Russell Ries 1:21

Good morning, afternoon, or evening to you wherever you're listening from. It's Saturday, July 18th. I'm Russell Ries, and you are listening to the Nashville Sports Report.

Weekly Recap

Russell Ries 1:44

All right, well, we started this week's show with Tony Husband's call of Nashville SC's game-winning and only goal in their return to action against Atlanta United following the MLS World Cup break. NSC appear to have returned from the break with more injuries than they started, while Sam Surge returned to action, Kristen Espinoza, Reed Baker Whiting, and Warren Madrigal were all held out of the match day squad with lower body injuries, while Andy Najar and Jaisson Palacios started on the bench before subbing on with about 30 minutes left. Fortunately, the somewhat heavily rotated side was able to eke out a win against a motivated Atlanta side. But this was a team who started the match missing both starting fullbacks, one of their starting midfielders in Patrick Yazbeck, a starting center back in Palacios, and Espinoza, one of the league's best wingers. The introduction of Najar around the 60th minute opened up the game, and Nashville's depth was enough to secure all three points, with Shaq Mohammed's 79th minute header proving to be the game winner. And more help is on the way. Earlier in the week, NSC announced the addition of German-born Tunisian World Cup winger Elias Saad. Up until now, Saad has spent his entire career in the German Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2, and he has also started two matches for Tunisia and this year's World Cup. Saad is expected to add additional scoring punch to the left wing position, which has currently been split between Ahmad Kasim and Warren Madrigal. Saad was present at the match last night and is waiting on approval of his visa before he can join the team on the field. On top of the Saad signing, there have been reports that Nashville plan to sign 21-year-old Senegalese midfielder Famara Kamara from Ranheim in the second tier of the Norwegian pyramid. In addition to having an all-time name, Kamara appears to be more of a defensive midfielder, which is a position the coyotes need filled. The Boys in Gold have had a lot of previous success with players from Norway, including Eddie Tagsith, Patrick Asbek, and Maxwell Wolegi. Hopefully Kamara can continue that Norway to Nashville pipeline success. However, the team has yet to eventually announce his signings, so we will have to wait until then to find out. Nashville SC will be back in action at Geodis Park this Wednesday evening when they host CF Montreal at 7.30. This week the Titans announced that they will be inducting Chris Johnson into the team's Ring of Honor during their week one game against the New York Jets. The honor was always justly deserved, but was also made more pressing by Johnson's recent announcement of his ALS diagnosis. It is sure to be an emotional time at Nissan Stadium as the Titans legend is enshrined amongst the franchise's best. Additionally, this week, Netflix released season three of their show Quarterback, which features Titans starting quarterback Cam Ward. The show gives great insight into Ward and his mindset as he navigated a tumultuous rookie season that saw his head coach fired early on, and the team only win three games. Ward comes across as a fiercely competitive, yet blunt, and oftentimes funny individual who has the skill and more importantly the work ethic to become a great QB in the league. The show is a must-watch for any Titans fan who wants to learn more about their team's starting quarterback. Titans rookies will report for training camp this Thursday, July 23rd, with the veteran players joining them the following Tuesday, July 28th. Both the NFL and college football are just around the corner. This week, the Nashville Predators announced their 2026-2027 schedule with a humorous TV-themed announcement video. My personal favorite bit was an HGTV style show that made fun of the Dallas Stars for their plan to move to Plano, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas. The Pred's home opener will be October 1st against the Minnesota Wild. This year, fans will be able to watch locally broadcast Predators games on the spot Nashville 28 using an antenna, cable, or satellite connection. It was also announced this week that longtime Predators assistant GM Jeff Kilte has left the organization to take a similar role with the San Jose Sharks. Finally, the Nashville Sounds are 53 and 41 and still two games behind the Memphis Redbirds for the division lead. They are currently in the middle of a three-game home series against the Norfolk Tides, with games tonight and tomorrow before they head to Sugarland, Texas on Tuesday for a six-game series against the Sugarland Skeeters.

