8
Apr
2021

The 15th Annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Annual Recap
Apr 8
-
Apr 9, 2021
Virtual
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2021

Annual Recap

Speakers

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Renie Anderson

Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President, NFL Partnerships

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Leore Avidar

CEO and Founder, Alt

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Shane Battier

Vice President, Basketball Development & Analytics Miami Heat

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Billy Beane

EVP of Baseball Operations, Oakland A's

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Gregg Berhalter

Head Coach, USMNT

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Kristin Bernert

President of Business Operations, Columbus Crew

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Richard Bickers

Founder, SquashLevels

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Sue Bird

Point Guard, Seattle Storm

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Elton Brand

General Manager, Philadelphia 76ers

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John Buccigross

Host - SportsCenter, ESPN

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Brian Burke

Senior Analytics Specialist, ESPN

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Paul Caine

President, On Location

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Valerie Camillo

President of Business Operations for Comcast Spectacor

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Catherine Carlson

CRO, Philadelphia Eagles

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Kathy Carter

CEO, LA28 | CEO, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Properties

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Nick Caserio

General Manager, Houston Texans

See Full List of Speakers

Events

Transforming Higher Education with DATA: Data, Analytics, Technology and Athletics

This talk provides lessons learned and key takeaways from the Data, Analytics, Technology and Athletics “DATA Bulls”, an applied data science project for undergraduate students built around sports analytics.

Competitive Advantages
The Digitalization of the Fitness Industry

With gyms forced to temporarily close in some parts of the country, COVID transformed the fitness industry in just one year. This talk will explore the broader trends observed with regards to the digitalization of fitness, and what trajectory we might expect moving forward

Competitive Advantages
The Top 25 Most Innovative Teams in the World

For the past 4 years, Sports Innovation Lab has been collecting and analyzing data from across the sports, technology, and media industries. Their findings produced the industry’s first data-backed ranking of the world’s most innovative teams. Hear how these teams are have created enterprise value and learn about their path to strategic growth.

Competitive Advantages
Vision - The Ultimate Competitive Advantage in Sports

This presentation will review the critical role of vision in sports performance and highlight use examples of analytics in measuring the relationship between vison and on-field sports performance in professional baseball. Finally, future and current uses of the merging of analytics, medicine, and computer software and hardware will be discussed.

Competitive Advantages
The Ideal Sports League

A new network of professional sports leagues aims to put athletes first with weekly drafts and integrated leaderboards rewarding both team and individual performances. After a successful inaugural women's softball season, we examine how well the analytical methodology held up.

Competitive Advantages
eNASCAR: The Virtual Fast Track to Fan Engagement

When COVID-19 brought live sports to a halt in early 2020, NASCAR and iRacing adjusted in real time to fill the void with the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series. In this session, NASCAR Chief Digital Officer Tim Clark will go behind the scenes to share how televised virtual races featuring the sport’s biggest stars kept fans engaged, drove value for sponsors and introduced NASCAR to new audiences.

Competitive Advantages
How to Meet Your Fan's Netflix Level Expectations

A global pandemic brought the shutdown of in-person live events around the world and a rise in the consumption of digital content. Digital content platforms like Netflix are shifting fan’s expectations to more personalized, customized, automated, and relevant experiences. Leagues, teams, and venues can utilize fan data to meet those same expectations.

Competitive Advantages
Democratizing Athletic Talent Identification via AR Technology – Leveraging the Power of Collaboration to Unlock Infinite Business Impact

A look at how an unconventional approach to problem-solving within Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment has unlocked innovative tools that’s creating massive impact across multi-disciplinary focus areas within the business. A deep dive on how this approach has created a new use for AR technology to disrupt and scale Toronto FC’s talent scouting processes, and the formalized MLSE Sport Performance Lab that aims to apply this way of thinking to new levels across basketball, hockey, soccer, football, and beyond to fundamentally change how the organization looks at innovation within sports business.

Competitive Advantages
Building the Ultimate Global Rating System for Racquet Sports

How good am I? How good are you? How good are the pros? How do they compare with the pros from previous eras? Simple questions yet impossible to answer objectively in racquet sports - until now... Richard Bickers - founder of SquashLevels - has worked to provide objective answers using a mathematical rating algorithm that takes behavioural factors into account and works globally across space and time. While currently developed for squash, the principles could apply equally well across all racquet sports promising to settle these debates once and for all.

