Guys still playing in the NFL in their 30s are usually the league’s stars—like Tom Brady, Julio Jones and J.J. Watt—which makes this team of over-30 players extremely competitive.
… Green hasn’t picked up a technical foul since April 30, in Game 2 of the Warriors series against Houston. It was later rescinded by the league.
He’s also dropped more than 25 pounds after a midseason intervention from Golden State general manager Bob Myers.
“Bob said, ‘If we’re going to win a championship, you have to get in shape,'” Green says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know. I’m fat as hell right now. Give me two weeks. It will probably take 10 days, but give me two weeks for sure and I’ll be good.
“‘My birthday is March 4, so I want to enjoy my birthday, but right after, on March 10, my diet starts.'”
On the eve of her 2019 French Open quarterfinal match against Sloane Stephens, Johanna Konta’s coach, Dimitri Zavialoff, tried to explain the one thing he thought had made the difference to the way Konta has been playing at Roland Garros.
“It’s just showing her how good she is and to invite her to try,” he told reporters. “To try and miss sometimes, and sometimes try and achieve something. I really don’t want to control anything in there. She obviously is a very good player, I would even say a fantastic player, and (now) she shows it. Now if she can express it — I think she did in the past — but also from one year to another, the evolution is there as a person.”
She went from prodigy to being anointed the future of U.S. women’s soccer. From injuries to finding herself through the growing pains. Now, at 21, Pugh is poised to perform miracles for the USWNT.
… The pace that once terrified defenders, the quick changes of direction, the energy and the constant movement are no longer part of his game.
Yet that is to miss the point about the late-career Ronaldo — the man can still put the ball in the net like very few others and has refined his game so that is now almost all he focuses upon.
The Sixers have parted ways with Dr. Daniel Medina, formerly their Vice President of Athlete Care, and Dr. David Martin, previously their Director of Performance Research and Development, a team representative confirmed to PhillyVoice on Tuesday.
… The Raptors are 22 points better per 100 possessions with Leonard on the floor than when he sits, which is why Nurse has leaned on him so heavily when the games have mattered most.
That Nurse has been able to do so reflects the outsized impact of the club’s director of sports science, Alex McKechnie, a white-haired senior citizen with a Scottish accent who has as much influence in the organization as anyone other than Nick Nurse and president Masai Ujiri.
When the Raptors traded for Leonard, who had missed 73 games in San Antonio in 2017-18 due to an unspecified right quadriceps injury, a Raptors insider texted McKechnie with a simple message:
“You’re the most important person in the organization now.”
… In this first piece, we start with the very definition of systems neuroscience. It is at heart the study of the activity of multiple individual neurons, of the messages they are sending. Everything we see, do, or think in the moment is through neurons sending spikes to each other. So a clear priority for systems neuroscience is to make the best recordings of the output of the most neurons, and with as much metadata about those neurons — where they are, how many there are, what type they are — as possible.
We have two mainstream ways of recording the output of individual neurons: insert electrodes to record spikes, or image calcium fluxes in the neurons’ bodies as a proxy for spikes. Both have unique strengths, both are constantly evolving in the white-heat of technology (and cash), but both have problems that are solved by the other. So our first “should”: we should find a recording method that combines the strengths of both. The great news is that we already know the answer. The answer is voltage imaging.
A recent study, “Incidence of Knee Injuries on Artificial Turf Versus Natural Grass in National Collegiate Athletic Association American Football: 2004-2005 Through 2013-2014 Season” published on April 17, 2019 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, examined whether the type of grass used in American football has an effect on knee injury rates. The researchers found that artificial turf was associated with a greater risk for certain types of knee injuries.
The study’s investigators collected data regarding anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), posterior cruciate ligament (PCL), medial collateral ligament (MCL), medial meniscus and lateral meniscal tear injuries which were captured in the NCAA Injury Surveillance System Men’s Football Injury and Exposure Data Sets. The researchers then compared injury rates which occurred on natural grass and those that occurred on artificial turf. They then filtered their results according to competition level (Divisions I, II and III) as well as overall.