Matthew Sullivan Introduction

Russell Ries 6:12

My guest this week is Matthew Sullivan. Matt is a senior developer at Ativa where I work, but he has also had about two decades worth of experience creating software to make data-driven decisions in fantasy sports and to simulate real-world sports outcomes. I spoke with Matt this week about his love of sports and how his sports-related software has evolved over the past 20 years. I also managed to claim victory over him in a fantasy league, which he did not join. So please enjoy the egg on my face and my conversation with

Matthew Sullivan Interview

Speaker 3 6:42

Matt Sullivan. Okay, well, Matt, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm just going to mention up front, Matt and I worked together at Atiba, have worked on some projects together before, which is how I got to know about some of the work you do with fantasy sports and sports modeling that I think is really cool. Also, one feather in my cap was that this past year I actually beat you in fantasy football, which made me feel really good. Sorry, I just want to get that out of the way now. I know that's not good hosting, but thank you for coming on the show, Matt.

Matthew Sullivan 7:13

I'm a little confused because I didn't actually play fantasy football last year.

Russell Ries 7:17

No, you didn't? No. Oh, well, I won the science. All right. Well, we're gonna keep that in because it shows the fallibility of me as a host. So I have these questions that I like to ask everyone who comes on the show. My kind of gauntlet of questions for people starts with what is your favorite sport to play?

Matthew Sullivan 7:44

When I was a teenager, late teens, my favorite sport to play was beach volleyball. There's Sand Court over at Centennial Park. And I'm old enough that the original Top Gun movie had just come out, and we practiced the high fives that Tom Cruise did in that movie. And my friends and I played two-on-two volleyball that entire summer before my senior year of high school. Still my favorite sport to play.

Russell Ries 8:10

That's pretty awesome. And did you see the new Top Gun and how they made sure to have like another sports montage in there?

Matthew Sullivan 8:16

Yeah, it didn't hit the same. No. I was impressed at how good that Tom Cruise looks at his age, but I don't even really remember much about that scene other than just marveling at what privilege and wealth can can do for a physique.

Russell Ries 8:28

I guess when it's your job to look good, you go all out. Alright, so moving on to what is your favorite sport to watch?

Matthew Sullivan 8:35

On TV, uh my favorite sport to watch is basketball. But in person it's baseball. Just because I typically can't afford good seats for NBA games. In fact, I've never been able to afford good seats for NBA games. But I just love the relaxing feeling of just hanging out at a baseball game, you know, spending time filling out scorecards, that kind of thing.

Russell Ries 8:59

Nice, you've been to uh many sounds games this year?

Matthew Sullivan 9:02

Not this year, but have been to good number of games at the at the new place and lots of games at the old Greer Stadium.

Russell Ries 9:09

Sounds are pretty good. They're still second or third in their division right now. I think they're yeah, just two games back of Memphis at the moment. But I actually have yet to go to the new new ballpark, but I have many fond memories of Greer. Alright, that kind of leads into the next question I have, which is what is your earliest sports memory?

Matthew Sullivan 9:28

That's a tough one. It kind of depends on what you consider sports. I remember watching the old Memphis wrestling with Jerry Lawler on TV as as maybe a kindergartner. And most of my early sports memories are of watching the Braves on TBS and the Cubs on WGN. But as far as playing sports, yeah, I was playing basketball at the boys club, which I don't think exists anymore, but used to be over Thompson Lane, like in a really hard-to-reach place, really steep hill that you would drive down. There were pretty good basketball players in the in the early 80s that played over there. The one all-American for Belmont played in the same look, same league that I did. That's pretty cool.

Russell Ries 10:13

And uh yeah, I remember the TBS WGN double-headed monster of Braves and Cubs, and thinking that was like really normal. It's weird now to look back on that and realize we were just kind of getting spoon-fed other people's local channels, but they were great.