Competitive Advantages
Creating Player Development Systems in eSports

Evil Geniuses, one of the most storied esports organizations, has had to build and adapt quickly since re-entering League of Legends in 2019. This talk delves into ways they have thought about identification and development of player talent

Competitive Advantages
The Path Forward: Analytics as an Organizational Imperative

As sports business organizations prepare for the future of sports business, analytics has become an organizational imperative. To design for that future, organizations must develop a balance between their people, processes and foundational technology – finding technology partners that allow them to drive deeper insights & results. As we look to emerge from the pandemic, the amount of data will only proliferate further – as mobile ordering and contactless transactions become further embedded in the fan experience, providing new challenges for organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Competitive Advantages
Premier Lacrosse League: Using Data to Plan and Execute a COVID-Free Season

In only its second year of operation, the Premier Lacrosse League successfully pivoted to a bubble-style 2020 Championship Series. Leading with data and analytics, the PLL was one of the first pro sports leagues back to field and had zero positive COVID cases during their 2020 Championship Series. This presentation will take us inside the PLL as we learn about their data-driven season.

Competitive Advantages
The First Four Shots

The first two times you hit a ball in a rally matter more to winning a point in tennis than all the shots that follow. Traditional tennis statistics focus on simple metrics such as first serve percentages and unforced errors. We identify how the point starts and ends but fail to acknowledge how many shots were struck. The most important metric in tennis has been hiding in plain sight for generations.

Competitive Advantages
Don't Call Them Non-Revenue Sports: The case for an accounting revolution to protect cash-flow-positive "non-revenue" sports

"… all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” (George Box) Athletic departments at schools with under-enrollment have been caught in a bad-model trap, where the NCAA's accounting conventions lead them to make harmful economic decisions in the false belief they are cutting costs. Andy Schwarz (PCL, OSKR) works through why the accounting gets the economics so wrong, provides detailed examples from schools that have made mistaken cuts in 2020, and outlines a solution to avoid these errors going forward.

Competitive Advantages
Fan Engagement in the time of COVID

The ongoing global pandemic has brought the sports and live entertainment industry to a grinding halt. The Sacramento Kings have leveraged data and technology to maintain a relationship with their passionate fanbase and drive revenue through enhancing existing initiatives and creating new programs not imagined 12 months ago.

Competitive Advantages
SailGP is tacking to better performance using the Oracle Cloud

With thousands of sensors on their catamarans and millions of data points, SailGP has a unique opportunity to advance the sport of sailing with technology. In this session, learn how SailGP combines vast data sets with Oracle Cloud technology to steer teams quickly, improve performance, and enhance their fan experience.

Competitive Advantages
How Bundesliga uses cloud technology to improve business operations, to personalize the fan experiences, and more.

Germany’s football top flight, the Bundesliga, has put innovation at the very heart of its media activities. Alongside with the strategic decision to control most of its value chain, this has created a competitive advantage amongst other sport leagues.

Competitive Advantages
Driving Inclusion of Women in Sports – Tools and Solutions to Enable Impact

Women are estimated to control $40 Trillion in consumer spending, make 89% of all banking decisions and will own 2/3 of the world’s wealth in the next 10 years. So why do brands continue to ignore the women consumer? Our approach is to provide our partners with the tools and solutions which inform insights that can drive meaningful change in support of equity and fairness for women.

Competitive Advantages
Women’s Sports: The Time is NOW

This panel brings together fierce advocates of equality in sport who will discuss why NOW is the time for investment in women’s sports based on evidence from impressions, viewership, and other overlooked data.

Panels
A Conversation with Mark Cuban and Andy Slavitt

Andy and Mark will narrow in what data has taught us about the health of athletes, who come from diverse backgrounds, experience higher physical and mental health risks, and are exposed to inconsistent healthcare experiences.

Panels
A conversation with Andrew Yang and Nate Silver

In this discussion, the New York City mayoral candidate, Andrew Yang, talks about the increasing role of data in politics as well as his story as a Knicks fan.

Panels
Acceleration of Sports Data Innovation at ESPN

This discussion will be rooted in how ESPN can create new high-quality analyses to enhance fan experience powered by low latency player tracking tech. Tune in to hear our executive panel discuss how they plan to innovate the presentation of live sports leveraging partnerships with industry leading technology companies.

