The official blog of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective
By Andrew Puopolo As 2016 winds to a close, we take a look back on 55 reasons why this year was a particularly crazy year in the world of sports. NFL 1.) Both teams that made the Super Bowl failed to make the playoffs the...
By Jason Light, Liam Cleary, Kayley Leonard, Zayne Matulis, Noah Reimers, Davon Robertson, and Jocelyn Skoler The inspiration for this article came from our conversations with the Boston Globe’s Shira Springer following an...
By Anthony Zonfrelli The worldwide wrestling community was shaken last week when the IOC ruled that it would remove the sport from the 2020 Olympics. This decision left many in disbelief—after foot racing, wrestling, added in...
Here are the final COSTAS medal standings, complete through the end of Olympic play on August 12. For an explanation of the methodology behind COSTAS, click here, and here for the COSTAS standings after the first week of the...
by Andrew Mooney Following the exploits of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt in London, the word “greatest” has been getting thrown around quite a bit. As with any time this word comes out, one has to question just how much of it...
By Andrew Mooney On Wednesday, the U.S. men’s basketball team begins its gold medal defense in earnest as they square off against Australia in the quarterfinals, a contest the U.S. has been given 1/100 odds to win, according to...
by Andrew Mooney As promised, here are the COSTAS standings for the first week of Olympic competition. To learn more about how COSTAS is calculated and what it intends to measure, read my original post here. Medal figures are...
by Andrew Mooney Four feet, eleven inches, and 90 pounds is hardly the prototypical physique of a world-class athlete, but as American gold medalist Gabrielle Douglas proved yesterday, it’s more than enough to perform...
by Andrew Mooney One of the biggest yawn-fests of a story in the buildup to this year’s Olympic basketball tournament was the idle bantering between this year’s US team and the original Dream Team from 1992. It seemed fitting...
by Andrew Mooney A couple of days ago, I wrote about a different way to think about the traditional Olympic medal standings, which reflected the unevenness of the playing field from which athletes from all over the world come to...