Zach Stovall is the Director of Analytics for the University of Tennessee baseball team who just won their first College World Series. He studied at UT while also working for the baseball team as a student manager. After three seasons with the Texas Rangers at their various minor league affiliates, he returned to the Volunteers for the 2024 season. In this episode, he discusses… Balancing schoolwork while working for a D1 baseball program Winning a College World Series vs a Major League World Series Interning at the Cape Cod League and studying under various scouts The differences betw ..read more

Tom Bliss is a Senior Manager of Football Operations Data Scientist for the NFL. He and his team work to improve the game for fans, players, and organizations through data analysis. They are constantly researching new ways to make the game more entertaining and safer. In this interview he discusses… NFL rule changes including the expectations around the new kickoff rule The schedule release and the various considerations the league looks at His day-to-day responsibilities and what programming is utilized in his role NGS, PFF, and various player tracking tools Big Data Bowl and what l ..read more

Dr. Curtis Goss is a Performance Support Specialist for USA Swimming where he is currently prepping for the Olympic trials and the 2024 Summer Olympics. He was a collegiate swimmer at Indiana University where he also completed his PhD in Human Performance. In this interview he discusses… The current landscape of data and tech within the sport of swimming U.S. Trials and the anticipation for potential record breaking races Communicating data to swimmers of various ages and experience The ups and downs of current technology and the manual aspects to data collection Evaluating swimmer p ..read more

Tim Gibbons is TruMedia’s baseball professional services lead, dealing with players, agencies and facliities. He previously worked as a minor-league hitting coach in the Orioles system. In this episode, Tim talks about… - His career path to becoming a hitting coach - What a minor-league hitting coach does - Data available to minor-league teams - How a minor-league team’s approach is influenced by the parent club - Communicating data to players - Mixing data with coaching of mechanics - How facilities and agencies use data - New baseball data points available to coaches - Follow Tim on Twitter ..read more

Matt Chang and his team won the 2024 NFL Big Data Bowl, an analytics competition with a $25,000 first prize. In this episode, Matt will discuss… - His team’s submission, entitled Uncovering Missed Tackle Opportunities - What the Big Data Bowl is and how he and his team became interested - The data and question provided by the NFL - Attacking that question through trial and error - Creating a metric and its components - Making the outputs easy to understand - Ideal next steps with their metric - Advice for anyone looking to enter contests like the Big Data Bowl Show Links - Kaggle notebook for ..read more

Ben Zauzmer is an assistant general manager with the New York Mets, and he’s better known publicly for his book Oscarmetrics and his Twitter account @BensOscarMath, where he uses data to project winners of the Academy Awards. With this year’s Oscars ceremony coming on March 10, Ben joins Expected Value to talk about… - How he got into the Oscars predictions business - Creating an Oscars model from scratch - The variables that go into his calculations - Projecting nominees vs projecting winners - Explaining probability - Factoring in betting markets - Reaction from the film community - Majoring ..read more

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Wes Johnson was named Head Baseball Coach for the University of Georgia on June 5th. Prior to taking the job in Athens, Wes served as the Pitching Coach for LSU, where he won a national championship earlier this year. He also has MLB experience, having served as the Pitching Coach for the Minnesota Twins from 2019-2022. His previous stops at Mississippi State and Arkansas add on to his SEC experience, in addition to his past as a high school baseball coach, among other stops. In this conversation, Wes talks about… Balancing his responsibilities of being LSU’s pitching coach in the midst of a n ..read more

Brandon Ally is the Co-Founder of S2 Cognition, a performance evaluation company that is revolutionizing the way professional teams asses prospective players. He is also S2 Cognition’s Chief Business Development Officer and Director of Football. His educational background stands up again the brightest minds in sports. He has a Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Tennessee, a PhD in Neuropsychology from Southern Miss, and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University & Boston University, working in the Geriatric Neuropsychology Laboratory and Alzheimer’s Disease Center ..read more

Alison Lukan is an On-Air Analyst & Writer for the Seattle Kraken. In her role, she provides analysis for the Seattle Kraken’s local broadcasts on Root Sports Northwest, with her team winning a Regional Sports Emmy for their coverage this season. She holds a degree in Leadership Studies from the University of Richmond and has previously worked as a consultant in Washington D.C. and has a background in journalism, where she is one of the faces of the hockey analytics revolution. She has also written for The Athletic. In this conversation, Alison talks about… Her academic and career path to ..read more