I am an Assistant Professor of Sport Analytics and of Statistics at Rice University. Much of my work involves what team front offices want to know: (a) how to measure individual contributions to team success in team sports and (b) how to squeeze optimal estimates of player talent from limited data. Building on these results, I research what league offices want to know: how teams and players respond to incentives, from a game theoretic perspective. I want to understand how leagues can design these incentives to promote the health of their sport. My favorite tools for these problems tend to come from statistical machine learning (regularized regression, gradient boosting, etc.) although I am also partial to Bayesian models when appropriate (and when the computational cost is reasonable). My favorite sports are baseball, soccer and volleyball.
I completed my PhD in statistics at Stanford University in 2017. From there, I worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers in R&D for five years and then spent one season as an Assistant General Manager with the Houston Astros before joining Rice in 2023. Along the way, I have held multiple-year consulting engagements with the Oakland Athletics (baseball), AZ Alkmaar (soccer) and Zelus Analytics (baseball and soccer).
In the news
2024-02-13 Scott Powers: Major league analyst acing Rice
The Rice Thresher
2023-09-27 What volleyball can tell us about what’s missing in MLB analytics
The Orange County Register
2022-11-11 Astros fire assistant general manager Scott Powers
MLB Trade Rumors
2022-01-03 Dodgers executive leaving for Astros front office is traitorous activity
Dodgers Way