Spread Football

AnalysisTim Hoolihan

tim@hoolihan.net

@thoolihan

What Is A Spread?

• Point Differential

• Added to favored team to determine adjusted score

• Attempts to get 50% of betters on each side of the bet*

• Different than trying to be accurate. For example: large fan-base skew

• Rule of Thumb: Home Team starts with -3

Goals

• Come back from a horrible start

in my league

• Pet project in R that motivates

learning more

Track

• Google Spreadsheet

• Download as CSV

• Blank copy you can edit:

http://bit.ly/1xLvg64

Functions For Game Types

…continued

League Trends

• rmarkdown

• convert to html

Home vs Away

Favorite vs Underdog

• First meaningful insight

• It appears away favorites are a

better pick

• Why?

Testing The Math

Spread Performance By

Team

My Trends

Upcoming Games

My Results & Progress

Residuals

Packages

• rmarkdown

• scales

• dplyr

• ggplot2

• gridExtra

dplyr

• Workshop exposure

• chaining, functional

• Linq in .Net

• Closures (JavaScript, Ruby)

• Domain Specific Language - like (see Residuals.R)

ggplot2

• Nice, but challenging

• qplot vs ggplot

Have I Learned Anything?

• Yes, a lot more R

• League position improved from

basement to basement stairs

• Don’t pick home underdogs

What Comes Next?

• Calculate Correct, other columns

• Clustering by spread size

• Model training (machine learning… caret?)

• My performance vs recommendation

• Break out web pages further (league, my performance,

next week)

• Shiny?

Your Turn

• https://github.com/thoolihan/FootballPicks

• Google Docs http://bit.ly/1xLvg64

• tim@hoolihan.net