Football

Sometime in the mid ’90s, while I was playing high school football, I read an article in Sports Illustrated. The article was about a division III college football coach who was taking a non-traditional approach to coaching. The article is lost to me, as I could not find it during an internet search, but the premise stuck with me all this time. In the article, as far as I recall, the coach would encourage/require the players to make daily affirmations. He would stride through formation during pre-practice stretching, talking about how beautiful the day was, and that each and every player belongs there. He would make them repeat phrases aloud. The intent was clear, to me at least, that he was using those affirmations to prepare the players for the practice. To stay focused and build confidence. It seemed to have worked as well. The program was successful, winning many games, and stood in stark contrast to traditionally run programs. For example, the one I was playing for at the time. A top down dictatorship, with strict adherence to what the coaches commanded, all coming from a hard nosed head coach who would lose his temper and scream at people who made mistakes. Fear was one of their main tools of motivation. ...

TLDR: Create a plot that shows the win probability throughout the 2024 Rose Bowl Game using data from College Football Database API. You can click here to go to the full code. Introduction What follows is the step by step approach that I took to plot the win probability for both teams in the 2024 Rose Bowl Game. The task is pretty straight forward. The api provides the exact data needed for the plot and one could make this plot with one api call. However I did seek to add a little more to the plot that I believe enhances the representation. Things like using the team colors for the lines, adding the final score with logos, and using quarter endings as the x tick marks. To achieve this there was additional data needed and a little extra work that needed to be done. ...