Brad Congelio, Ph.D. - Sports Analytics

Sports Analytics: The Ultimate Guide To Learn and Break Into The Field

August 17, 2020 by Brad Congelio

Sports Analytics: An Introduction Sports analytics is becoming an incredibly popular avenue for my students to break into the industry. And it doesn’t seem like this firehose of excitement is going to end anytime soon. Case in point: I spend countless Saturday mornings during the Fall and Spring semesters meeting with potential students and their …

NFL Analytics: Exploring Early-Season Defensive EPA with nflfastR

September 25, 2020September 25, 2020 by Brad Congelio

Long story, short: I am a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I grew up about 45 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. My father worked in the steel mills his entire life. There was really no other option for me in terms of my fandom. Because of that, I usually gravitate towards working with the Pittsburgh Steelers when …

Web Scraping with rvest: Exploring Sports Industry Jobs

September 2, 2020September 1, 2020 by Brad Congelio

Web scraping with rvest is easy and, surprisingly, comes in handy in situations that you may not have thought of. For example, one of the unique things about academics is the constant need to stay “ahead of the curve,” meaning being nimble enough as a program to shift curriculum around to provide students training and …

Sabermetrics: Using a ggplot Image To Make Beautiful Graphs

August 31, 2020August 11, 2020 by Brad Congelio

Using a ggplot image can make a boring, mundane plot in RStudio truly pop off of the page. While doing so may seem exceedingly difficult, I promise you that it is not. In my case, I am a big Pittsburgh Pirates fan and I wanted to throw together a graph showcasing the silly season that …

How To Create a Pitching Spray Chart with RStudio

August 23, 2020July 19, 2020 by Brad Congelio

I will be honest: this example is a little “backward” because I am graphing every pitch faced by a batter over the course of a segmented season. However, the general coding remains the same: you would simply replace the batter’s name with the pitcher’s name you want to graph when you get your data. With …

Your Academic Website: A Step-By-Step Guide To Building Your Own

September 10, 2020January 8, 2020 by Brad Congelio

As an academic myself, I know that building your personal academic website is probably pretty far down on your to-do list. Because, let’s face it: that list is pretty dang long. Research.Writing.Class prep.Teaching.Grading.Meetings.Advising. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of that, my goal here is to provide you an actionable, and …

Faculty Interview Questions: What To Expect During The Academic Job Interview

November 20, 2019October 17, 2019 by Brad Congelio

Ah, faculty interview questions. You know: those little things that ultimately stand between you and the tenure-track job of your dreams. I know the feeling. I have been around the block when it comes to academic job interviews, so I am pretty confident in my ability to provide some, hopefully, sage advice here. In fact, …

The Featured Snippet: How One Website Stole #1’s Traffic Overnight

November 8, 2019October 17, 2019 by Brad Congelio

I’m currently working on a research paper that I will be presenting on November 7th and 8th at the Northeastern Association of Business and Technology’s annual conference at Penn State and, while doing so, came across a rather intriguing little piece of SEO gamesmanship. (Hint, hint: come see me talk, if you are in the …