Matthew Sullivan 10:27

I mean, there was a time when most people were either Cubs fans or Braves fans, if if they didn't have a local team.

Russell Ries 10:34

Yeah, it seems like now we're a little bit more overrun with Cardinals fans as well.

Matthew Sullivan 10:39

Yeah, that's happened in the last 15 or 20 years. I've I've noticed that too. People are equally likely to be Cardinals fans or Braves fans, and there's occasionally Reds fans.

Russell Ries 10:50

You know, I had Nancy Schultz from Music City Baseball on a few weeks ago. She's one of the board members behind the National Stars and the push to bring Major League Baseball here. And she feels very confident that probably by the end of the decade there'll at least be an announcement that a team is coming. And it does make me wonder how much conversion we'll have, or if it'll be kind of like sort of like with the predators when they first came and all the all the folks down in Spring Hill who had moved from Detroit, pred wings fans, you know, like preds fans until the wings came to town. I wonder if we'll see a bit of that for maybe the sort of the first generation of the Nashville stars.

Matthew Sullivan 11:24

I would assume that we would. I don't know that there's any city in America where it would be any different, honestly. And I I don't know if you even want me to talk about it, but I I typically think that stadium deals are always bad for the community. But if we did get a baseball team, I would go. You know, so it's one of those things where I'm not sure if it's the the right thing for Nashville economically, but if it did happen, I would support it 100%.

Russell Ries 11:50

Yeah, so Nancy came on the show and I didn't get the impression that they just expected that the you know the city and the state would cough a bunch of money. It sounds like they have given a lot of thought to whichever and whatever way they can to get a stadium in place.

Matthew Sullivan 12:06

I I think the biggest obstacle for sports teams in Nashville right now is just getting to the games and back. I used to go to 25 Cubs games a year, and it was as easy as getting on the L, getting off right at Wrigley Field, you know, watching the game, get back on the train, I'm back at home in an hour and a half, you know, with very little hassle. It's just kind of draining to go to some things in Nashville right now because of the traffic and just the the lack of public options to to get to games.

Russell Ries 12:31

I totally agree. I yeah, I don't want to mess with all that. Okay, how did you end up in Nashville? You mentioned playing high school ball here. Were you born in Nashville?

Matthew Sullivan 12:40

No, I was born in a small town in Illinois. My parents moved to Nashville when I was young. Actually, my dad worked for for Lipscomb High School and University, operated the scoreboard at high school and university basketball games. But grew up here and then moved back to the Chicago Evanston area for grad school.

Russell Ries 13:00

Was it a small town on the outskirts of Chicago or southern Illinois?

Matthew Sullivan 13:05

No, it was over near the Iowa border. I'm actually I'm not even sure what town I was born in because there's several that are really close together there. I know that when we would go back and visit my grandmother, there was only a Dairy Queen. Oh. A walk-up Dairy Queen, not even a drive-thru.

Russell Ries 13:20

Oh wow, okay. I asked because my mother-in-law is from Heron, Illinois, and we recently got to visit a few years ago, and they were the same way. It's like a little square, and they had a place called Made Wright Burgers.

Matthew Sullivan 13:32

Yeah, we weren't even really into Made Wright when we lived there, or even when we would go back to visit my my grandmother, but it became a thing because of Roseanne. There was an episode of the Roseanne show that yeah, that had something to do with those made right sandwiches. The the thing that that we really did like there was there's really, really thick milkshakes. There's a place called Whitey's and one called Country Style. And I think Whitey's actually ships on dry ice nationwide, but it's you know pretty expensive.

Russell Ries 14:03

It's funny. Down in Heron, they're I guess got a big Italian population. So like one of their big sort of I don't want to call it a regional cuisine because it's not, but like fried raviolis was like a big thing down there. And I think they had a a store that would ship them similarly, maybe not on dry ice. Okay, pivoting back to Nashville after that little Illinois interlude, what is your favorite Nashville sports team?

