Rick Stroud ?@NFLSTROUD 7mMoneyball effect: Bucs add director of analytics to staff http://www.tampabay.com/blogs The Bucs have made a progressive move in adding a new position to their front office, hiring a "director of analytics" to bring creative statistical analysis to the new staff around general manager Jason Licht and coach Lovie Smith.Tyler Oberly comes to the Bucs from Houston, where he wrote for a site called TheSidelineView.com, applying an electric engineering background to football applications. He was a speaker last month at the MIT Sloan Sports Conference, a major gathering of sports analytics experts -- other speakers included baseball's Bill James, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and many others. Baseball and basketball have made considerable investments into adding number-crunchers in the post-"Moneyball" era, and football is starting to do the same.Here's some of Oberly's work for TSV, and here's an abstract called "Elitics: Using Analytics to Reach NFL Ascendancy," which shows the link between six specific statistical metrics and winning in the NFL. Will it help Smith and Licht win in Tampa? That remains to be seen.
