Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 10, 2016

The Chargers’ injury situation has officially gotten ridiculous. For the past three seasons, San Diego was among the most banged-up teams in the NFL. According to Football Outsiders’ adjusted games lost metric, which weighs injuries to starters and takes into account whether guys are active but playing hurt, the Chargers have ranked 27th, 31st, and 28th, respectively, over the past three years.

That’s an awful run of luck, matched only by the Giants, who’ve finished dead last in that stat in each of the past two seasons. But this year San Diego’s health concerns have reached a new level. “Snakebit” is no longer an appropriate term to describe them.

In October 1996, when Arsenal football club’s latest manager began his tenure, fans of “The Gunners” could be forgiven for grumbling. Apart from his name, there was little about Arsène Wenger to suggest that he would be a good fit. Only three foreigners had ever managed in the Premier League. Mr Wenger, a cerebral Frenchman with a degree in economics and a modest playing background, had almost nothing in common with his grizzled British peers. He had guided Monaco to a French league title in 1988, but had spent the previous two years in the footballing wilderness of Japan. The Arsenal squad that he inherited were a notorious bunch of alcoholics and drug addicts. The British press scorned his appointment.

Nobody could have expected “Le Professeur” to survive for 20 years. In that time, Mr Wenger has become Arsenal’s most successful manager, the third-longest serving coach in English footballing history, and arguably the Premier League’s most important innovator. His reforms at Arsenal were immediate. He turned a diet of pills and booze into one of protein and broccoli. He transformed a side known for turgid defence into one feared for its swashbuckling attack, by supplementing an experienced British core with flamboyant European youngsters. (Your correspondent, a lifelong Arsenal fan, was lucky enough to see young Frenchman and future star Thierry Henry score his first goal for the club in 1999.)

When the newest U.S. women’s national team roster was announced earlier this week, it signaled some potentially significant changes with the team going forward. Chief among them: the National Women’s Soccer League may finally play an important role in building the USWNT’s player pool.

It’s not that NWSL players have not comprised the USWNT roster before. Everyone on the Women’s World Cup-winning team last year played in the NWSL, except for Abby Wambach. But all those players were brought into the USWNT fold due to their performances in the national team system or in college, and they only played in the U.S. Soccer-backed NWSL initially to help establish the fledgling league.

But after four years, the flow of talent may go the other direction and league may be starting to make a significant impact.

Life presents us with problems of varying complexity. Yet, complexity is not accounted for in theories of human decision-making. Here we study instances of the knapsack problem, a discrete optimisation problem commonly encountered at all levels of cognition, from attention gating to intellectual discovery. Complexity of this problem is well understood from the perspective of a mechanical device like a computer. We show experimentally that human performance too decreased with complexity as defined in computer science. Defying traditional economic principles, participants spent effort way beyond the point where marginal gain was positive, and economic performance increased with instance difficulty. Human attempts at solving the instances exhibited commonalities with algorithms developed for computers, although biological resource constraints–limited working and episodic memories–had noticeable impact. Consistent with the very nature of the knapsack problem, only a minority of participants found the solution–often quickly–but the ones who did appeared not to realise. Substantial heterogeneity emerged, suggesting why prizes and patents, schemes that incentivise intellectual discovery but discourage information sharing, have been found to be less effective than mechanisms that reveal private information, such as markets. [full text]

Before the Mets’ season was wiped out by the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday, Amazin’s pitcher Seth Lugo revealed to The Post how he gets through crises of confidence.

“We’ve got a mental-skills coach [Will Lenzner]. If I’m really struggling with confidence or pressure .?.?. he’ll fix me up real quick,” he said.

After this week, Lenzner’s calendar is no doubt booked solid.

“You can see how certain guys will be affected by this for a long time. Mental coaches .?.?. are there to help [them] move on,” says Dan Simonds, director of baseball at IMG Academy, which has taught mental skills for decades. (Founded in 1978, the Florida prep school offers elite training in eight sports.)

