Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 6, 2018

… Cook was on a “pitch count” against the Los Angeles Rams last Thursday, playing just 18 total snaps.

“This thing is still healing up,” Cook said. “I want to 100 percent as bad as everybody else wants me to be 100 percent, but I’m just not there yet. It’s just got to keep chipping away at it. I’m going to be ready when the time comes, when I need to be.”

“I can’t give you a percentage right now because every day you start different,” Cook added. “Right now, at this point, I’m getting to where I need to be at.”

English 101 is not in Travis Dermott’s job description, but he’s giving a gold star to eager student Igor Ozhiganov.

The Russian has been cramming lessons with a regular tutor, but his defence partner Dermott gets the day job, especially when countryman Nikita Zaitsev is not nearby to interpret.

Thus Ozhiganov was comfortable in communication heading into his first Leaf game Wednesday.

“He’s getting better day by day,” Dermott said. “I try to keep it simple for him, not saying anything too crazy. He gets the gist of it and understands what Mike Babcock is saying, too. He’ll just get better with time.

… His career path – including the return from a European move that has stagnated many a career in Australian football – reflects Jedinak’s irrepressible drive.

The 34-year-old is a model not only of dedication, but of respect and belief – in oneself and others.

Emerging from that kind of setback to be a part of the 2015 Asian Cup triumph – arguably the Socceroos’ greatest achievement to this point – makes for one of the best stories in Australian sport, let alone lifting the trophy as captain.

Then again, that mix of drive, focus and poise is exactly why Jedinak was captain of the Australian national team to begin with – an exemplar of the “when he speaks, everyone listens” theory.

… Roberson’s importance to the 2017-18 version of the Thunder cannot really be overstated. He was defending at not just an All-Defense level when he went down, but garnering Defensive Player of the Year buzz — an extreme rarity for a perimeter player. Roberson was handling the most difficult perimeter matchup every single night, allowing Paul George and Russell Westbrook to slide into easier matchups and save their energy for what they needed to do on the offensive end of the floor.

Roberson defended the opposing team’s leader in usage rate on 25 percent of his defensive possessions, by far the highest rate on the team, per an analysis of Second Spectrum matchup data conducted by Krishna Narsu and myself. He also defended the opposing team’s leader in Offensive Real Plus-Minus on nearly a quarter of his defensive possessions (24.67 percent), again the highest rate on the team by a long shot. The next-closest player on the team was George at 17.66 percent, and many of those possessions came during the second half of the season when Roberson was already out.

Tottenham Hotspur may not have added to their squad this summer, but the completion of their Player Lodge could make a difference on and off the pitch.

The Lodge, which is adjacent to the training centre at Hotspur Way, opened in the summer and welcomed the Brazil national team as its first guests. It boasts 40 bedrooms, a hydrotherapy spa, medical suite, altitude chamber, multi-purpose theatre and digital tactics room.

… According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, 85 college athletes died from 2000 to 2016 from indirect causes related to their sport. (Indirect causes of death, such as heatstroke and sudden cardiac arrest, occur when overexertion causes one or more of the body’s key systems to fail.) Of those 85 deaths, 40 percent were football players. And according to Scott Anderson, Oklahoma’s head athletic trainer who has published research on the subject, 23 Division I football players alone have died from indirect causes since 2000. Most of the deaths occurred after workouts or conditioning drills, including a Maryland offensive lineman who died in June.

The prevalence of catastrophic events in football does not surprise those who have examined the issue closely. Experts see the strength and conditioning field still struggling to agree on uniform professional standards. And the relatively young profession continues to be influenced by a sport whose popularity has fostered a sometimes dangerous — and persuasive — culture.

Where does the line fall between improving student-athletes’ performance and pushing them into peril?

Caleb Williams took a deep breath as he stood atop a bosu ball, his gray Nike sneakers shifting little by little as he sought to keep his balance. He was at Athletic Republic, a sports performance complex in District Heights, Md., and his large palms gripped a football. With each rep on this Saturday in July, the 16-year old pulled his right shoulder back and then jerked it forward in a fast yet controlled motion.

But there was no actual throwing of the football in this drill. Instead, the purpose was to strengthen his core and perfect his throwing mechanics while trying to avoid falling off the half-platform, half-exercise ball hybrid. As the drill neared its end, Williams finally exhaled, a smile creeping across his face as he watched himself in the mirror.

