Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 22, 2019

Growing up in North Dakota and initially uninterested in playing college football, Jamalcolm Liggins is getting attention from NFL teams—one gave him a playbook to study—and could solidify himself as a draft sleeper at his pro day next week.

It’s a scary thought for the rest of the NFL, something the Indianapolis Colts have been waiting to spring on their opponents for four years.

Andrew Luck finally is getting a full offseason to work on his craft.

… This is your reminder that Bartolo Colon remains unsigned. But he’s 45 years old and ready to pitch. All it takes is one phone call. He’s on the same page as fellow not-yet-retired older folks like Matt Holliday, Matt Belisle, Jorge De La Rosa, Brandon Phillips, Ryan Madson, Jose Bautista and Santiago Casilla.

If you are younger than everyone on this list, congratulations. But time is coming for you yet.

1. Ichiro Suzuki, OF, SEA (age 45)

…

Looking back nearly a year later as she prepares to help lead the No. 2 Huskies in the NCAA Tournament one last time, Samuelson realizes the significance her injury played in the growth she’s experienced as a senior. Last season was a season of adrenaline, perseverance and caution, and it resulted in the most transformative year of her career. She’s amazed at how her mind helped her block out what was going on with her body and how she’s been able to channel that new mental strength into every obstacle she’s seen this year. She came away with a new perspective, increased physicality and renewed confidence.

That experience will prove critical for her as she readies to push past the pain of her recent back injury — spasms and bruising she suffered at the end of the regular season — to return to the court for UConn’s first round game against Towson on Friday. The Huskies were surprisingly named a No. 2 seed and could have to get past Louisville, a team that beat them earlier this year, just to get to the Final Four.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced today the team has added Maral Javadifar as assistant strength and conditioning coach and Lori Locust as assistant defensive line coach. Locust and Javadifar are the first full-time female coaches in franchise history and the Buccaneers now become the first NFL team with two female coaches on staff.

Gregg Berhalter prepares for U.S. national team matches like a CEO getting ready for a deal.

The new American coach uses video presentations when he meets with foreign-based players via computer. He has tripled the team’s data analysts to three.

Two white boards are on the grass at training sessions, one with the day’s objectives and schedule, the other with magnets to denote formations.

“I’ve been amazed the first few days just how much information he’s got across and how he wants every guy to be on the same page and have a perfect understanding of how we want to go into the game,” star midfielder Christian Pulisic said ahead of Thursday’s exhibition against Ecuador in Orlando.

… A researcher at the University of Alberta has been studying the impact of youth being cut from sports teams. Lauren Sulz has found students who don’t make the team are less likely to participate in the sport they were cut from. The parents and students she heard from don’t report developing coping skills.

Sulz believes eliminating tryouts and opening up the roster to everyone not only increases physical activity but helps students feel more connected to their school.

“It’s also been connected to greater attendance rates, higher educational aspirations. The connection between teacher, coaches and their classmates.”

biomechZoo is an open-source toolbox for the analysis, processing, and visualization of movement data. Since the official public release of this resource in 2016, we have been working hard to improve features and the user interface. We have also led seminars and workshops to help users familiarize themselves with advanced functionalities and analyses.

As a freshman last season at Michigan, Isaiah Livers shot 36 percent from 3-point range. Decent, but not great.

In the offseason, he went to work.

“I was shooting at like 37 to 40 on the angle, and that’s not good,” Livers said. “Now I’m at probably 45 to 48.”

Livers was referring to the arc on his shots, an area he’s tried to improve using an innovative system from the data-service provider Noah Basketball. The high-tech setup at Michigan’s practice facility can give immediate verbal responses, so a player can hear how much arc was on the most recent shot. This season, Livers is shooting 45 percent from 3-point range, the top mark in the Big Ten.

… Bergstrom has been testing material under the Informed-Sport certification program since 2014, which has an even stricter test frequency of every batch.

These certifications were less about entering the sports nutrition space, and more about differentiation. Our main initiative was to set us apart from commodity manufacturers of MSM, Hammond said.What the company is doing to enter the sports nutrition market is connecting with university researchers to explore whether MSM may uniquely benefit different populations of athletes.

The company has tapped the University of California-Davis to study MSM effect on collagen cross-linking in women athletes. It is currently still in the early planning stages.

… New research finds that a small and simple fix might make a big difference: Put the calorie labels on the left side of menu items, rather than the right. That’s an intriguing finding, because it has implications for design choices by the private and public sectors in countless domains.

The researchers — Steven Dallas of New York University, Peggy Liu of the University of Pittsburgh and Peter Ubel of Duke University — conducted three different experiments. The first was undertaken at a chain restaurant on a college campus.

There was a lot more to Ben Kennedy’s incredible injury-time penalty heroics for the Mariners on Saturday than simply ‘guessing the right way’

… Most prediction methods (and I’ve explored many over the years) assume that players abilities are transitive. That is, if player A is two times greater in overall ability than players B and C, than his win expectations in a match against B and C should be equal. Matchup effects throw a wrench into the transitive property and effectively act like an interaction term, where the overall abilities of players can’t in themselves explain the results of their matches against each other.

That description gets us on track to how we might identify the presence of head-to-head effects. Suppose we have our favourite approach for predicting the chance player i
wins a match against player j that doesn’t account for matchup effects (so this might exclude bookmaker odds, for example).

Major League Baseball suggested sweeping changes to the minor leagues — including a significant increase in salaries, a higher standard of living conditions and better transportation — during an initial collective-bargaining session with the group that oversees the minors, sources familiar with the meeting told ESPN.

After years of weathering criticism and lawsuits regarding minor league pay, MLB appears ready to remedy what long has been considered substandard treatment of its future players. The meeting took place within the last month, around the same time the Toronto Blue Jays were finalizing a new wage scale for their minor league players, which was first reported by The Athletic. The working agreement between MLB and the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, which operates Minor League Baseball, expires in September 2020.

“We have received many questions regarding the decision of the Toronto Blue Jays to increase the salaries of minor league players,” MLB said in a statement to ESPN.

… How did the Patriots, who are never known as big spenders, get themselves in a perilous salary cap situation?

To answer this, we analyzed their salary cap spending by player and by position, and compared the numbers with the rest of the league. All numbers are via the NFLPA and OverTheCap.com. Here are some findings:

1. Tom Brady is expensive.