(This post is about DVOA, it might be slightly OT: it relates to a post from last week's preview thread. This might be better in a new thread?)
@BradyFTW! In last week's preview thread you mentioned some interesting DVOA statistics.
I criticized the DVOA metric because it was somewhat of a black box. Later I felt bad because football analytics is an interesting subject, and I was not intending to discourage you (or anyone else) from pursuing it.
I just came upon are reddit post describing a DVOA alternative called EPA. It claims to be similar to DVOA, yet it has 2 important advantages:
1) It is open source. Anyone can look at the source code. The calculations involved are not secret.
2) It claims to be out performing DVOA as a predictive measure.
[OC] Calculation of EPA ranking and it's better than DVOA • r/nfl
The code for the calculations is written in python.
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If people are interested, it might be fun to explore EPA in more detail. Getting into the nuts and bolts of the calculations in the above links might require some quantitative and/or computer science background. Still, it might be fun to break down the calculations as much as possible so that folks who have an interest football analytics but don't have coding skills can follow also. If people are interested I will report on my experiments with and explanations of EPA.
Furthermore, if anyone else has a stat/data-sci/CS or related background and wants to collaborate on this let me know!