… The Vikings drafted Cook in the second round. Presumably character questions were as big a factor as anything in him lasting that long, but teams could also nitpick about his speed.
So it was interesting — and heartening, for a Vikings fan — to see this nugget tweeted Tuesday by Randall Liu of NFL Communications:
“Dalvin Cook recorded 2 of the top 3 fastest max speeds by a RB in Week 1 reaching top speeds of: 20.45 MPH 19.98 MPH.”
That jibes with a tweet from April — between the combine and the draft — from Bleacher Report’s Marcus Mosher: “According to Sports Science, Cook has the second-fastest top speed of any RB they’ve tested in the past five years.”
Aaron Rodgers sees the future. His teammates are convinced because they have noticed it time and time again. The Green Bay Packers quarterback knows what the opposing safety is thinking and where the linebacker is going. He knows what his own teammates are doing often before they do. When his team dropped five of six games last season, Rodgers is the one who memorably said the Packers would run the table. And they did.
“He knows what’s going to happen before it happens,” said tackle Bryan Bulaga, who is in his eighth season protecting Rodgers. “He’s already played everything out in his head.”
So when Rodgers talks about the future, when he says he wants to play for several more years — beyond age 40, even — no one doubts him.
… Last season for Dortmund, Pulisic started only 15 matches in the Bundesliga and six in the Champions League, averaging about 52 minutes per game in regular play and 60 against Europe’s best. He was more than a part-time player, but the crush of expectation wasn’t entirely on his shoulders.
His country has asked far more of him, and for the most part, he has obliged, scoring seven times in 18 national appearances. “I’m going to do everything I can to help us qualify,” he said. But he can’t continue to carry the U.S. on his own. (Asked about Alexi Lalas’s recent “Wonderboy” barb, Pulisic shook his head. “I’m not going to lose sleep over what Alexi Lalas has to say about us. He can say what he wants.”)
More worrying, Peter Bosz, Dortmund’s new manager, appears as intent on leaning on him as Bruce Arena. The departure of Ousmane Dembele and a rash of injuries have seen Pulisic play nearly every minute of Dortmund’s young season, including the full match at Wembley.
… though neutral hitters like Ms Henin have thrived in days gone by, for the last decade women’s tennis has been a big-hitters’ game. Indeed, 31 of the last 45 grand slams have been won by players ranked in the top third by AS—including the Williams sisters, Ms Kvitova, Maria Sharapova, and the reigning champions at Roland Garros and Wimbledon, Jelena Ostapenko and Garbine Muguruza. Players like Ms Stephens, in the middle third, account for 11 of the remainder, leaving only three titles—two for Ms Kerber and one for 2015 US Open champ Flavia Pennetta—for the predominantly defensive tacticians in the bottom third.
When Pierre Allard went back to school at age 30, he probably had no idea that he’d one day be leading a brand-new department in the Montreal Canadiens’ organization.
And yet, that’s exactly what has happened. Allard, who was the Canadiens’ strength and conditioning coach for seven years, will head into the 2017-18 season as the team’s Director of Sports Science and Performance, a project he’s been working on for two years. In a nutshell, he will be managing a new department whose goal is to ensure that the latest research, technology, and science developments are being used to help Habs players reach their on-ice potential.
Of course, there’s the Catapult system, a technology that allows for the collection of a wide array of data on players – both during on-ice practices and off-ice training – but that data is only effective if you know what to do with it. That’s where the new department comes in, and it will be assisted by two university students currently working on their Master’s project and a third working on a PhD.
“It’s an area that’s evolving very quickly, too quickly for us to pass up on the opportunity to collaborate with a university on it,” explained Allard. “I had my own research project and we wanted to apply it and work on some internal research projects with our data and be able to take our results and immediately apply them to the team.”
… Franklin said he spent an educational couple of summer days with Cael Sanderson and his five-time national champion wrestling program.
“I got a tour of their facilities. I sat in their office. It was really good,’’ Franklin said.
“Then I think a week later, I had the five guys that all won (individual) national championships come and meet with me in my office, and it was kind of interesting to get their perspective compared to the coaches and be able to kind of tie those two things together.’’
… Every season, and often across multiple teams, athletes are tested on their fitness. Then six weeks later, they’re tested again. High performance sport has been testing this way for years, and it’s filtered down into youth sport. Unfortunately, there’s been little consideration for the impact it’s having.
The problem lies in the generalised approach to testing that is taken. When you set the same battery of tests for every athlete, regardless of their individual needs, you lose personal relevance, which is so important when it comes to engagement. What’s more, subsequent training too often takes a one-size-fits-all, quantity over quality methodology, failing to appropriately address the competency of the test. And the result? Athletes who struggle to improve, and ultimately, disengage with the environment.
… A handful of teams have turned to a Denver-based company called MuscleSound to understand how close they might be to the line. MuscleSound uses ultrasound scans to determine energy stores in athletes’ muscles, in the form of glycogen level, providing an overall “fuel rating” from zero [empty] to 100 [full]. The idea is that knowing how much each game drains an athlete’s batteries, and checking to see if they’ve been recharged sufficiently by the next game, will help teams fashion personalized training and nutrition schedules for each player.