Matthew Sullivan 14:28

Right now, it is the Norman Binkley Elementary Club soccer team who did win their division this year by a very exciting group of fifth grade and underkids.

Russell Ries 14:40

That's awesome. They this is the first time they've made an entry into this list, and congratulations to them.

Matthew Sullivan 14:46

What uh what is the mascot? Oh, the the school mascot is I think it's a blue jay. Okay. Go blue jays. It's a mixed gender team, so girls and boys on the field together. A lot of fun. Good parents, you know, supporting their kids who are pretty good, to be honest. Uh, much better than than I've ever been in my life, and we're talking about pretty small kids. So it's it's impressive to see how well they're able to play that game.

Russell Ries 15:11

That is cool. Really cool that they won the division. Congratulations again to them. Okay, well, this may tie into that, but what is your favorite Nashville sports memory or moment?

Matthew Sullivan 15:22

I wasn't in Nashville for the Music City Miracle, but we did my wife and I did move back to Nashville, uh, sometime around 2005, and I used to have Titans season tickets, and I won their season ticket holder fantasy league, and the the prize for that was four box seats in a suite to see a Texans game, and they let me take my my friends out on the field before the game, and you know, Titans players were tossing the ball back and forth with us, so that was pretty cool.

Russell Ries 15:51

That does sound really cool.

Matthew Sullivan 15:53

Yeah, I I got assigned football, but uh uh we moved a few years ago, and uh, I don't know if the football made it through the move. Haven't found it yet.

Russell Ries 16:01

What year would this have been?

Matthew Sullivan 16:03

About? I'm gonna guess 2014, 2015, somewhere in there.

Russell Ries 16:08

Cool. Yeah, and did you get like the little placard or whatever you hang around your neck, field pass, all that kind of stuff.

Matthew Sullivan 16:15

Well, it's not like we were the only ones on the field. Uh there were there were many of us that day. I'm not sure what everyone else was there for. They're probably much more important people than me. But yeah, uh uh one of the Titan staff members came to to greet us at the stadium and then took us down the elevator. We did get stopped by security a couple times. I I think it would be great when the new stadium opens up just to give people tours of the inside of the stadium because that was it was fascinating just walking through that part of of the facility that most people don't ever see. Probably enjoyed that actually more than being on the field, to be honest. Yeah. No, I I if I if I got a lanyard that day, I didn't retain it. You know, call me cocky, but I figured that was the first time of many times I would win their fantasy league.

Russell Ries 17:02

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see that. Love to see that at the new stadium. That reminded me of when I was in Boy Scouts back when they were opening the arena, they did what they called the great flush-off. The whole thing was to test the water system, and they literally got five hundred people or something, and everybody lushed a toilet at the same time just to see if the water system could handle it.

Matthew Sullivan 17:23

Do you think that's just symbolic? Because surely by that point they know whether it's gonna work or not, right?

Russell Ries 17:28

Well, I mean maybe.

Matthew Sullivan 17:31

Like what if what if it doesn't?

Russell Ries 17:35

Got a bunch of Boy Scouts getting flooded out in the new arena. Maybe it was just similar. I don't know. I they had t-shirts and everything, and I I didn't actually get to go that day. I I was sick or I was doing something else, and uh I always wished I had a a great flush-off t-shirt. Okay, no way to pivot from that. So I'm just gonna go into my next question. And this is specific to you. It doesn't have to be who you think it should, you know, like, but who is on your Mount Rushmore of Nashville sports?