Kellogg Insight; Alexander Chernev, Rima Touré-Tillery, Michal Maimaran, Yuval Salant, David A. Matsa, Nancy Qian from
We all aspire to eat better—but diets are often ineffective fads, and even the most scientifically sound advice is only as good as our ability to follow it.
To help, we’ve compiled research from Kellogg faculty on the science of making smart decisions about food.
That’s where the idea starts. The team would need to be successful — really good, preferably, enough so that in Major League Baseball’s June draft, it picks toward the end of the first round. And that success needs to be sustainable, too, because the idea doesn’t make much sense otherwise.
So the idea. It’s more a plan, actually. It’s a little anarchy, a little ingenuity, a little game theory and a lot to gain. It would anger plenty of people, might prompt an investigation but is, as far as anyone can tell, completely legal. It would, at least for a handful or two of players, change the habitual underpayment of domestic amateur talent. And for a team with the combination of cunning, foresight and luck, it would reap incredible and instantaneous dividends.
During and in between a series of yoga poses he was going through before heading out to a press conference for his MLB-draft-dodging client Carter Stewart – the 19-year-old who was the eighth overall pick in last year’s draft but instead of signing with the Braves will instead ink a six-year-deal with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Japan that will allow him to become an MLB free agent at the tender age of 25 – baseball agent Scott Boras took the opportunity to express thoughts he has on the eve of Monday’s amateur draft.
To be clear, Boras does not have a “namaste” to utter when it comes to assessing the current MLB draft structure.
Too many restrictions on draft values have “created a competitive cancer in Major League Baseball,” says Boras.
… The forecast is based on a hybrid random forest learner that combines three main sources of information: An ability estimate for every team based on historic matches; an ability estimate for every team based on odds from 18 bookmakers; further team covariates (e.g., age, team structure) and country-specific socio-economic factors (population, GDP). The random forest is learned using the FIFA Women’s World Cups in 2011 and 2015 as training data and then applied to current information to obtain a forecast for the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The random forest actually provides the predicted number of goals for each team in all possible matches in the tournament so that a bivariate Poisson distribution can be used to compute the probabilities for a win, draw, or loss in such a match. Based on these match probabilities the entire tournament can be simulated 100,000 times yielding winning probabilities for each team. The results show that defending champions United States are the clear favorite with a winning probability of 28.1% followed by host France with a winning probability of 14.3%, England with 13.3%, and Germany with 12.9%. The winning probabilities for all teams are shown in the barchart below with more information linked in the interactive full-width version.
Every time the NCAA updates its recruiting rules, there can be a scramble from college coaches, potential recruits and their families to figure out how the new rules will affect them and the athletic recruiting process. After all, the recruiting process is a multi-year journey for most families and coaches. When the new NCAA Division I recruiting rules took effect on May 1, 2019, they essentially changed the timing for certain recruiting activities.
But what do the new rules mean for freshman and sophomores in high school? While it can be difficult to predict exactly how rule changes will impact each specific sport because of different timelines, we can at least make educated guesses about how things can play out.
Kellogg Insight; Satyam Mukherjee, Yun Huang, Julia Neidhardt, Brian Uzzi, Noshir Contractor from
It’s a phenomenon that has played out in sports over and over again: A coach assembles a roster of high-performing athletes that everyone predicts will dominate the competition. But matched up against a rival that lacks star power, the elite team loses.
Think of the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Olympics, when a team of young American hockey players beat the four-time gold medalist Soviet Union. Or Germany’s 2014 soccer team (described as an “anonymous squad” with “no superstars” in one article) trouncing host country Brazil, which had been seeking a sixth World Cup victory.
“People are surprised that the dream team failed,” says Brian Uzzi, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. “You would expect, with that much horsepower in the talent, they’d be able to win anytime. And in fact, it doesn’t happen.”