Have you considered expanding into other sports? and if not, are there other sites you would recommend that provide a similar level of thoughtful analysis for other sports?
I love all the functionalities of the site and the simple presentation of the data, and would love to have this for more than just golf. I find it makes watching golf more enjoyable as I can reference the data to understand what I’m watching on TV (and if the broadcasters are full of **** or not) and the process of putting together picks much more simple/enjoyable.
Obviously, the nature of the Strokes Gained metric makes golf a great test ground to develop this type of model but with the proliferation of advanced metrics (and availability of data) in most other sports, it seems a great opportunity to expand what is already a great product for golf into other sports.
I think Data Golf used to do women’s golf
I strongly believe a tennis-focused site set up in a manner similar to DataGolf would be very popular. Another tour-based, 4-major individual sport played in discrete increments (points vs. strokes) and where a lot of similar adjustments apply (current form, preference for certain surfaces, etc.). And according to a quick Google search there are twice as many tennis fans as golf fans worldwide apparently.
There are a few sites that attempt to provide tennis analytics, but having spent significant time digging into them, they do sloppy work, provide limited transparency into their projections, and/or have a poor user interface. DG is vastly superior on all 3 fronts. They also provide little to no betting-related info, which I think is a big draw for many of us paying subscribers, and based on my manual analysis their projections aren’t consistently accurate enough to overcome the books’ margin.
I’m guessing Matt and Will are too busy with this site to ever pursue it (and no idea if they’re even tennis fans), but I think it’s an opportunity for someone - I wish I had the website building and database management abilities to do it myself.
4 Likes
There are many sites with thoughtful writing an analysis of different sports, but I am not aware of a site that I would say represents as high-quality of an effort and product as datagolf.
1 Like