Sports Analytics

Catalog description

Big data continues to dominate the world of professional sports as exemplified by the movie Moneyball, which showcased the innovative use of data by the Oakland A's baseball franchise. This course examines the use of data and advanced modeling in professional football. Students use R platform alongside artifcial intelligence to analyze a variety of large player tracking data files from the National Football League (NFL). Students are encouraged to submit their work to the annual NFL Big Data Bowl competition in January each year. Prior coding experience is highly desirable for this course as is a basic knowledge of statistics and an ability to communicate complex results to a professional audience. <i>DS</i>