Williams is the returning sophomore starting quarterback for Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and will be one of the leaders of a talent-laden Eagles team in the fall. But Williams’s preparation for the position is a year-round effort, one that has seen him work with at least one private quarterback coach in each of the last seven years — instruction that at times has little to do with throwing passes.

“No summers off,” said Williams as he stood next to a specialized speed treadmill. “This is what I do.”

… It even has a name, too — the “first-night effect”. If you’re not frequently travelling and sleeping in new places, taking yourself out of your comfort zone will definitely mess up your sleep habits. Basically, your mind won’t turn off until it deems itself safe.

The NBA Draft hasn’t changed much lately. Ever since the league decided to condense it down to just two rounds back in ‘89, it’s operated in essentially the same manner. (At one point, the draft had north of 20 rounds, which based on how long today’s televised draft takes, means a 20-round draft would last roughly all summer.) While the draft’s format has been the same for nearly three decades, the process of scouting prospects for it has evolved dramatically.

Today’s pre-draft prep goes far beyond watching college film or travelling to exotic locales for preseason college tournaments or international showcases. Those practices still exist, but there’s much more that teams consider in their draft equation in 2018. And the teams that are on the cutting-edge of these draft evaluation processes are the teams that are consistently unearthing the draft’s hidden gems. Scouting has turned into an arms race of sorts, with teams utilising any process or system they can find to give them an edge.

Just ask the Toronto Raptors, who entered a groundbreaking partnership with IBM, tasking Watson with spitting-out data-driven player analysis. While the Raptors are currently knee-deep in player and prospect analysis, the biggest change to player scouting — brain-training— could upend the entire evaluation process.

… ‘You want a little bit of braking force to catch your balance, and then you want to be able to generate force to propel you forward,’ explains Reed Ferber, professor of biocmechanics at the University of Calgary, Canada, and director of the university’s Running Injury Clinic. If you’re running too tall, your feet will hit the ground too far in front of your pelvis and centre of mass – also known as overstriding – which generates braking force and slows you down.

‘Think of running as a shock wave that’s going to travel up your body,’ says Ferber. ‘Your foot passes that shock wave on to your knee, then your hips, then your spine. Your spine is supposed to absorb most of that force, but if it’s too stiff and upright, it can’t absorb enough. So your knee undergoes unnecessary stress, and your hamstrings and glutes have to work overtime to absorb that stress.’

There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. A variety of Olympic and professional athletes tell us how they made it and what they sacrificed to get there. And if you can identify the sport most likely to get a kid into a top college — well then, touché! [audio, 1:07:43]

… When the NFL allocated $60 million to its Engineering Roadmap of health and safety initiatives in 2016, the league selected the leaders of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics to head the effort. The center’s director, Jeff Crandall, and his deputy, Richard Kent, have overseen that research from their Biocore consulting lab in Charlottesville.

Previous efforts to monitor head impacts focused primarily on sensors built into helmets, but tests of those systems showed that the head often moves differently than an exterior shell. Mouthguards are preferable because the upper jaw is part of the skull. The league has tested a number of commercial and research sensor-laden mouthguards, but Biocore has also developed its own version under the stewardship of senior research scientist Nate Dau. If the pilot test with Virginia goes well, the goal will be to provide the mouthguards to NFL players on a handful of teams on a limited basis in 2019.

“We’ve been focusing heavily on the technology,” Crandall said. “What we’ve done is invested into a new technology that has very high accuracy, very small, fits into a package into a mouthguard. It’s much smaller than what was available on the market. It’s a completely new line of sensor technology.”

Boston-based Nix Biosensors recently won the grand prize at the third-annual Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s (SFIA) Start-Up Challenge, held in Denver on Sept. 26. The company received a $15,000 check via Black Lab Sports and an all-expense-paid trip to visit the Under Armour Innovation Team.

Nix’s award-winning product is a single-use patch that monitors sweat rate and electrolyte loss to support hydration management while running or exercising.

The construction boom around the Atlantic Coast Conference is showing no signs of slowing down.

In the seemingly never-ending facility arms race in big-time college football, some schools hope player-friendly project will give them an edge and help them keep up with their ACC peers — and other programs around the country.

