… This season there are a whopping nine players aged 22 or younger who have played 600 minutes (a filter used for all stats in the piece) and average over 0.40 combined expected goals and expected assists. Relax the criteria to 0.30 combined xG and xG assisted and that number springs to 17. Last season, there were only 4 players over 0.40 combined and 12 with over 0.30. Two seasons ago those numbers stood at 7 and 11. So, what exactly is going on in the Premier League this season?
One major factor in the young success bump is that Chelsea and Manchester United, for different reasons, handed the keys over to young stars in the attack. Chelsea sold Eden Hazard and bought Christian Pulisic, but also accepted a transfer ban, instead opting to rely on Pulisic, Tammy Abraham, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Mason Mount. All four of those players have cleared the 0.30 threshold, and all but Mount are over 0.40. Chelsea took a good squad, rolled the dice on playing the kids and were richly rewarded.
Adapt or die. If you don’t change and adapt, based on your situation, surroundings or environment, you will struggle to survive, let alone succeed. That is the basic principle behind Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Many people have adapted that same principle to other facets of life—and running is really no different. In training and racing, over the span of many years you have to learn to evolve based on your past, limitations and strengths. Your body is in a constantly changing state and if you always train the same, your success will be limited.
… Griffin spoke about the minute restriction with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, about how the training staff set out to make a judgment call when they identified signs of fatigue – even if that fatigue came as a result of a made-for-Hardwood Classics burst of 17 points in three minutes.
“It’s not something that I think the coaching staff was overly comfortable with, just conceptually, but I also don’t really care,” Griffin said. “We spent 14 weeks putting him position to have a sustainable future and we’re going to be very mindful of that moving forward.“
SB Nation, Land Grant Holy Land blog, Gene Ross from
… During this part of the offseason, with head coach Ryan Day and a bunch of the other assistant coaches on the road hitting the recruiting trail, Marotti is likely the man on staff with the most daily interaction with the players. He just recently held his annual team meeting, one he describes his personal Academy Awards in terms of importance, which he uses to reset the team from last season and set the course for the next one.
Marotti was super impressed by how the freshmen handled the meeting. Mapping out the next seven to eight weeks for each player to enhance and improve, he says that usually freshmen are intimidated by such a hard regimen. This group of guys, however, were different, and a couple of the highly rated players seemed especially eager to get to work.
… Eight years after founding Driveline Baseball, the data-focused Seattle-area performance facility that began in a warehouse and has become famous for training big league pitchers such as Trevor Bauer and Adam Ottavino, [Kyle] Boddy had the option to carve out a full-time position with one of several teams.
He still more than half expected to turn down any offers and keep his focus on Driveline. Joining a club as a regular employee was something he’d mulled for some time, but he’d yet to make the jump. Then along came the Reds.
Boasting one of the Majors’ largest analytics departments, Cincinnati has taken positive steps to improve its pitching of late. For a team that plays half its games in a hitters’ haven, the Reds tied for eighth last year with a 4.18 ERA and ranked fourth in xFIP (4.10, per Fangraphs). After finishing 27th in fWAR for pitchers in 2018, they leapfrogged all the way to ninth in 2019.
Wolves Head of Sports Science and Medical Phil Hayward is leaving the club after 11-and-a-half years to join LA Galaxy.
Hayward was pictured in the LA Times at the MLS side’s training base last week in their official club kit. He is scheduled to start his job as Head of Sports Science there next month subject to Visa clearance, according to the Express and Star.
Former Arsenal Head of Elite Performance Darren Burgess has defended his cull of medical staff at the club in the summer of 2018, saying a “culture change needed to happen” and that “the players often ran the place” when he first arrived.
In his first in-depth interview since being sacked by the club in May 2019, Burgess told The Athletic he had “a sense of pride” that “a lot of the structures and philosophies that we put in place as a group are still there”.
… The process is simple. You start with a defined vision and set of rules for getting there. Then you learn the process, live the process and defend the process.
