About Jerome & This Site

Hey there and welcome!

My name is Jerome and I have two passions in life -- sports and math. I probably should list beer in this group, but I typically use that as an excuse to discuss the first two. In high school, I wrestled and played football (and named captain in both), which was pretty typical growing up in Northeast Ohio. My Bachelor's degree is in education, with a Master's in Applied Mathematics and another MS in Statistics & Operations Research. I spent time teaching at community college and working as a tutor before joining a large consulting firm. This has given me the opportunity to help solve some really difficult and (in my view) really important problems.

But I always like to come back to sports, be it football, basketball, baseball or whatever and my view on "sports analytics" is the same as my view on applying the same ideas for clients — gathering more information to aid decision making is rarely a bad idea. Some processes and decisions may be able to be automated, but for the most part that's not how #analytics works.

My goal for this site is not be yet source that gives you stats to regurgitate, or rehashes things that have already been beat into the ground. Instead, I would like to use some #analytics to make us all, hopefully, a little bit smarter about how we intake, interpret, and convey. Sometimes that will be by posing a unique or interesting question and seeing what comes of that or maybe other times it's just a good ol' lesson in statistics. Many of the topics I'll cover are things I pondered here and there. Now seems as good a time as any to do more than ponder and share the results with all of you.

If you have any thoughts or feedback leave some comments or shoot me an email or on twitter using the buttons below. Smash the subscribe button while you're at it. Enjoy!

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Comments

The Mysterious NFL Passer Rating

So WTF is the NFL's passer rating, really? It's one of those stats announcers and talking heads on TV like to use to make a point when it's mentioned only when it's very high or very low. I knew only a few things (and I think is the case for most people) about passer ratings: Greater values are "better", it ranges from 0 to 158.3, and sometimes a quarterback would be better off throwing all their attempts into the ground, or so the announcer would say. This prompted several questions. How is this rating calculated? Are greater values always better? Why is the max 158.3? And what is with that weird scenario I hear about where a QB would be better off with all incompletions? I'll hit on a few of the key concepts and background of passer ratings, but if you want to read more on this the NFL has goes into more detail here . Quick Background of Passer Ratings The point of this passer rating system is to compare passers' performances from season t

Combine-ing Football and Physics

There are many ways football analysts can describe a player. He's a high energy player...hits with a lot of force...has exceptional power…puts in the work. For the most part we all understand what is meant when these types of words are used to describe some physical attribute of a player. However, in the world of physics each of the words I used above has a specific meaning and, you guessed it, a formula. This is going to dive into what is sometimes referred to as Newtonian (or Classical) Mechanics , which looks at how forces applied to objects create and influence motion. This is, of course, named after Sir Isaac Newton , the founder of gravity and partially credited with inventing calculus (I'm team Leibniz , but that's maybe for a later time). You may have heard of Newton's Three Laws of Motion - that's what we're going to explore here and relate the mechanics of motion to the NFL combine. Newton discovering gravity by getting donked in the head by an

Hitting the NBA Jackpot

Lotteries are typically really tough to win. Powerball, Mega Millions, and even state lotteries are all damn near impossible claim the jackpot. Even winning anything is pretty unlikely. Getting a Pick 5 (numbers 0-9) exactly right is 1 in 100,000. Getting luck enough to draft the next phenom like LeBron, Anthony Davis, or perhaps Zion Williamson? That's much, much easier than getting a few digits in the right order. NBA Draft System and Protected Picks A quick refresher: The NBA determines the selection order of the first 14 (of 30) teams for an upcoming draft of new players by a lottery system. These are teams that didn't make the playoffs. The rest of the draft order is determined by inverse order of regular season record. The NHL also has a lottery system for non-playoff teams but differs for teams in the post season where order is determined partially by playoff performance and regular season point total. In the NFL, non-playoff teams are ordered purely by regular sea

Math With Jerome

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