“When you think of Harvard the first thing that comes to mind usually isn’t sports,” said Harvard junior Kurt Bullard. And of course he’s right, historically speaking. Of all the historic achievements that the prestigious Cambridge university has made through the decades, comparatively few of them have pertained to athletics.

Yet Bullard has a unique vantage point of a place that’s helping to alter that perception. As a member of the Harvard Sports Analytics Collective (HSAC), he’s part of the latest generation of students to help blur the lines between academic study and sports analysis.

In a recent interview, BostInno was able to catch up with three members of HSAC. Bullard, the collective’s treasurer, was joined by co-president Harrison Chase and president emeritus, Henry Johnson.

All three of them have similar stories in terms of how they joined HSAC, which itself began in 2006.

“I got to Harvard not really knowing what opportunities there would be involving sports,” Bullard said. “Luckily I found this club freshman fall.”

“I knew I really liked math. And I knew that I also really liked sports. I was lucky enough to find this club,” Chase explained. “It’s been a blast.”

Johnson’s discovery of HSAC revealed just how different it is from usual perceptions of college clubs, traditionally wedded to a hierarchical mentality:

I found out about it at a student reception in Chicago. There was an alum whose son was in the club and it sounded really interesting. So I looked up the website and read some articles. It was really cool stuff, so one of my first days on campus I emailed the club president. I assumed it would be this really, really hoddy-toddy club so I sent him an email saying I’m willing to do data entry for you guys. I thought there’s no way I could get in on the analysis, but turns out it’s a lot easier than that. Ever since joining it’s just been a really creative, affirmative group of people. It’s just great discussions, very relaxed. It’s been one of my favorite experiences at Harvard.

And even the way HSAC exists on a day-to-day basis is much more informal than the precision, data-driven posts that it regularly produces would seem to suggest. For all of the analytics, most of the original ideas are born out of circumstances familiar to regular sports fans.

“It is a slightly more formal version of people sitting around and watching a game asking some questions,” Johnson said about how HSAC meets. “We sit around and we pass around donuts and then we’ll say ‘hey, did you see the Red Sox game this weekend?’ Somebody did something and we’re wondering if it was a good decision. So I think rather than basing the question in statistics, we base them in just what sports fans might want to know.”

Meeting once a week at a roundtable conducive for group discussion, the group comes from a wide array of sports interests and backgrounds. Still, they all share a common love for the analytics. 

We’ll post something and it’ll say ‘this is what I think using this methodology.’ And then it will evolve into ‘this is what Harvard thinks using this methodology’ and then it will evolve into ‘Harvard declares that blah blah blah will happen.'”

“I’m an NBA fan, and NBA.com just recently released the SportVU data,” Chase adds, “which up until a few years ago didn’t even exist. And then for a few years after that, was private. So that fact that we’re doing this analysis in the midst of all this new data being released is really cool to be able to do that.”

And being able to utilize that data to draw strong conclusions is something that appeals to the group. This is especially true in harsh and subjective world of Boston sports talk radio.

“It seems like no one in sports has slight opinions,” Johnson observed. “You can listen to a sports talk show for 10 minutes and you see everyone thinks they’re exactly right. So to be able to apply numbers and come to an objective conclusion I think is a pretty satisfying conclusion.”

Notably, Harvard’s academic model has helped to facilitate the students’ interest in sports analytics.

“A lot of the classes that we take are project-based, rather than test-based or essay-based,” Bullard said. “And so you often have free reign to sort of do whatever project you want. Obviously you have to utilize certain regression techniques, but you’re free to do analysis on whatever you want. And a lot of us in the club gravitate towards sports.”

The relationship between their academic study on side and work for HSAC on the other is a striking one. While the group’s outside sports interests have inevitably filtered into the project-based schoolwork, the flow has reversed at various points.

Inspired by some of what they learn, members of HSAC have taken newly-learned material and applied to their sports interests.

“Just this passed semester, we learned about this statistical method in one of our stats classes,” said Johnson. “And that night, Kurt wrote a post on it to look at NHL playoff seeding. And I understood the concept a lot better by virtue of its use in Kurt’s post.”

Naturally, the quality of the work done by HSAC hasn’t gone unnoticed on a larger stage either.

Recently, another of Bullard’s posts (“A Way-Too-Early Prediction of the NFL Season“) attracted social media attention from the NFL:

 

“I was definitely not expecting the reaction that my post got,” Bullard described. “I posted it on a Wednesday morning, was at work and got text messages from people in the club and even kids from my town.”

This isn’t the first time (nor will it be the last) that HSAC has received attention from bigger media outlets or professional leagues. FiveThirtyEight has linked to them on multiple occasions, along with other national writers and websites.

The fact that they write for a Harvard publication helps, but can also get misconstrued.

“I think the label is extremely beneficial,” said Johnson, though he noted the humorous side of it. “It’s kind of funny. We’ll post something and it’ll say ‘this is what I think using this methodology.’ And then it will evolve into ‘this is what Harvard thinks using this methodology’ and then it will evolve into ‘Harvard declares that blah blah blah will happen.'”

Still, the group maintains that they simply do this because it’s fun. It’s clearly helped them advance their education in the informal style that HSAC projects.

As the school year returns soon, definitely keep up with what Bullard, Chase, Johnson and what the rest of the club has to say on the subject of sports analytics. Because as they continue to prove with the occasional viral post, Harvard is on the forefront of sports analysis just as it is in so many other fields.

Image via Harvard Sports Analytics Collective 

Photo Credit: American Inno
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