Panels
Howzdata: How Analytics is Revolutionizing Cricket

Hear from players and change agents from the world of cricket discuss how this globally beloved sport is playing catch up by using data and in-game technology to further develop the sport.

Panels
Phillie Phanatics: How Teams Cultivate and Grow a Passionate Fanbase

The panel will discuss what exactly connects fans so deeply to their teams and what levers teams and fans can pull when engaging with one another.

Panels
A Keeper: The Evolution of Soccer Analytics

Tune in to hear experts discuss how they use real-time analytics to inform in-game tactical changes and optimize data analytics tools and software to leverage the insights they need to be effective.

Panels
Select Your Fighter: How to Assess Players and Build an Esports Roster

In this panel, industry leaders will discuss the growth of competitive analysis in esports and how teams have advanced their roster building strategies.

Panels
Making a QB1: The Science behind QB Evaluations

Our panel of football experts will look at how analytics can be used to evaluate, scout, and improve quarterbacks, as well as make the ever-important decision of whether to tag or move on from a player.

Panels
Fact or Fiction: Basketball Mythbusting

Listen in on our panelists determining what is fact and what is fiction when evaluating player and team talent. We bring together coaches and GMs with a variety of experiences to break down these rumors.

Panels
Sabermetrics v. The World: Are Analytics Baseball's Answer?

This panel aims to examine the fine line between when to make managerial decisions on gut feel, versus when to stick to the data. Did the 2020 World Series serve as a catalyst for changes to the game going forward, or will managers shrug off pressure from the media?

Panels
The Data Dangle: Hockey Analytics

This panel will dive into the world of hockey analytics, examining how teams are using the abundance of new information to help inform player personnel decisions, in-game coaching strategy, and scouting, amongst other things.

Panels
To Play or Not To Play: Rich Eisen 1-on-1 with J.J. Watt

How does J.J. decide when to return to play after an injury or a natural disaster? How has J.J.’s perspective on playing changed throughout his career? Join this panel as Rich Eisen deep dives into J.J. Watt’s thought process and decision making.

Panels
Negotiating the Future: How Priorities Changed as a Result of COVID

Learn how key leaders were impacted personally by the COVID-19 pandemic, fought for business imperatives and ensured their perspectives were understood.

Panels
Adapting on the Fly: The Future of Ticketing

As the sports world’s recovery continues, industry giants will share how they navigated the pandemic, the impact of new technologies & data, how analytics is driving fans return, and how their partnerships have been strengthened to overdeliver on the fan experience.

Panels
Quantify This: Valuing Sports Sponsorships Presented by Bose

The leading executives from the NFL, Wasserman, Bose, and Ticketmaster will discuss the increasing role of analytics, ROI, and sponsors who became partners in surviving the pandemic together.

Panels
Evolving Sports Through Technology: How Data is Changing the Way We Innovate in Sports (Presented by AWS)

Learn how sports organizations are innovating faster than they used to and what this means for athletes and fans.

Panels
Getting a Handle on Social Media: How Data is Engaging GenZ without Losing GenX

This panel brings together experts who have tapped into the Gen-Z psyche on a myriad of platforms to grow engagement through social media.

Panels
Big Data Energy: How Marketing Technology and Analytics are Changing Sports

The panel brings together marketing & business innovators from the NBA, NBC, Wasserman, and Endeavor to discuss how they leverage big data to make decisions, continue to change their traditional marketing strategies, and what lessons they can take from this past year.

Panels
The Show Must Go On: Digitization and Innovation in the Sports World

This panel highlights the behind-the-scenes work of leagues and their broadcast partners to produce engaging live events when confronted with COVID.

Panels
Alternative Investing: Teams and SPACs

Learn from the experts who are early adopters of SPACs, buying assets, creating investing arms, or going public to take advantage of this frothy market. Billy Beane, John Collins, Josh Harris, and Jason Robins will discuss their strategies and the future of sports as an alternative investment vehicle.

Panels
Leading Through Change and Transition Presented by Wasserman

We bring together leaders from the FanDuel, Washington Football Team, and ESPN to sit down and discuss the difficult decisions they made when faced with the new normal, and how they were able to lead their companies through these challenging times using available data available to guide decision making.

Panels
Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: Survivor Analytics

From finding immunity tokens to forming alliances, this panel brings together some of the most famous Survivor players to examine what it takes to be Sole Survivor.

Panels
Beyond the Gambit: Chess’ Big Move

Hear from the most forward thinkers in chess as they discuss what other sports can learn from chess.