“The world of intercollegiate athletics, especially in the Southeast, is extraordinarily competitive,” Florida State President John Thrasher said. “You’ve seen what Alabama has done, Clemson has done, Florida does. We know that we need to stay competitive. Not better necessarily, not more, but competitive so that our student-athletes can have the same opportunities that the ones in the past have had and certainly hopefully ones in the future will have.”

Earlier in the decade, the building boom centered on indoor practice facilities. By the end of this month, every ACC team will have one — all but two of them were built since 2011 — putting all 14 conference schools on relatively even footing in that regard.

Long-term human motion can be represented as a series of motion modes—motion sequences that capture short-term temporal dynamics—with transitions between them. We leverage this structure and present a novel Motion Transformation Variational Auto-Encoders (MT-VAE) for learning motion sequence generation. Our model jointly learns a feature embedding for motion modes (that the motion sequence can be reconstructed from) and a feature transformation that represents the transition of one motion mode to the next motion mode. Our model is able to generate multiple diverse and plausible motion sequences in the future from the same input. We apply our approach to both facial and full body motion, and demonstrate applications like analogy-based motion transfer and video synthesis.

… One of his areas of interest is what happens to athletes when their playing days are done and, after amassing more 140 interviews with current and former NFL players and extensively researching the subject, he’s written “Not for Long: The Life and Career of the NFL Athlete” (Oxford University Press 2018; $24.95).

It’s a look at the most popular professional sports league in the U.S., where some athletes at the height of their physical prowess can boast stratospheric salaries in the multimillions but then, often in just a few years, no longer are working.

“The stories of many of these players is heartbreaking,” Turner says. “I love these men and they’ve gone through a lot of pain and sorrow and it hurts to hear, that but what kept me going was the awesome gift of being able to tell their stories.”

… The university quickly hired Rod Walters, a sports medicine consultant, to investigate the athletic department’s safety protocols. As Walters worked on his report in the months following McNair’s death, details of the workout and the medical treatment remained cloudy and disputed.

After briefing the University System of Maryland Board of Regents on his findings Sept. 21, Walters released his report to the public. The following is the account of the May 29 workout that Walters put together by conducting interviews, watching video and reviewing records.

Every season, Penn State baseball coach Rob Cooper stands in front of his team and shares his story. He tells it with purpose, that it might produce an outcome much more important than that of any game.

Cooper has suffered from depression since he was 26. At its worst, the condition left him wanting only to stay in bed. Now, entering his fifth year at the head of the Penn State program, he still takes medication to manage it.

Since his head coaching career began at Wright State in 2005, Cooper has made it a point to have these conversations with his teams.

“I share what it felt like, what it feels like at times. I share with them that I go see a therapist. I share with them that I take medication when needed,” Cooper said. “Because I don’t want them to think they’re ever alone.”

When it comes to gaining strength, muscles are only part of the equation. “It’s crucial to pay attention to your tendons and ligaments, too,” says Jakob Roze, a Tier 2 trainer at Equinox West 50th Street in New York City. “They connect muscle to bone, and if they’re not strong enough they can restrict your movement and make you more prone to injury.”

These fibrous cords are made mostly of collagen, a structural protein that accounts for about a third of all the proteins in the body. By stimulating collagen production, you can bolster your muscles’ support system. Below are five simple strategies.

1. Make a long-term commitment.

Artificial sweeteners, widely regarded as a healthy alternative to sugar, may be sabotaging your gut biome.

A new study published in the journal Molecule found that E. coli bacteria in the intestinal tract became damaged when exposed to several different kinds of artificial sweeteners.

The study zeroed in on six artificial sweeteners to determine their toxicity to the healthy bacteria present: aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k.

Sometimes nothing tastes better after a run than an ice cold beer. Sometimes there’s no better way to wind down at night than with a good glass of wine, especially if we had a good training session that day.

But if we’re serious about achieving our running and fitness goals, is that a problem? More specifically, does alcohol impede our recovery and ultimately stand in the way of our progress?

In this article we take a look at what your body is tasked with when you consume alcohol, and what those processes mean in the grand scheme of your running.

… Players make these types of adjustments constantly, often at a sprint. And, it’s a game of inches, as the saying goes. The game’s speed influences how the brain’s decision-making systems work, said David Redish, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who studies decision-making in human and nonhuman animals.

