Document Type
Oral Presentation
Campus where you would like to present
SURC Room 202
Start Date
15-5-2014
End Date
15-5-2014
Keywords
Football, Probability, Statistics
Abstract
Analytics has become a valuable tool in sports. Movies like Moneyball have even popularized the mathematical methods that sports teams are now using to try to gain an advantage over their opponents. Sports analysts are also using analytics to attempt to predict outcomes in sports. Since offensive plays in football offer clearly-defined, short term events (plays), offensive play-calling in football is the perfect opportunity to analyze how a team calls plays and how those plays affect performance. My project will attempt to analyze all of the Seahawks’ 2013 regular season offensive plays by fitting specific play events to probability distributions in order to predict the probability of certain plays being called in certain situations, and finding the strongest correlations between game situation and play-call to predict the performance of those plays/drives. I am personally responsible for all aspects of the project, including data collection. I have watched every Seahawks game play by play and collected more than 25 fields of data for every offensive play. By defining the specific data fields and collecting the data myself I will analyze the plays from my unique perspective with the hope that my findings will be unique to sports analysis. This project is an original idea that to my knowledge has not been attempted before (at least not like this). My hope is that I am able to offer a new perspective from which to analyze offensive play-calling in pro football and provide valuable, unique information to my hometown Seahawks on how they called plays in 2013 and how those plays affected their performance in 2013. Go Hawks!!!
Recommended Citation
Brand, Adam, "Analyzing the Seahawks' Offensive Play-Calling" (2014). Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE). 33.
https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/source/2014/oralpresentations/33
Additional Mentoring Department
Mathematics
Additional Mentoring Department
Actuarial Science
Analyzing the Seahawks' Offensive Play-Calling
SURC Room 202
Analytics has become a valuable tool in sports. Movies like Moneyball have even popularized the mathematical methods that sports teams are now using to try to gain an advantage over their opponents. Sports analysts are also using analytics to attempt to predict outcomes in sports. Since offensive plays in football offer clearly-defined, short term events (plays), offensive play-calling in football is the perfect opportunity to analyze how a team calls plays and how those plays affect performance. My project will attempt to analyze all of the Seahawks’ 2013 regular season offensive plays by fitting specific play events to probability distributions in order to predict the probability of certain plays being called in certain situations, and finding the strongest correlations between game situation and play-call to predict the performance of those plays/drives. I am personally responsible for all aspects of the project, including data collection. I have watched every Seahawks game play by play and collected more than 25 fields of data for every offensive play. By defining the specific data fields and collecting the data myself I will analyze the plays from my unique perspective with the hope that my findings will be unique to sports analysis. This project is an original idea that to my knowledge has not been attempted before (at least not like this). My hope is that I am able to offer a new perspective from which to analyze offensive play-calling in pro football and provide valuable, unique information to my hometown Seahawks on how they called plays in 2013 and how those plays affected their performance in 2013. Go Hawks!!!
Faculty Mentor(s)
Chueh, Yvonne