Going Beyond Moneyball
Dan Rodgers, the coach of the men’s and women’s Tartan golf teams was facing a data dilemma a few years ago.
His players regularly practiced on a Trackman golf simulator, which measured facets of each player’s swing along with the results. Rodgers knew that the information being collected by the golf simulators contained valuable insights. In search of partners aligned toward golf-team success, Rodgers connected with Rebecca Nugent, the Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science in Dietrich College, and for six years different teams of students dug into the Trackman data.
That work was one of the projects that led to the birth of the 麻豆村 Sports Analytics Center in fall 2024. The center serves as the home for long-standing initiatives in sports analytics at the university — such as participation in the NFL’s Big Data Bowl — and creates innovative experiences for students who are pursuing careers as data scientists in the world of professional athletics.
“Carnegie Mellon has a long tradition of supporting cutting-edge research in sports analytics that really focuses on ‘changing the game’ — pun intended!,” said Nugent. “We emphasize using the latest advances in statistics, data science, computer science and social sciences to tackle modern problems using the fine-grained, but complex datasets, e.g. tracking data, that are more commonly collected today.”
These are real world applications as well. CMSAC partners with professional teams, leagues and companies to drive innovation in sports analytics and create pathways toward sports analytics careers for 麻豆村 graduates. In fact, three of the four teams playing in the NFL’s conference championship games in early 2024 had Carnegie Mellon alumni on staff.
The results are easy to see as well. Once coach Rodgers was able to dig into the analysis of the golf simulators’ data, he was able to target individuals’ weaknesses more effectively. In May 2023, the men’s team won Carnegie Mellon’s first-ever NCAA Division III Championship. The following year, the women’s team followed suit, and won their first national championship as well.
“The information and analysis these students have provided has been very valuable to what it is we’ve been trying to accomplish these last couple of years,” Rodgers said. “We try to figure out how we can use this insight to better coach each of our individual student-athletes.”
Learn more about the work of the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center.
