I’m always interested in the things that coaches can control. Unfortunately, there are 100 times more things that they do not control than those that they do. But by looking at the things that they can control, we could get a sense of a team’s strategy and how well that coaching staff puts their players […]
Earlier this year, I finally got around to putting out live win probabilities for in-progress games. Last year, I had managed to build the after-the-fact visualizations for games already completed, but the leap this year was being able to do it for games as they are happening. It’s not a perfect system, largely because of […]
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I hope that the folks over at FiveThirtyEight buy into that idea. Because this post is a shameful rip-off of a concept they wrote about recently. But hey, if it hasn’t been done for college lacrosse yet, that always perks up our ears.The article, by […]
This year’s Air Force vs Denver game planted a nagging question in my head.First some background. Last year, Denver led D1 with roughly 36 minutes of possession per game, thanks mostly to Trevor Baptiste’s dominance at the face off X. But in their early season game, Air Force managed to flip the script, holding the […]
The original point of looking at talent geography was to understand how the geographic distribution of lacrosse players around the country (and world) impacts the various D1 programs. To put it another way: to what extent does a school’s geography lock in a talent advantage or disadvantage? It’s an interesting question with Utah joining D1 […]
We’ve been doing a series of posts on geography in lacrosse, but today we’ll take a quick detour off that route. Today, we’ll talk about projecting production levels. In reality, this is a necessary detour in our geography series. But whether you’ve been following that or not, this post works as a standalone as well.The […]
There is a principle in sociology that effective groups can be no more than 150 people. If your company rises above 150 employees, you start to see a drop-off in overall efficiency. Nomadic social groups of pre-history seem to have been about that size. In effect, 150 people is about the maximum number of people […]
The announcement of Utah going D1 got us thinking about geography in lacrosse. Geography is important to Utah because they will become the western-most program in the U.S. That means they become the closest program to the fastest growing lacrosse regions in the country. But they are also the farthest away from the traditional east […]
Utah’s announcement that their program will go D1 in 2019 is huge news. Lots of people have written about how this changes (or doesn’t change) the landscape of lacrosse in the United States. My focus is going to be a bit less grandiose: how does the current geographic distribution of talent help or hurt Utah’s […]
Way back in March, we looked at the expected goals value of each lacrosse play, broken down by quarter. It was a follow on analysis to another post, which examined how the sequence of plays in a game can be used to estimate the number of goals that would be scored by both teams over […]