… Former Sooners tackle Jammal Brown (no relation) met Orlando Brown when Orlando was a child. Jammal had befriended Orlando Brown Sr., a 360-pound tackle nicknamed “Zeus” who played for the Ravens and Browns, during his NFL career. When the elder Orlando Brown died in 2011 at age 40, Jammal helped mentor the younger Orlando. That continued through high school and college, and after the combine Jammal visited Orlando in California to help re-center his protégé. Jammal, a two-time Pro Bowler in the NFL, knew Orlando had expected to do between 18 and 20 reps at the combine. He knew Orlando had hit those numbers while training. “He didn’t become Hercules in one week,” Jammal said on Wednesday. “He had a bad day at the combine. These [at the pro day] are his real numbers.”
Orlando knew something was wrong after his fourth rep on the bench press at the combine. He had practiced one breathing technique throughout his training, but he got out of rhythm around that fourth rep and never recovered. He never considered pulling out of the other events at the combine—throughout his career, adversity had made him stronger. He thought about his game at Tennessee as a redshirt freshman in 2015. Volunteers defensive end Derek Barnett ate Brown alive early, but Brown got better as the Sooners engineered a comeback then dominated in overtime of Oklahoma’s win. But this time, he couldn’t right himself mentally. “It snowballed,” Brown says.
… For the Raptors scouting department, VanVleet is a triumph. Finding future NBA stars isn’t all that hard; they are nearly all prodigies, advertised well before they arrive in the league by rare blends of size, skill and athleticism that are harder to miss than to identify. VanVleet represents the other end of the spectrum — he’s barely six-feet tall, has just an average wing span for that below-average height and, while quick, would not qualify as explosive by NBA standards. All of which explains why 30 teams passed on drafting him — twice. But the Raptors, lacking a 2016 second-round pick, believed someone with VanVleet’s intangibles might be able find a way to prove effective at the next level. They signed him as a free agent, benefitting from the early legwork Tolzman had done and the team’s relationship with VanVleet’s management team, which also represents Lowry.
But even though the Raptors saw something in VanVleet, it’s still telling that the rest of the NBA didn’t or couldn’t see the qualities that have made him successful. Quantifying will, mental toughness, emotional IQ and perseverance remains an inexact science. “Every time I saw him, I came away thinking, ‘Man, I wonder if he’s good enough to play,’” says Tolzman. “But I just love him. I love everything about how he approaches the game. He’s a good shooter and just tough.”
SB Nation, Hammer & Rails blog, Travis Miller from
Hammer & Rails has been around for over nine years as of this past February. We’ve seen a lot and grown a lot. To me, one of the greatest honors we can get is when a current or former player reaches out to us for something.
One of the most vocal recent players through social media has been former safety, Albert Evans. Evans played under Joe Tiller in his final season in 2008, then for the first three years of the Danny Hope era. Yesterday, he contacted us because he wanted to give our fans a look at what life is really like for a college football player. What follows are his words on what is like in the high pressure world of college football.
A neural circuit mechanism involved in preserving the specificity of memories has been identified by investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI).
They also identified a genetic “switch” that can slow down memory generalization — the loss of specific details over time that occurs in both age-related memory impairment and in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which emotions originally produced by traumatic experiences are elicited in response to innocuous cues that have little resemblance to the traumatic memory.
“The circuit mechanism we identified in mice allows us to preserve the precision or the details of memories over the passage of time in adult as well as aged animals,” says Amar Sahay of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine and HSCI.
Building and perfecting a product can be like building a plane while flying it. When productizing early-stage tech or figuring out ideal user interaction dynamics, launch/iterate or A/B tests aren’t always an option. We identify “Principles of Product Physics” that cross domains – from user-facing apps and devices to developer platforms and infrastructure, out of which emerges a toolkit of best practices for product design and evaluation to accelerate development and save time & resources. [audio, 63:38]
… Although our company was founded and is still headquartered in Israel, we always had the world in mind when we launched. We established American operations in late 2013, and our first client came soon after – the University of Georgia Bulldogs tennis. We were a complete unknown at the time, and it was a lot of knocking on doors and getting the technology in front of the right people. For instance, meeting Gordon Uehling III, who runs Courtsense in New Jersey and is widely-regarded as one of the sharpest minds in tennis, installed our technology, which helped to shape our vision of the sport.
We are very grateful that we decided to begin with tennis. Not only was it a sport that, at the time, was second to last (in front of boxing) in terms of technology adoption, but we quickly saw that the market needed and wanted SmartCourt technology – an all-in-one video and analytics system for all levels of the sport.
We’re now a multisport company with a strong presence in basketball and high school sports across the country. But our philosophy of finding key early customers (Golden State was our first basketball client) and partners (Verizon Ventures and Greg Norman invested last year) has remained the same.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is commonly used to assess autonomic functions and responses to environmental stimuli. It is usually derived from electrocardiographic signals; however, in the last few years, photoplethysmography has been successfully used to evaluate beat-to-beat time intervals and to assess changes in the human heart rate under several conditions. The present work describes a simple design of a photoplethysmograph, using a wearable earlobe sensor. Beat-to-beat time intervals were evaluated as the time between subsequent pulses, thus generating a signal representative of heart rate variability, which was compared to RR intervals from classic electrocardiography. Twenty-minute pulse photoplethysmography and ECG recordings were taken simultaneously from 10 healthy individuals. Ten additional subjects were recorded for 24 h. Comparisons were made of raw signals and on time-domain and frequency-domain HRV parameters. There were small differences between the inter-beat intervals evaluated with the two techniques. The current findings suggest that our wearable earlobe pulse photoplethysmograph may be suitable for short and long-term home measuring and monitoring of HRV parameters. [full text]
University of Southern Mississippi, Southern Miss Now from
On Tuesday, March 13, the National Sports Security Laboratory (NSSL) at the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4) tested and evaluated an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, at The University of Southern Mississippi.