Panels
Trash Talking: Live at SSAC presented by Oracle

Joined by Nate Silver, Andrew Friedman, and Sue Bird, SSAC Co-Founders and Trash Talking podcast hosts Jessica Gelman and Daryl Morey will bring the fun with predictions, games, and finally settling, which sport has the best rules.

Panels
When the Sports World Stopped & How It Came Back to Life: COVID and The Future of Sports

This panel will examine lessons learned around player training/safety and what the future of the sports world will look like in the new normal for organizations and fans alike.

Panels
Super Glue: Investigating Basketball Culture vs. Analytics

Hear from coaches, players, and the journalists who report out on the ‘culture codes’ of teams as they discuss the analytics behind culture and the potential to measure these ‘glue’ players.

Panels
The Invisible Opponent: Our Mental Health Crisis

We bring together a diverse set of panelists to discuss their personal stories dealing with mental health and share lessons learned from their journey.

Panels
The Case for Activism: Sports' Impact on Society

This panel brings athletes and media members together to discuss the evolution of activism in sports, personal journeys, and the increased integration and future of sports-led social initiatives.

Panels
Backdoor Cover: Revolutionizing Sports During COVID

What's the next big thing for the sports betting industry, and how will businesses adapt in order to meet their customer's needs? Tune in to hear Erika Nardini, Scott O’Neil, and Jason Robins wager on what’s ahead.

Panels
Say Goodbye to the 40 Yard Dash: The Future of NFL Roster Building

Analytics writers, coaches, and front office executives provide their unique perspectives on the current and future states of analytics for player evaluation and development in the NFL.

Panels
The New Sports Fan: Innovation and Data

Learn how leading executives from the most forward-thinking organizations in sports (Amazon, Comcast and KAGR) are using data to understand how to attract new fans & create new experiences.

Panels
Self-Made Sports Legends and Entrepreneurs: Michael Rubin and A-Rod

Listen in as these industry luminaries share lessons learned from their experiences on the field and in the boardroom.

Panels
Need Fantastic Trophies

This panel brings together experts with a wide range of experience to debate the past, present, and future of the memorabilia business.

Panels
Show Not Tell: Sports Storytelling

Adam McKay and Michael Lewis discuss a variety of topics from how they bring athlete stories to life to how sports media was the precursor to political media.

Panels
2021 Virtual Hackathon Presented by Major League Baseball

The 7th Annual Hackathon at the 2021 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference will bring innovative and analytical minds together to create groundbreaking solutions in the sports industry.

Activities
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2021 Startup Competition & Trade Show

The Startup Competition and Trade Show provides an opportunity for selected startups and small companies to showcase their innovations in the fields of sports-related technologies, products, and services.

Activities
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2021 DraftKings Sports Gaming Innovation Challenge

DraftKings, the digital sports entertainment and gaming company, invites graduate students and those attending the conference to enter their Sports Gaming Innovation Challenge! Graduate students from around the country will be tasked with creating and presenting a new sports gaming concept to DraftKings.

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Research Papers

Decoding MLB Pitch Sequencing Strategies via Directed Graph Embeddings

Arnav Prasad

Download the Full Paper Here
Risk of Collusion: Will Groups of 3 Ruin the FIFA World Cup?

Julien Guyon

Download the Full Paper Here
Using Mobile Location Data to Assess Sponsorship Effectiveness

David Schweidel
Kyeongbin Kim
Michelle Andrews

Download the Full Paper Here
Routine Inspection: A playbook for corner kicks

Laurie Shaw, Harvard University
Sudarshan Gopaladesikan, SL Benfica

Download the Full Paper Here
Predicting NBA Talent from Enormous Amounts of College Basketball Tracking Data

Andrew Patton, Matt Scott, Nathan Walker, Alex Ottenwess, Paul Power, Aditya Cherukumudi, and Patrick Lucey (Stats Perform)

Download the Full Paper Here
MAYFIELD: Machine Learning Algorithm for Yearly Forecasting Indicators and Estimation of Long-Run Player Development

Alexander Williams, The Ohio State University
Sethward Brugler, General Motors
Benjamin Clarke, The Ohio State University

Download the Full Paper Here
I Think We'll Go to Boston - Marathon Performance Prediction

Varun Pemmaraju, Strava
Dave Hoch, Strava

Download the Full Paper Here

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