… and bright minds to interpret it. Keeping datasets in a lock box is out of step with the modern world.

by Dean Towers

Arjun Menon is a senior at the University of Michigan majoring in Sports Management with a focus on analytics and a minor in economics. He’s also the owner of one of the best X (Twitter) feeds around. It details hard-to-find football stats, actionable intelligence and angles he programmed himself that bettors and fans use to enjoy the sport.

How did his feed get so popular?

“I’ve always been a football fan, but it got taken to the next level when I learned to code my freshman year of college, and that was only possible because of all the public NFL data available,” Menon said to me via a direct message on “X”.

“If NFL data wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t have taken learning coding that seriously and may not have been where I am now.”

It would be interesting if Menon was a unique case, but he isn’t.

Ben Baldwin and a partner run Rbsdm.com, a completely free site with some mind-blowing handicapping and general interest football statistics, all created with free data. In addition, this same free data has spawned popular websites like The Edge and NFL Player Stat Explorer which are independently owned and created.

Pop onto football betting reddit sometime, and you’ll see these sites — as well as many others like them — referenced over and over again by fans and bettors alike. There is little doubt the explosion of free data has helped enrich not only interest in the sport of football at the micro-level, but has also driven betting handle in the aggregate.

Meanwhile, in horse racing land where data has been protected for eons, we are starting to see some cracks in the armor.

Just this month, Equibase announced they’re offering a free dataset for the entire year of 2023 for the sport of thoroughbred racing. The data giant said in a release that the “potential uses for the data include testing for product development or individual handicapping theories, support for research projects in academia, and enabling sports marketers and organizations outside the industry to see the type of data available for horse racing.”

Equibase also noted this data release is what they’d consider only a “first step” to stimulate interest and innovation.

A second step, I believe, should be harness racing offering everything — every race, every chart line, every piece of past performance data they have in the sports’ history — for free to these same masses.

When we get the data out there it allows the Baldwins and Menons and other sharp programmers to have at it, if they wish. It allows them to create, innovate and potentially drum-up interest in the sport.

Last summer my cottage neighbor, a nice young lad about 13, came over to see me. He was taking a summer course in coding and wondered if I could help him with something.

“Do you know Python?” he asked.

“The snake?” I replied, only half joking.

No, I couldn’t help my young neighbor, but it reminded me that it’s a completely different world. Our pens, papers and highlighters were once the mighty tools of the handicapping trade, but they’re being replaced with R and SQL and Python. I believe it’s time for the sport to sail with the tide, not continue to row against it.