The evaluation took place at M.M. Roberts Stadium on USM’s Hattiesburg campus and included a team of subject matter experts in the field of sports safety and security.
“When you have mass gatherings of people at large sporting events, we have to look at how that technology functions and operates and educate the end users,” said Daniel Ward, Director of the National Sports Security Laboratory. “That’s what we’re doing here.”
Other technologies that have been through the rigors of the NSSL include walk thru metal detectors, explosive detection canines, social media monitoring, and video surveillance, to name a few.
When JaeHee Cho first auditioned for the executive chef job with the Philadelphia 76ers, he was going to wow the brass. He composed a menu titled “Chicken & Egg.” He’d take four or five chickens and showcase every part of the bird — use the bones to make a broth of incomparable depth, confit the legs and craft an elevated salad from the meat, concoct an East African-style stew by braising the thighs in a berbere spice, and even bake chawanmushi, a Japanese egg custard tart, three ways.
Sixers president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo received the suggested menu over email and winced. He appreciated Cho’s ambition, but this might be a little bit too … chefy.
“I was looking to show off a skill set, and how I could use creatively every part of a chicken,” Cho says. “but they were like, ‘Can you make a good pancake?'”
The Sixers countered by suggesting a meal that would start with basic breakfast items, then move toward crowd-pleasing lunch and dinner fare. Cho would also need to pay attention to the nutritional composition of the dishes because he’d ultimately be feeding world-class athletes.
… Right now, the Eagles have their franchise QB in Carson Wentz; a Super Bowl MVP backing him up in Foles; and a young developmental QB in Nate Sudfeld. It’s possible the Eagles take advantage of Foles’ ascending stock and trade him this year (though the price tag has likely risen above the first- and fourth-rounder they got in the Bradford trade). But the point is, Philadelphia’s strength-in-numbers approach to the position—with the added bonus of insurance for a potentially season-wrecking injury like Wentz’s—is likely to be copied around the NFL.
In fact, it already has been. Last winter, the Bears signed Mike Glennon, then traded up to the second overall pick to draft Mitchell Trubisky, slotted into a four-year, $29 million rookie deal. Two weeks ago Glennon was released, his “three-year, $45 million” contract becoming, in actuality, a one-year, $18.5 million pact.
Usually privately, sometimes out loud, Jake Arrieta would say that he was going to make $200 million in free agency. Nobody in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse could tell if he was entirely serious or just trolling, but this was not some one-off proclamation. It was 200 or bust.
Nothing emboldened Major League Baseball players quite like free agency. It was as sure a thing as any in sports. Every winter, agents for the best free agents would lay out their demands. Teams, frothing for talent, accepting of the market’s miserable inefficiencies, would protest and gripe and dissent before their inevitable acquiescence. To teams, free agency was a necessary evil.
Then came this winter, when nearly every team asked itself some derivation of the same question: What if it weren’t so necessary? It really was an extension of last winter, the beginning of the squeeze on free agency. Which itself was an extension of the years before, when teams started manipulating service time, a vise on the front end of players’ earning potential. And that was an extension of collective-bargaining-agreement wins in which MLB positioned itself to remake the economics of the game as it so desired. When the story of this period in baseball labor relations is told in a decade – when the labor war that seems more inevitable by the day is fought – it is this winter that may prove most seminal of all.
… For all the respect of his man-management skills, Schmetzer isn’t often included on the shortlist of MLS’ brightest tactical minds. He has been candid about his own failings leading up to and during Seattle’s comprehensive 2-0 loss at BMO Field.
“There was a lot of deep reflection after that game,” Schmetzer told ESPN FC this week, and the shortcoming that most stuck out was his and his team’s lack of adaptability. Having been so beholden to the same system for a year and a half of steady success, when Toronto exposed the flaws in it, the Sounders lacked a Plan B to fall back upon.
“Had I been able to arrange them in a different formation, Toronto was still better on the day, but it might have given us a chance,” Schmetzer said. Instead, Seattle’s dreams of a repeat title were shredded to bits and borne away by a frigid Ontario wind.
Projecting aging patterns helps teams and fans understand when a player’s talent peaks. Most aging studies measure a player’s overall talent, while fantasy owners care less about real-life talent, with stolen bases and pitcher wins dominating the discussion. For this article, I’m going to examine how standard Rotisserie league stats age.
Knowing aging patterns and weighting them correctly can give a fantasy owner an advantage when valuing players for a single season or for keeper or dynasty leagues. I’ll be using just one type of league setup, which can be frustrating to some owners as hundreds of different leagues types exist. I can’t cover every option, so I’m going with the most common. The following information can still be used in a wide variety of formats to get a reasonable idea of how players age.
“They generally have PhDs, doctorates in computer science or statistics. They’re extraordinarily bright computer programmers and statisticians.”
It sounds like a Silicon Valley upstart. Instead, it is the basketball analytics team at the Philadelphia 76ers, which Alex Rucker leads as vice president of analytics and strategy.
Rucker learned about the power of analytics serving as a US navy officer. There, he “was first exposed to really large datasets. The lesson that really struck home was the power of grounding complex decisions in fact – and the critical role that data can play in helping to establish that foundation.”
When Rucker was signed from the Toronto Raptors in 2016, the news was leaked, like a player transfer, over Twitter.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/sport/other/nba-philadelhpia-76ers-data-analytics/