director of the Purdue MRI Facility. Leverenz is a clinical professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology and an expert in athletic training.

Life is full of risky decisions, from mundane ones, to matters of life and death.1 In professional football, risk is everywhere: For the club—the risk of having a poor season and loss of income by not qualifying for an important competition. For the manager—overseeing a bad run of results, potentially jeopardising his position. For the player—poor performance and, of course, injury. For the medical/science team—bringing a player back too early from musculoskeletal injury, and he/she suffering a reinjury. The dilemma is that, usually, riskier options promise higher returns.1

In football, the decision to progress or delay a player’s return to play (RTP) after musculoskeletal injury could be the difference between having a key player back two games earlier (giving the best chance to earn six points) contrasted with keeping the player out for two extra games, lowering his/her reinjury risk, but potentially ending up with fewer points. Which risk is more important? Do we aim for a reinjury rate of 0%? Or might we settle for 10% recurrence, where every injured player is back one game earlier?

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the bipartisan Sports Medicine Licensure Clarity Act (H.R. 921) which stipulates health care given by a sports medicine professional to an athlete, athletic team or team staff member in a state outside of the professional’s state of licensure falls under the appropriate medical malpractice insurance provider.

According to press releases from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the bill protects team physicians and athletic trainers when they travel with their teams across state lines and provide treatment by ensuring providers are covered by their professional liability insurance. The bill, which had190 cosponsors, will be sent to the U.S. Senate for consideration.

“Sports medicine professionals are integral to the operation of athletic teams around the country,” Thomas C. Barber, MD, chair of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Council on Advocacy, said in a press release. “H.R. 921 ensures these professionals can treat injured athletes, whose medical histories they know well, across state lines without the fear of incurring great professional and financial loss.

… With the daily wear and tear of spring training, the 162-game regular season and (with luck) postseason, it’s almost a miracle players can stay healthy. That miracle is called modern sports medicine, and the saints of the trade are the trainers that employ some of the simplest and strangest methods to keep the bats swinging.

Without the trainers of any major league baseball team, injuries would be more frequent and players would burn out faster. And the sports medicine that they practice and administer is always changing, always advancing.

Colorado Rockies head athletic trainer Keith Dugger, who has been working with athletes in the majors for 18 years, said that many of the treatments his staff employs circulate around manual therapy and massage. They have a wide range of innovative treatments at their disposal, and each treatment is interconnected.

When you dip into a creamy pint of ice cream on a hot summer day, it can be challenging to limit yourself to just one serving. But what if a company told you that they make a healthy ice-cream-like dessert—and that it’s perfectly fine to eat a whole pint?

That’s what Arctic Zero and Halo Top seem to suggest you can do. “Our love of ice cream runs deep, like eat-the-entire-pint deep,” says Arctic Zero’s package (even though it’s technically a frozen dessert because it doesn’t contain enough milk solids to meet the definition of real ice cream). And the website for Halo Top, which does qualify as ice cream, exclaims, “Save the bowl. You’re going to want the whole pint.”

Unable to resist, we reviewed Vanilla Maple and Purely Chocolate from Arctic Zero and Vanilla Bean and Chocolate from Halo Top for nutrition and taste.

Science in Sport (SiS) is Liverpool Football Club’s new official sports nutrition provider, with an emphasis on customised solutions to the giant club’s players.

… Now that you know why protein is important, let’s look at what the requirements are. Before you begin to establish how to integrate protein properly into your training diet, you need to understand how much you should consume under normal circumstances (no or light training). For most active individuals not under heavy training load, 12 percent to 15 percent of their daily calorie consumption should come from protein. However, when training intensity, volume, or both increase, athletes may need to take in 15 percent to 20 percent or more of their daily caloric requirements from protein. This intake should be based on the amount of muscle damage that’s incurred from hard training. Muscle soreness is one of the best indicators of this type of damage. To understand your protein needs calculate your grams per pound required for certain training loads.

On it goes.The Russian cyber-espionage group Fancy Bears had promised to publish more confidential records of more athletes, obtained by hacking into the World Anti-Doping Agency’s databases. And last night they were good to their word, posting the confidential medical records of over a dozen more top athletes, including the British cyclists Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, showing the banned substances for which they had received a therapeutic use exemption (TUE). It followed the first leak of information detailing the TUEs Serena and Venus Williams and the gymnast Simone Biles had received. Wiggins and Froome have defended their use of TUEs, while the Williams sisters’ and Biles’ insistence that they had done nothing wrong has been staunchly backed by Wada and the tennis and gymnastics authorities.

Nonetheless, on social media questions about whether there is more here than meets the eye have been winging their way round the carousel. Some have doubted whether Serena Williams needed to take powerful medication such as prednisolone, methylprednisolone, hydromorphone, oxycodone and prednisone, for instance, while others have asked what the Fancy Bears data says about TUE use and how widespread it may be.

BACKGROUND:

The hydration status of elite female soccer players is a concern, especially during high-volume training periods or tournaments. Furthermore, scientific literature on this topic is scarce to non-existent. Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to evaluate the hydration status in elite youth female soccer players during an official tournament. The secondary aim was to identify a possible relationship between pre-training hydration status and fluid intake.
METHODS:

Eighteen players were followed during eight consecutive days. Urine specific gravity was used to assess hydration status. Body weight was monitored before and after every training and match, whilst individual fluid intake was only registered during training. The players were informed about their hydration status on day 5.
RESULTS:

On days 1 to 4, the percentage of players who were at least minimally hypohydrated ranged between 44% and 78%. On day 5 (rest day), all the players were at least minimally hypohydrated. After the information session on day 5, the relative number of euhydrated players increased to 89% on both day 6 (training day) and day 7 (match day). On the final day (rest day), all players were either minimally hypohydrated or hypohydrated. Furthermore, a moderate and significant negative correlation (r = -0.44; N = 54; p = 0.01) was found between fluid intake during and USG value before the training sessions.
CONCLUSIONS:

The data illustrates that the hydration status of this population of elite youth female soccer players may be suboptimal and is of substantial concern on rest days during this tournament under temperate conditions. Receiving personal advice about rehydration seems to have a positive effect.