Because NFL teams are often secretive about whom they work with, the company was reluctant to provide a list of clients. However, according to CEO Andy Jackson, that group includes at least one of last season’s main playoff contenders. To highlight how teams use MuscleSound, Jackson tells the story of an offensive lineman from that team who was first scanned in June 2016. “This particular lineman rocked up at the start of training camp under 25,” Jackson says. (For reference, an average lineman might be expected to leave camp with a fuel rating drained down to about 70.) “[He] had always had problems with being injured, and had never played more that 12 or 13 games in a season.”
Scientists at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital have developed a cheap, sensitive, and highly accurate way of detecting protein biomarkers. The technology may very well revolutionize diagnostics, disease monitoring, and help stop the spread of infectious pathogens. The nanoswitch-linked immunosorbent assay (NLISA) has the potential to be as simple to use as self-administered pregnancy tests but with nearly laboratory-level of accuracy.
NLISA screens for specially prepared DNA strands that change shape in the presence of a protein biomarker. The DNA strands have multiple small proteins that bind to the target proteins, and as they bind, they pull on the rest of the DNA strand, changing its shape. Electrophoresis is then used to pull on the DNA strands, some of which move faster than others depending on whether they’ve been bent out of their original shape or not. Moreover, while the dragging is going something called “kinetic proofreading” is administered to the DNA strands, shaking loose any imperfect connections that may lead to false positives.
As we develop a wide array of new implantable, injectable, and swallowable medical devices, the need to accurately track their location within the body becomes ever more critical. Currently, ultrasound, electromagnetism, and other methods are employed to track objects introduced into the body, but these modalities suffer from a number of imperfections that limit their accuracy, usefulness, and applicability. Now a team at Caltech have come up with a radically new way of localizing small devices introduced into the body with an impressive level of accuracy.
ATOMS, the acronym for the technique that stands for “addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins,” involves tiny (1.4 square millimeters) silicon chips that include a magnetic field sensor, resonator, radio, and antenna. The devices are able to detect the strength and direction of a magnetic field produced by a magnet located nearby. In response to the measured parameters of the magnetic field, the devices resonate and produce a radio signal at different frequencies depending on where within the field they are. Once the resonance is detected, its frequency is then essentially used as the address of where the device is in the body.
… The newest Watch will soon start winning over serious athletes. While it lacks the long-rumored glucose-monitoring abilities, watchOS4 packs a handful of crucial software updates for the fitness-minded: automatic resting heart rate measuring and recovery heart rate tracking. These two features are true game-changers for athletes looking to modify their training in real-time. Notice your resting heart rate rising or that it’s taking longer for your heart rate to recover to rest post-run? You now have the information to update your training on the fly. Apple is also launching a heart study with Stanford Medicine to help users potentially spot atrial fibrillation, a surprisingly common condition in athletes. (The Watch will also now update users when their heart rate is elevated when not exercising. This could be crucial for spotting emerging health issues.) These updates come on top of a rebuilt Workout app that features high-intensity interval tracking.
The biggest open question marks for endurance athletes about the new Watch are battery and data sharing.
Hockey is a complex and multifaceted game, yet many of the statistical tools used to evaluate performance are univariate. To garner a better understanding of hockey’s multifaceted nature, two structural equation models (SEMs) assessing the interrelations between offense, defense, and possession were built from three seasons of NHL data. Overall, it was found that the concepts of offense, defense, and possession are best understood via a small constellation of measured variables, and that offense mediates the relationship between possession and defense such that higher levels of offense leads to poorer defensive performance. These findings are discussed within the context of ranking player performance. [full text]
Herald Bulletin, CNHI Sports Indiana, Mike DeFabo from
The Purdue men’s basketball team has joined the sports analytics revolution by adding Andrew McClatchey, an analyst who holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, to help the Boilers break down the game in a different way.
Nathan Baird of the Lafayette Journal & Courier first reported the hiring. McClatchey is also listed on Purdue’s staff directory online and added his new position to his Twitter bio.
During the job search, Purdue coach Matt Painter said he was looking for someone who could “think differently.” He said the new staff member wouldn’t necessarily be a coach but a “math guy.”
Two years ago, an NFL executive surveyed the college landscape and offered an associate in the industry some friendly advice. “You better hit on an offensive lineman now,” the executive told his pal, because he could see the supply of capable blockers dwindling.
The words seem prophetic after the dismal product the NFL rendered in Week 1. The league has for years fretted over a scarcity of capable quarterbacks, and starting appearances from the likes of Tom Savage and Scott Tolzien on Sunday highlighted the notion there are more NFL teams than competent professional quarterbacks in existence.
But an equally alarming problem surfaced as offenses reached new levels of putridity. It was not only the men throwing the ball, but also the men charged with protecting them. The NFL is amid an offensive line crisis, and the talent drain at the position is damaging the quality on the field in even uglier fashion than poor quarterbacking.
Yesterday I discussed what you actually get when you hire a new head coach or manager. Today I want to talk about a better way to go about hiring the most important position in the club.
Manager/Head Coach Searches is one of our core offerings at StatsBomb Services, and the feedback we’ve had from clients has been overwhelmingly positive. Because of how messy and haphazard normal coaching searches tend to be, I thought it would be good to shed some light on our process and why that’s a dramatic improvement over the status quo.