Expected Value TruMedia Networks

Dr. Curtis Goss is a Performance Support Specialist for USA Swimming where
he is currently prepping for the Olympic trials and the 2024 Summer
Olympics. He was a collegiate swimmer at Indiana University where he also
completed his PhD in Human Performance. In this interview he discusses…

* The current landscape of data and tech within the sport of swimming

* U.S. Trials and the anticipation for potential record breaking races

* Communicating data to swimmers of various ages and experience

* The ups and downs of current technology and the manual aspects to
data collection

* Evaluating swimmer performance and identifying areas of improvement

* Swimming techniques and philosophies

* His path to working for USA Swimming and his drastically different
career plan

* Working with Katie Ledecky, Caeleb Dressel, Kate Douglass, etc.

* Highlights of his career journey thus far

Tim Gibbons is TruMedia’s baseball professional services lead, dealing with players, agencies and facilities. He previously worked as a minor-league hitting coach in the Orioles system. In this episode, Tim talks about…
- His career path to becoming a hitting coach
- What a minor-league hitting coach does
- Data available to minor-league teams
- How a minor-league team’s approach is influenced by the parent club
- Communicating data to players
- Mixing data with coaching of mechanics
- How facilities and agencies use data
- New baseball data points available to coaches
- Follow Tim on Twitter: @LineDrivePro

Allison Loucks is the Director of Business Development and Innovation at ESPN, where she oversees ESPN’s Analytics group. Her team has created ESPN metrics including their Total QBR, Basketball Power Index and pass rush win rate. In this conversation, Allison talks about…
- What she does as a director of the analytics group and what a typical day looks like
- How ESPN creates proprietary metrics
- Challenges of using complex metrics in simple ways
- How sports betting has affected her team’s work
- Common misconceptions about ESPN metrics
- What’s on the horizon for the analytics team
- What she looks for when hiring
- Her ESPN career and journalism background
- Meeting one of her sports heroes
Show links
- ESPN Analytics home page

Matt Chang and his team won the 2024 NFL Big Data Bowl, an analytics competition with a $25,000 first prize. In this episode, Matt will discuss…
- His team’s submission, entitled Uncovering Missed Tackle Opportunities
- What the Big Data Bowl is and how he and his team became interested
- The data and question provided by the NFL
- Attacking that question through trial and error
- Creating a metric and its components
- Making the outputs easy to understand
- Ideal next steps with their metric
- Advice for anyone looking to enter contests like the Big Data Bowl
Show Links
- Kaggle notebook for Matt’s team’s winning submission
- Video of Matt’s team’s presentation
- Matt’s advice for future Big Data Bowl contestants
- Big Data Bowl home page
- Big Data Bowl Kaggle home page
- Matt’s transition from hardware to machine learning
- Follow Matt on Twitter and LinkedIn

Ben Zauzmer is an assistant general manager with the New York Mets, and he’s better known publicly for his book Oscarmetrics and his Twitter account @BensOscarMath, where he uses data to project winners of the Academy Awards. With this year’s Oscars ceremony coming on March 10, Ben joins Expected Value to talk about…
- How he got into the Oscars predictions business
- Creating an Oscars model from scratch
- The variables that go into his calculations
- Projecting nominees vs projecting winners
- Explaining probability
- Factoring in betting markets
- Reaction from the film community
- Majoring in applied mathematics at Harvard
- Course and skills recommended to aspiring analysts
- His favorite movie and favorite Best Picture winner
Show links
- @BensOscarMath on Twitter
- Buy Oscarmetrics on Bookshop or Amazon

Bobby Bandelow is the coordinator of advance scouting for the world champion Texas Rangers. During his decade-long career, he’s worked with the Astros, the then-Indians and the Rangers, in roles ranging from video intern to major-league analyst. In this conversation, Bobby talks about…
- Winning the 2023 World Series
- What an advance scout does for an MLB team
- How he presents data to Bruce Bochy and the Rangers staff
- Adapting to MLB rule changes
- Dealing with small sample sizes
- His career path with three MLB teams
- Advice for aspiring sports analysts
Show Links
- Follow Bobby on Twitter
- Bruce Bochy doesn’t miss a thing
- How the Rangers improved their defense
- The Patriotic Pig