👋 Monthly recap, plus an update

A short recap of posts over the last month, plus an update moving forward.

This a recap of what I posted over the past month, some things I didn’t post, and a short update on the future of the newsletter.

In the month of June . . .

• 📍Putting the 16 NCAA Baseball Regionals on a map: there is a heavy distribution to the southeast. At this point, I’m surprised the SEC hasn’t lobbied to put the CWS in Hoover, Alabama instead of in Omaha, Nebraska.

• 🧐 Unintended consequences of the COVID year of eligibility: freshmen are playing fewer minutes than ever in college basketball. Continuity is down and experience is up.

• 🏈 ACC football records in the divisional era: Seven different Coastal Chaos Division champions and four different Atlantic Division champions. Six different conference champions (12 from Atlantic, five from Coastal, one to Clemson in 2020).

• 📊 SP+ historical rankings across the ACC and other conferences: diving into percentiles of the historical SP+ rankings supplied by Bill Connelly.

Long form post

Earlier this week, I went a bit long with the thoughts on the current state of college athletics using the latest discourse around the College World Series. I watched the 2021 documentary, UNEVEN: College Baseball’s Scholarship Issue, from Matt Wyatt and had some thoughts.

Something I didn’t publish . . .

One thing that I didn’t publish this past month is SP+ historical data as it relates to coaches. Here is an example of a chart that didn’t make the cut, using the ACC schools in North Carolina. You can find others with the code here.

A few interesting things I’ve read or watched this month . . .

• ⚽️ Wages are gravity, not density: This is old post from Scott Willis examining how wages affect team results in the English Premier League. Wages are a gravitational pull towards a spot on the table and not a destiny. Wonder how this would translate to big time spenders in college athletics?

• 🏈 QB School: Drake Maye against NC State: JT O'Sullivan breaks down the Carolina and State game from Drake Maye. JT is a big fan of the argyle on the sidelines at Kenan Stadium, but might not be a huge fan of the play-calling. As an aside, Carolina has absolutely pissed their pants two seasons in a row against NC State. Brutal.

• 🏀 How data science is transforming the NBA: This is a DataCamp podcast interview with Seth Partnow, who used to work for the Milwaukee Bucks and now works at StatsBomb. It was one of the more honest conversations I’ve heard about working in sports. It’s like being a chef.

Pressing pause . . .

This whole newsletter is one giant experiment. My goal is to practice writing code and communicating with data.

As a reminder, I’m continuing to share and publish any R code to generate the charts and graphs for the posts. This month I tried to produce more readable and reproducible code.

At times, the work has felt a bit shoddy. I don’t have an editor and mistakes happen. So, I’m going to take a short break.

Over the next month, I’m planning to publish less and think a bit more. In the future, I want to experiment with publishing more frequently, and sending fewer emails. I’m not sure anyone wants more email?

Instead of an email for every post, perhaps, a recap email of what was published each month. Who knows I might even experiment moving away from Substack. I want each post to be useful or entertaining, and both if possible.

All that is to say, if you’re still reading, thank you!

Here are a few data projects or ideas I’m chewing in the future:

• trying to project ACC title odds for football in the fall

• ACC composite standings for football or basketball

• consistency of college basketball lineups (see this from FiveThirtyEight)

If you have any ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

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