Pre-Snap Tells and Offensive Predictability: Insights for Strategy And Performance In The NFL
Introduction In the NFL, success on offense involves more than just raw talent. Defenses are constantly looking for cues—“pre-snap tells”—that tip them off to whether a play is likely to be a run or pass. In my recent work in the 2025 NFL Big Data Bowl (which uses player tracking data from 2022) l dig…
How Is Fantasy Sports Like Optimizing a Business?
If you’ve ever studied basic algebra, you may recall a classic example involving a painting job: You have a professional painter who can paint more quickly (but costs more) and an amateur who paints more slowly (but costs less). You’re given constraints: maybe you have a limited budget, or you can only hire a certain…
Evaluating the potential lift of how-casting.
Introduction In our previous blog post, we discussed how to move from simple forecasting to “how-casting” by using machine learning and optimization to decide the best allocation of marketing touchpoints across multiple territories and customer groups. Now that we have both a real-world plan (the Actual allocation implemented) and an optimized plan (the Optimal or…