This is the website for “R for Data Science”. This book will teach you how to do data science with R: You’ll learn how to get your data into R, get it into the most useful structure, transform it, visualise it and model it. In this book, you will find a practicum of skills for data science. Just as a chemist learns how to clean test tubes and stock a lab, you’ll learn how to clean data and draw plots—and many other things besides.

Throughout this summer we wanted to investigate the relationship between vertical jump force production and throwing velocity. Instead of looking at vertical jump height, we instead used our Neulog force plates to examine whether the amount of force produced when doing a counter-movement jump (CMJ) was correlated to throwing velocity.

The research on the relationship between vertical jump and pitching performance doesn’t show a strong relationship, but replication of research is always a valuable endeavor.

A study on cricket players did find a moderate relationship between vertical jump and throwing velocity – but only after a multiple regression analysis.

… Only five running backs—Miller, LeGarrette Blount, Matt Forte, Ryan Matthews, and T.J. Yeldon—had more than twenty carries this week, but 28 had at least ten. A whopping 61 running backs had at least one pass thrown their way, per Pro Football Reference, and 49 had at least one carry and one catch. Twenty-nine running backs had at least five carries with five or fewer pass targets, while six were thrown to at least five times but had no more than five carries.

This, along with notable breakout performances by second- and third-round picks, has led to the idea that teams can get star-tailback production without investing in standout talent. But it’s not the source of production that’s changing, necessarily; it’s that the star tailback itself is going extinct.

The NFL quarterback has long been the most important position in sports, and that significance has only grown as passing yardage has risen nearly 20 percent since 2005. And as the position has evolved during the modern era, there’s been just one constant: the league’s continued inability to protect its passers.

QB safety isn’t a new talking point, but after an opening week in which some of the league’s most high-profile passers were routinely savaged by defenses that received surprisingly few penalties, it’s become one of the story lines that could define this NFL season. It’s gotten so pressing so quickly that commissioner Roger Goodell had to address the matter before the season’s first Monday Night Football game in Washington, saying, “What is it we can do to try to ensure that those hits don’t occur?”

Goodell isn’t the only one asking that question; he’s also not asking all of the questions. While most fan and media outrage has focused on Carolina’s Cam Newton, whom the Broncos blasted in the helmet on four plays and slammed to the ground on more while getting flagged for roughing the passer only once on Thursday night, Newton wasn’t the only QB to get routinely rocked in Week 1.

Even in Major League Baseball’s enlightened sabermetric age, you’re liable to see at least one instance of obvious bullpen mismanagement on any given night. Such blunders usually come in the form of a manager hewing too closely to traditional inning-based roles — “saving” bullpen aces for a meaningless ninth frame when the game is on the line earlier, or bringing in a closer to hold a three-run lead in the ninth when a rookie would do just fine. These tactical errors can be frustrating to watch, as tenuous leads become deficits while the team’s best relievers are sitting in the bullpen waiting for “their” inning.

Logic and hard-won experience have shown that a team’s best relievers should pitch during the most important junctures of a game, regardless of when those moments occur. It’s a philosophy that saber-savvy analysts inside and outside the game have been pushing for some time now. And despite their occasional lapses in judgment, it appears that managers across the league, in addition to deploying some of the best bullpens ever in an absolute sense, are getting much better at optimally deploying their relievers according to skill, regardless of their age or experience.

QPR director of football Les Ferdinand remains sceptical as to the use of data analysis when it comes to signing players.

This approach has been adopted at other clubs, notably Fulham this summer, and has courted controversy with managers, pundits and supporters.

Ferdinand, though, believes the data should be used to complement what the scouts see with their eyes.

The QPR director of football said: “I always say to people that what data and analytics don’t tell you is whether the player has talent or not. [commercial video autoplays]

… Through 144 games, the Brewers have stolen 159 bases. That’s a huge number by present-day standards, one that dwarfs the next-highest total, the Reds’ 122. With a pace of 178 over 162 games, the Brewers would bag more bags than any other team has in the past seven years, and the most by a National League team in nine years.

So, is that by design?

“More than anything it’s probably a reflection that we view good baserunners as adding to the value proposition of a team,” said Brewers general manager David Stearns. “I can’t say we set out to acquire players who might lead the league in stolen bases. We also try to expand beyond stolen bases, to get good baserunners who have the ability to impact the game in other ways as well. We’ve seen that from those three guys.”

… The first thing to note is that there are a few dominant club sides. As you can see in our attractive diagram (technically a treemap, fact fans), Chelsea have provided the most Young Lions: 20 across the six squads, with 16 from Arsenal and 14 from Man City. Everton and Tottenham have 10 each and then there’s a significant drop-off to Fulham, Man United and Wolves with 5 each.

If the Old Trafford outfit offer scant representation, at least they provided more Young Lions than their old rivals down the East Lancs. Liverpool have just 3 call-ups – the same as Southampton, their top-eight rivals from whom they have sourced so many expensive signings of late.