Football Analytics with Python & R

Football Analytics with Python & RBaseball is not the only sport to use "moneyball." American football fans, teams, and gamblers are increasingly using data to gain an edge against the competition. Professional and college teams use data to help select players and identify team needs. Fans use data to guide fantasy team picks and strategies. Sports bettors and fantasy football players are using data to help inform decision making. This concise book provides a clear introduction to

Baseball is not the only sport to use "moneyball." American football fans, teams, and gamblers are increasingly using data to gain an edge against the competition. Professional and college teams use data to help select players and identify team needs. Fans use data to guide fantasy team picks and strategies. Sports bettors and fantasy football players are using data to help inform decision making. This concise book provides a clear introduction to using statistical models to analyze football data.Whether your goal is to produce a winning team, dominate your fantasy football league, qualify for an entry-level football analyst position, or simply learn R and Python using fun example cases, this book is your starting place. You'll learn how to:
"Apply basic statistical concepts to football datasets
"Describe football data with quantitative methods
"Create efficient workflows that offer reproducible results
"Use data science skills such as web scraping, manipulating data, and plotting data
"Implement statistical models for football data
"Link data summaries and model outputs to create reports or presentations using tools such as R Markdown and R Shiny
"And more
About the AuthorEric A Eager is the Head of Research, Development and Innovation at Pro Football Focus (PFF), where he uses his training as an applied mathematician to produce solutions to quantitative problems for 32 National Football League clients, over 105 NCAA Football clients and numerous media clients and contacts. He also co-hosts the PFF Forecast Podcast, which can be found on PodcastOne and iTunes and is the most popular football analytics podcast in the world since 2018. Additionally, Eager supplies odds used Steve Kornacki on Football Night in America, the Today Show, and other programs since 2020.He studied applied mathematics and mathematical biology at the University of Nebraska, where he wrote his PhD thesis on how stochasticity and nonlinear processes affect population dynamics. Eager spent his first six years thereafter as a professor at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, before transitioning to PFF full-time in 2018. He has since taught statistics and mathematics to over 10,000 students through college-level courses, the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiatives Moneyball Academy, as well as an online course, Linear Algebra for Data Science in R� with DataCamp.Eager has been interviewed nfl.coms Ian Rappoport about Cowboys in-game decision making and The Washington Post for commentary about sports analytics. He joined the legendary Peter Kings podcast about fourth-down decisions and is a frequent guest on Cris Collinsworths podcast. Richard A Erickson helps people use mathematics and statistics to understand our world as well as make decisions with this data. He is a lifelong Green Bay Packer fan, and, like thousands of other cheeseheads, a team owner. He has taught over 25,000 students statistics through graduate-level courses, workshops, and his DataCamp courses on Generalized Linear Models in R and Hierarchical Models in R. He also uses Python on a regular basis to model scientific problems.Erickson received his PhD in Environmental Toxicology with an applied math minor from Texas Tech where he wrote his dissertation on modeling population-level effects of pesticides. He has modeled and analyzed diverse datasets including topics such as soil productivity for the USDA, impacts of climate change on disease dynamics, and improving rural healthcare. Erickson currently works as a research scientist and has over 70 peer-reviewed publications. Besides teaching Eric about R and Python, he also taught Eric to like cheese curds.