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A recent NCAA report stated that only 14 of the 120 athletic programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision made money. The Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) includes all BCS conferences (PAC 10, SEC, Big 10, Big 12, etc) so odds are your favorite athletic program is losing money. 12% of college athletic programs are profitable. Which…
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I recently came across a study on the NBA and effects on playing time. The study conducted by Berkeley professors Barry Staw and Ha Hoang, analyzed playing time in the 1980’s over a five year span following the NBA draft. Professor Staw analyzed factors including on court performance, trades, injuries and draft position. What did…
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A while back Adam Foster of Project Prospect sent out a tweet wondering how height impacts success and longevity as a pitcher. Adam is focused on minor league baseball prospects and thus was curious how height impacts a pitchers chances of “making it” and how long they last in the major leagues. My first instinct…
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My last two posts have been about the average height and average weight of MLB players. While I will be looking at performance relative to height and weight as well, I wanted to make a quick post to show height and weight over time. Have players gotten taller on average since 1960? Do players weigh…
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Following up on my post from yesterday regarding average height of baseball players, I wanted to look at the average weight. I posed the question through my Twitter account, and heard back with pitcher, catcher, first base, designated hitter, and third base. Again, I looked at all MLB players since 1960 who played at least…
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I was at a spring training game a few days ago and had an interesting conversation with my dad regarding average height of position players. We guessed that middle infielders (shortstop and second basemen) are the shortest players on the field. Being a numbers guy though I wanted to know for sure. I looked at…
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I recently had a conversation with a sports executive (whose name is easily recognizable), and was surprised to learn he hadn’t registered his own name as a domain name. In its simplest form, a domain is a web address like sportsologist.com, or espn.com. Whether you are an executive in a sports organization, entry level worker…
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In my last post, I talked about the effect of simplicity on sales conversions. There are many simple changes, such as altering site design, to yield significant improvements. With that in mind, I’d like to propose another simple idea, that is supported by one of my favorite books, in addition to many social websites: PEOPLE…
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Based on hours of research I’ve done from books (Yes!, Made To Stick, etc) to videos (Kevin Rose, etc) to websites (abtests.com, etc), a simple conclusion can be drawn: simple sells. What is simple? How does that translate to sports? Let’s look at ticket sales and website design to further examine this idea. One of…
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In our first post, we showed the percentage of players in Major League Baseball based on birth month. As I showed, there is a much higher percentage of players born in August, largely due to the Little League Baseball cutoff date of July 31. In order for players to reach the majors, they had to…
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The birth month phenomena is an interesting occurrence that is applicable throughout society. While Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell implied the same was true for baseball, I wanted to take a closer look. Looking at the birth month of every MLB player that has appeared in a game since 1965, the graph suggests that you’re most…