

Show HN: StatMilk - Football Stats Visualized - digitalmarks
http://statmilk.com/NCAAF

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aggronn
Very impressive. Definitely the best data presentation dashboard I've seen.
The depth of information (even if the source of information is so centralized)
plus the diversity and clarity in presentation, not to mention the overall
cleanness of the whole thing, really is very cool.

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ojiikun
Hah, read the title as "football, the sort you play with a round ball" and got
rather excited. Only minor disappontment ensued when I realized you were
talking about "handegg". ;)

Still, I love this kinda stuff and have been pining for more creative, dynamic
presentations of futbol stats. I wish anyone could explain to me why every
darn mainstream coverage site has the same, boring chart of the same, boring
dozen stats. Sagarin does some fun math, but his presentation is uninspired at
best.

For all the uses of highly-dynamic HTML5/JS that are distracting and
unnecesary, presentation of stats is just a homerun! </zing>

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pmahoney
Football, a sport played on foot.

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qw
What about handball?

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macklinchaffee
Beautiful! Incredibly clean and intuitive. A great model for those of us
building statistical interfaces. A+ and bookmarked.

Small thing: The sorting parameters for "Margin of Victory" and "Turnover
Margin" are a bit off. I believe sorting alphabetically rather than
numerically?

Looking forward to other leagues/sports?

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digitalmarks
Absolutely! iPhone app is in the final stages as well.

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alecdibble
The interface is excellent. If you had NBA statistics, I would be willing to
pay for this.

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grayc
That looks nice. You could improve things a lot by using even a simple model
to account for opponent quality, home field advantage, etc.: a simple fixed-
effects regression model with team-level effects would be one approach and
would take only a few lines of R code.

For an example, look at: <http://www.pseudotrue.com/details> which is my blog,
so this is a pretty shameless plug but I don't really know of a different
reference.

The point of using model isn't because you believe the model is true or expect
it to necessarily be accurate, but because it can give you a better measure
than just looking at (say) yards per game.

But your site is cool as is, so good job.

edit: tweaked URL to point to the right page.

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josephjrobison
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Would be cool to
have the BCS rankings in there as well.

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emilioolivares
Awesome work guys, the presentation and design are excellent, top of the line.
Some much attention to detail, pixel perfect, I'm really blown away! I'm not
into sports at all, but this is inspiring at many levels.

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mdoerneman
Very nice! Beautiful and very fast for the amount of data that is calculated
on the fly. What technologies did you use? Also, did you have to pay license
fees to display team and conference logos?

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digitalmarks
MVC3 + SQL Server + Mongo + custom software for the realtime calculations.

All components (with the exception of the front-end) are highly abstracted
enabling us to swap technologies (e.g. SQL Server to MySQL, Mongo to
Memcached) quickly.

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awellis13
Yeah, I'd like to know about the process of showing team logos and the stats.
Are you just scraping the data from somewhere, or do you have permission to
use any of this data? I'm wanting to build and application similar to this for
the NHL (if we have a season... har har...) but the licensing of big teams is
scaring me away some.

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madsushi
This is awesome. My only concern is that the data looks to be a bit stale, as
the Oregon Ducks won last night but none of their stats are up. Mind if I ask
where you're pulling the data from?

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digitalmarks
Thanks. Data is sourced directly from the NCAA. Expect updates every Sunday
morning.

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sheraz
are you scraping results into your database from their site? Also, are you
familiar with sportsML and sportsdb[1] ?

I ask because I am also working on a sports product for release in November.

Nice work!

[1] - <http://www.sportsdb.org/sd>

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jergason
This is beautiful. What charting libraries are you using?

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josephjrobison
Would love to see a breakdown of how you set this up as well as know what
libraries.

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digitalmarks
We'll have a blog up and I promise to cover this.

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modarts
This is so ill, I love everything about the presentation. I'm partially glad
you don't have NFL stats, otherwise my work productivity would plummet.

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digitalmarks
Thanks - and I suggest you get a lot accomplished over the next few weeks.

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ktsmith
Great data visualization but the stat widget headers are pretty hard to read
due to the complete lack of contrast with the background color.

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jredwards
As someone who really appreciates sports stats, I find myself ignoring the
numbers to admire the design. Really, really beautiful.

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pablobaz
What are you using for the help array overlay?

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williamdix
The margin of victory does not correctly sort.

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nekojima
As well, I'd generally think a 6-0 team should be ranked above a 6-1 team,
does not currently appear that way.

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larrydag
Agreed. It should be rank ordered by losses then wins.

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blanecordes
Where are you obtaining your stat data from?

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nanijoe
It appears the only thing that correctly predicts victory is turnover margin!!

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nekojima
There is a high correlation in the NFL between turnover margin and winning.

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maxpospischil
really nicely done, would love to see NFL stats

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pablobaz
What are you using for the help arrow overlay?

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digitalmarks
Overlay image + CSS + jquery-cookie

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shanecleveland
Incredible. I will definitely return to this.

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nmb
Too, too sexy.

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webXL
Yeah, I think it's trying to hard in this regard. It's got a nice clean look,
but the font can be a little more traditional, and the dark background with
glowing buttons makes it look more like a toy than something used for serious
analysis.

It seems geared to comparing conferences and not arbitrary matchups. I was
expecting to be able to compare any 2 teams. I'm sure you're working on it.

Good job presenting the data though.

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digitalmarks
Of course you can compare any two teams - click on the logo and select the
team(s) you want.

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webXL
I can only select one at a time. And it's not obvious that the NCAA logo is a
button.

How can I see a Matchup between Cal and Stanford, like you have for Miami and
Florida St.?

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digitalmarks
<http://statmilk.com/NCAAF/MatchUp/107/674/>

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webXL
Ah, how silly of me. You told me to just click on the logos and I was just
clicking on them on the wrong tab. However, you really need to put more time
into the design of that feature, and that select "button". I know you have a
splash screen explaining "select a team", but there's no affordances for the
user who overlooks that instruction and is looking to achieve the same thing I
was. A simple mouse over effect would help big time.

BTW, on the "Matchups" page, I was expecting to see more than one. You might
want a featured list somewhere on that page to make it easier to load this
week's big games.

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digitalmarks
Addressing both issues this week - thanks for the feedback.

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danso
* Looks great, I think everyone is in agreeance on that. I had some questions about the actual data being shown and whether the emphasis should be on other datapoints and aggregations...

So the aggregate conference W-L standings are overall records, right? As the
season goes on, most games are played within conferences...so...what's the
relevancy of displaying conference by these W-L numbers? If there were no
early non-conference games, then the W-L ratio would basically be 50-50 for
every conference. I think you should remove that statistic as it's not
terribly useful.

* Also, the filters provide a few confusing options. If I select "Winning games", the view stays the same except that everyone (and every conference) has a winning record...I understand programmatically why that is, but I don't think the layperson will.

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digitalmarks
Great feedback - we're listening...