Defending the process is the hardest, say those who have been a part of it. It can be as simple as turning to a teammate and saying, “This isn’t how you do it.” It can be as mundane as making sure a folding table is put away instead of being left in the hallway after a meeting.
“The best way to define it is doing the little things consistently with excellence,” said Rhule’s father, Dennis. “The process — that’s his word and that’s his coaching style. Not only for his players, but anybody in the building.”
Temple went 2-10 in Rhule’s first season, and then won 10 games in Years 3 and 4. Baylor went 1-11 in Rhule’s first season, and then 11-1 with a trip to the Big 12 championship game and Sugar Bowl this past season, his third.
The new technology allows for instantaneous data distribution, including speed. The hope is the flood of new data will enhance the fan experience. [video, pre-roll + 2:24]
It might be a work in progress when it arrives, but the NHL will have puck and player tracking in every arena beginning next season.
During his All-Star Game news conference, commissioner Gary Bettman said that puck and player tracking will be “up and running in the arenas of all 16 teams that make the playoffs this season, and all arenas leaguewide for the 2020-21 season.”
The technology has been a long time coming in the NHL. Bettman announced at last year’s All-Star Weekend that puck and player tracking would be implemented this season. But last year, the league split with Jogmo World Corp., the German company developing the smart puck and wearable technology. Working with partner SportsMEDIA Technology, the NHL will use a combination of sensors placed on the players and inside the puck, with data collected by in-arena antennas, and optical sensors at ice level.
Medium, Multiple Views: Visualization Research Explained, Zoya Bylinskii from
TLDR: New crowdsourcing techniques and computational algorithms are making it possible to measure and predict human attention at-scale, and this comes with exciting new opportunities to study how people interact with visualizations.
Two Triangle medical technology firms are teaming up to create new blood pressure solutions that they believe will improve patient care and safety.
Raleigh-based Valencell, which makes biometric sensors for wearables, has signed a collaboration agreement with Halma-portfolio company SunTech Medical, based in RTP, to jointly develop clinical-grade blood pressure solutions augmented with photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor technology.
On October 7, The “Barça Sports Medicine Conference” took place during the “Sports Science Week”. An event organised by Barça Innovation Hub (BiHUB), the innovation platform of FC Barcelona. The main tendon specialists in the world of sports participated in the event in which they were able to show the latest scientific evidence about pathophysiology, pain clinic and prevention, intervention and rehabilitation protocols in tendon injuries. The launch of the FC Barcelona Tendon Injury Guide was announced for 2020, which will include the knowledge and experience of 35 collaborators from 11 countries, in order to gather a unique vision and comprehensive approach of tendon injuries.
… Lindsey Lepley and colleague Adam Lepley, clinical assistant professor of athletic training, took MRI brain scans of 10 ACL-reconstructed patients. The scans showed that part of the corticospinal tract—the pathway that scuttles messages from brain to muscles—had atrophied in the patients.
The corticospinal tract runs from front to back through both hemispheres of the brain. The side of the tract that controls the ACL-reconstructed knee was about 15% smaller than on the uninjured side, the researchers say.
Think of the altered corticospinal tract as a traffic tunnel that narrows, letting fewer cars pass through, they say. In the ACL reconstructed patients, less information gets from the brain to the muscle because less information can travel along the smaller tract.
Associated Press, Teresa M. Walker and Larry Fenn from
NFL teams paid more than a half-billion dollars to Week 1 starters who missed games because of injuries this season and players who ended the year on injured reserve, according to an Associated Press study.
And the players sidelined the most in a league devoted more and more to speed: the fastest guys on the field, wide receivers.
While much of the recent focus has been on protecting high-priced quarterbacks and limiting head injuries — concussions were up slightly over last year — keeping wideouts and the defenders who try to stop them healthy has occupied most of the NFL’s medical personnel. Cornerbacks and safeties were second and third on the list.