Impact matters. For years Ivo and I have been telling our clients this obvious fact. Over and over we hear the heavy heel strike of our barefoot clients on the floors of our office. We are constantly drawing their attention to this unnecessary impact load. They hear it, feel it, and make immediate notable changes and realize that they are a big part of their own problem. (Recently, an onslaught of Sever’s “disease” cases have been coming into our office and the parents confirm a herd of elephants live on the upper floors of their homes, if you catch our drift. Impact matters. Kids with heel growth plate issues should not be pounding their heels into the floors.) We like to say, the heel can touch down first, that is ok, it is normal in walking gait, just please “kiss the floor” with the heel instead of driving nails. But, to be fair, all those high heel EVA foam cushioned shoes have brought us to where we are, and minimalism is trending us out — a little.

In a back room of a lab at the University of Ottawa is a cabinet full of heads.

The “headforms” come in beige, blue and charcoal hues, and they’re built to take a beating. This is the Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory, where devices are designed to ram the heads from all directions; to drop them onto different surfaces resembling turf or roadways; to send them flying sideways into a propped-up futon (the wall was taking too much abuse).

Accelerometers inside the headforms help scientists to make a computer model of each hit, which can show how force is transmitted through the head from hits of different speed, duration and angle. That helps them calculate the types of strain that can lead to head injuries – and how to prevent them.

But this lab is also part of a larger debate about just how far science has come in understanding concussions – and what companies who make protective gear are allowed to say about their ability to limit the risk in contact sport

Graphene has been touted as a possible next generation material for wearables, smartphones, and other electronic devices, but scientists at Rice University suspect borophene, an atom-thick substance, could provide even better results.

One of the main differences between graphene and borophene is the undulating structure it takes when moved from its typical state, metallic, to silver substrate. Its structure remains intact during this process, meaning it can retain its flexibility.

Your phone inevitably runs out of juice when you need it most, but soon your clothes could keep personal tech perpetually powered. Scientists have created a fabric that uses human movement, the wind, and the sun to charge electronics. Wearing a power t-shirt while you walk around all day could keep your smartwatch charged while you party all night.

This fabric that takes function in fashion to the next level was developed by material and environmental scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology. They call it “a micro-cable power textile” and reported on it in Nature Energy on Sept. 12.

Take Home Message: Prevention programs focused on reducing the risk of ankle injury are effective for soccer athletes.

“Stacey” — a new video from #NCAAInnovate awardee @Aths_Connected on enhancing student-athlete mental health.

In sports, there is a constant effort to improve metrics which assess player ability, but there has been almost no effort to quantify and compare existing metrics. Any individual making a management, coaching, or gambling decision is quickly overwhelmed with hundreds of statistics. We address this problem by proposing a set of “meta-metrics” which can be used to identify the metrics that provide the most unique, reliable, and useful information for decision-makers. Specifically, we develop methods to evalute metrics based on three criteria: 1) stability: does the metric measure the same thing over time 2) discrimination: does the metric differentiate between players and 3) independence: does the metric provide new information? Our methods are easy to implement and widely applicable so they should be of interest to the broader sports community. We demonstrate our methods in analyses of both NBA and NHL metrics. Our results indicate the most reliable metrics and highlight how they should be used by sports analysts. The meta-metrics also provide useful insights about how to best construct new metrics which provide independent and reliable information about athletes.

Where talent identification was once based on subjectivity, the analytics revolution in sport has made the process anything but. Richard Allen is the Head of Talent ID at the Football Association and uses data analytics to support his work. We sat down with him following his presentation at the Sports Analytics Innovation Summit in London this April.

Did artificial intelligence help the Western Bulldogs win the AFL flag? The Sons of the West certainly played a pack-centred style of football, in contrast with the more flowing play of opposing teams.

On grand final day they excelled at catapulting the ball out of packs like there was no tomorrow. After two or three lightning handpasses, the ball would be with a Bulldog in the open, and on the way to a goal. Coach Luke Beveridge can take credit for forming a “handball club” to teach players to punch ballistic missiles. The Bulldogs have been the No 1 handball­ing side out of stoppages.

But don’t discount the role of computer machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence — in helping shape the Doggies’ game play. They are among a few AFL clubs going hi-tech to gain an edge.

The Chargers conduct a study each offseason.

They compare injury data from their team with the rest of the NFL, analyzing how they stack up in such variables as injury-type frequency. Are they ahead of the curve in some respects? Behind in others? They dig deeper for trends and potential explanations. Certain staff members analyze the latest exercise-science advancements to ensure players run stride for stride with modern research.

This study is done every offseason.

Except next time, it will be different.