In high-speed game situations, “you don’t have time to imagine all the possibilities. What you are doing is recognizing a pattern,” said Redish. “And what makes somebody an expert is that they learned the sets of patterns to recognize.”

Changing the patterns to avoid leading with the head, or to avoid landing hard atop another player, requires new programming — and lots of practice. When players practice tackling, said Redish, they learn when and how to release “what we call an action chain — that you’ve practiced over and over again.”

… When Sunstein was running the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for Barack Obama, the White House rejected a regulation to control ozone and supported a regulation to control mercury. Environmental groups were perplexed: did Obama want to save the planet or didn’t he? Was there cynical political triangulation at play? For Sunstein, the answer is nothing so Machiavellian: ozone regulation was expensive and would do little good; mercury regulation was cheaper and would prevent a great deal of harm.

This example sums up the challenge for defenders of cost-benefit analysis: it’s important, but it is dull.

The book makes three valuable contributions: it relates the history of cost-benefit analysis in US policymaking ; it tackles the economist Friedrich Hayek’s argument that technocrats simply don’t know enough to weigh costs and benefits; and it makes a case that cost-benefit analysis could reduce political tribalism.

… “As an organization there was some amount of satisfaction that came with the work that we’ve been doing the last several years to prepare a young group coming through our minor leagues … and to see that finally hit our major league team,” general manager Erik Neander said.

“When we look back at this year, hopefully it will be seen as the year that started off a run of many competitive, playoff achieving seasons,” Neander added, “and hopefully, a championship in there at some point.”

The Rays lost 12 of 15 to begin the season, digging themselves into a hole few people felt they were capable of escaping after a winter that saw them trade Evan Longoria, Steven Souza Jr., Corey Dickerson and Jake Odorizzi and lose starting pitcher Alex Cobb to free agency.

… The NBA doesn’t use the Wonderlic from what I could tell, and if any team uses it, I’d chalk up that use to be about as science-y as a convoluted interview described above.

There are some promising developments in the NBA based on psychological precedence. Scott Goldman of Athletic Intelligence Measures, Inc. has shown to implement intuitive psychological theory as a foundation for their battery of tests. Read Ben Dowsett’s piece on Goldman and his work, as it does a fantastic job providing insight to Athletic Intelligence Measures inner working and development of the Athletic Intelligence Quotient (AIQ). Dowsett mentions that for the most part, teams don’t get rid of Goldman’s services. He has a high retention rate of 93 percent, meaning that not only are his methods reasonable, but the theory behind AIQ testing is sound.

…

“It’s different, but we’re doing everything we can to get into the playoffs,” said Bellinger, who went 0 for 4 Wednesday and has a .703 on-base-plus-slugging percentage against left-handers this season — 200 points lower than his mark against them last season.

“So it’s unfortunate, but you can’t really argue about it. Everyone’s been doing their part. You can’t complain about it and you try to perform when you’re out there.”

The Dodgers are masters in roster manipulation. They use the disabled list aggressively. They bounce pitchers between the rotation and bullpen. And, recently, they’ve become unforgiving platoon stalwarts in their push to another playoff berth. Their main trade acquisitions this season allowed for further maneuvering. Manny Machado, Brian Dozier and David Freese, all right-handed batters, have fortified the club against left-handed pitching and allowed them to implement platoons nearly across the board.

On a day that a Bears quarterback broke historical records, I had a chance to talk with some of the people shaping the future of football.

The Opportunity Atlas provides data on children’s outcomes in adulthood for every Census tract in the United States through an interactive map providing detailed research on the roots of these outcomes, such as poverty and incarceration rate, back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. This tool will enable policy makers, practitioners, and the public the unprecedented ability to look within their city to understand better where opportunity exists and how each neighborhood shapes a child’s future economic and educational success.

… The ex Scotland player and manager, himself a diminutive 5’6″, says that whereas teams used to intimidate through size and power, they now do it through speed of thought and movement.

“I watched Chelsea against Liverpool last weekend and it was phenomenal,” Strachan told Talksport. “You needed to be a top, top player to feature in that game and the six central midfielders, none of them were over six foot. They had so much energy.

“The game is not so much about tackles now, as about interceptions and being able to cover five, 10 yards very quickly when you win the ball back.