Media analytics major Heath Foster '24 used his senior year to translate his passion for sports analytics into multiple undergraduate research projects, several presentations, and some good news for San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk.
The Sports Media Lab Student Spotlight profiles the lab’s graduating seniors and their work.
This spotlight is on HEATH FOSTER ’24, a media analytics major with a marketing minor. Heath has experience with a variety of platforms (including Excel, R, SQL, Tableau, SEM Rush, Hootsuite, and Google Analytics), and is pursuing a career in sport analytics.
Heath excels at communicating insights. He’s a natural storyteller and a gifted presenter, somebody that can both analyze the data and tell somebody why it matters. Here’s his website and LinkedIn.
THE WORK
TITLE: Perception vs. Reality: How Fantasy Experts, Scouts, and College Students Value NFL Players.
ORIGIN: Both football fans and broadcasters often focus on the “exciting play.” A 70-yard touchdown bomb. A 45-yard screen pass. It’s perfect content for SportsCenter, ideal for Instagram or TikTok. And it feeds right into our obsession with fantasy football where touchdowns are prioritized.
But there’s so much more to football than these plays. Did the receiver run the correct route? Did the running back make the appropriate block? Yet these moments rarely make the highlight shows. And there are few social media accounts dedicated to good routes or blocks (although there are indeed a few).
Which leads to the genesis of this project: how does our collective emphasis on the exciting play affect fans’ perceptions of what makes a football player a good football player?
THE METHOD AND THE DATA: To answer this question, rankings of NFL wide receivers and running backs were created with three groups of data.
To determine the top NFL players from a scout or front office perspective, thousands of data points were collected, cleaned, assigned a weight, and analyzed using dozens of metrics favoring efficiency such as “true catch rate,” “target separation,” and “run block rating.” Each of these data points came from an athlete who played in 10 or more games and ran at least 10 routes or had 5 carries in each.
Similarly, to determine the top NFL players from a fantasy football perspective, metrics favoring opportunity and production such as “targets/game” and “rushing touchdowns/game” were used to assess individual performance regardless of team outcome or efficiency.
And to determine the top NFL players from a fan perspective, the top 20 wide receivers and running backs from each group were randomized together in a list and send out to 70+ football fans asking them to rank “the best players” at each position.
RESULTS: While the rankings for fantasy football and fans were similar, the scout/ front office rankings told a different story.
From a fan or fantasy football perspective, the usual suspects appeared at the top of the list: Tyreek Hill, Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb. But from a scout perspective, D.J. Moore, Nico Collins and (as we’ll see below) an under-appreciated 49er all made the Top 10.
THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PROJECT:
1) We really care about our fantasy teams: Public perception is heavily tied to fantasy performance and big play appeal rather than the mundane data points used by scouts and GMs. Maybe we should start paying more attention to “Top Coverage Draw Rate” or “EPA per Target/Carry” to see how a player is impacting the game outside of the final stat sheet. Exciting plays are awesome, and should be emphasized, but there’s a lot more that goes into this game that we often don’t recognize.
2) Somebody send this research to Brandon Aiyuk: According to scouting
metrics, Brandon Aiyuk is one of the best wide receivers in the league. He runs sharp routes, gets separation, and isn’t afraid to throw a downfield block.
But according to fans, he’s the 27th best wide receiver in the league, right behind Michael Pittman, Zay Flowers, and Jakobi Meyers.
Is it possible that this perception will affect the size of his contract or his sponsorship opportunities?
3) The role of NFL broadcasters: A constant emphasis on the big play is skewing our perception of what constitutes a good player. Moving forward, how can broadcasters showcase true on-field talent to give a more complete story of the game of football? In other words, how do we properly glamorize the more subtle (yet important) parts of the game?
SHARING THE FINDINGS: Heath presented this research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Long Beach, California and at Elon University’s Spring Undergraduate Research Forum (SURF).
JUGGLING PROJECTS: A week after NCUR, Heath presented research that explored how Formula 1 qualifying times and point systems influence global viewership at the annual conference of the Broadcast Education Association in Las Vegas, Nevada.