Matthew Sullivan 18:03

Well, I'm glad you could you said that could be specific to me because mine is really, really specific. Like I said earlier, my dad operated the scoreboard at Lipscomb basketball games. And when I was young, I got to go to the women's team games, which always took place before the men's, but my bedtime was was early enough that I had to go home before the men played. So the best women's basketball player that that I saw growing up was Amy Fuller. She was missed basketball two years in a row. I think the first two years they actually had that award in the TAASAA. And then she went on to play for Virginia and then came back and transferred back to Lipskin. So she would be on it, and then Philip Hutchison, John Pierce. Philip Hutchison held the college record for most career points scored in basketball. And then four years later, John Pierce beat his record. So within the space of four years, two different Lipscomb basketball centers held that scoring record for college basketball. College basketball meaning NAIA. At that point, Lipscomb wasn't NCAA yet. So those two guys would be on my amount, Rushmore, and then Don Meyer, who was the Lipscomb coach at the time, who was the at one point the winningest coach in basketball history. I think Bobby Knight passed him eventually.

Russell Ries 19:24

Wow.

Matthew Sullivan 19:24

I don't know. Again, very specific to me, but no, that's great.

Russell Ries 19:28

That's exactly what I want. I feel like I've just learned quite a bit. I didn't know about pretty much any of that. I mean, uh a little bit, but like that that we had back-to-back scoring champions gracing Nashville. It's pretty amazing stuff.

Matthew Sullivan 19:40

Yeah, and uh Don Meyer was one of the most respected coaches in in America for a long time. One of my clients is actually a college basketball coach. I've built an app with her. She she knew Don Meyer really well. So yeah, old school coaches all know who Don Meyer is.

Russell Ries 19:56

That's really cool. I feel like I remember sort of the tail end of his career just as a sports fan in the late 90s, but maybe I'm making that up in my head. Or maybe I'm thinking of Rick Bird. I don't know. Don't mean to do that to a Libskom fan, but I don't remember when Don left.

Matthew Sullivan 20:14

I know it was because the administration of the school wanted to move to Division I. And it's not that he was opposed to that, but he had recruited a whole group of players under the promise of playing in a different division. And obviously, when you move up a division, you're not going to be very competitive at first. So I know that Coach Meyer felt it was unfair to that group of kids that he had recruited to basically sentence them to four years of losing teams.

Russell Ries 20:39

And what a testament to his character. I feel like that is antithetical to a lot of what you hear about the ruthless nature of sports and like, oh, we gotta get better players and yada yada. I really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 20:52

Uh yeah, Buster Olney wrote a book about him. Worth reading if you get a chance.

Russell Ries 20:56

Oh, okay, yeah. Definitely check that out. Okay, so moving on from that, do you have any Nashville sports hot takes or conspiracy theories that you want to get off your chest?

Matthew Sullivan 21:08

No conspiracy theories, but my hot take is it's hard to root for a team, even if the players on the field are good, if the front office is subpar. And it's been hard for me to be a Titans fan knowing that they were the only team in the NFL that didn't have a full-time analyst position until 2021. They were the last team in the NFL to actually start working with data, and it only happened five years ago.

Russell Ries 21:35

That that is pretty wild. I do think, in fairness to the Titans, that they're catching up. They're modernizing. I think Mike Burgonzi is doing a lot of work in those spaces. In fact, I would say the same with the predators. You know, Chris McFarlane just came in as the new GM there, and I didn't realize that the Pred's analytics crew was so understaffed, but apparently it was like one or two people. You know, that's just not going to cut the mustard. So I I take your point there. I I do I feel hopeful. Maybe it's the Homerism in me, but I feel hopeful about both those teams now and their front offices, the brain trusts running them.

Matthew Sullivan 22:12

I don't think it's a coincidence that you know that we finally won, you know, after bringing in the OIP team. I'm not so naive as to think that just because you have an analytics department that suddenly you're gonna be a contender. Baseball now, everybody has one, so that that playing field is is pretty level at this point. But it does raise the floor, and the floor for the Titans has been pretty low in the past few years.

Russell Ries 22:38

Yes, indeed it has. And you know, again, there's sort of this competitive thing and the nature of things, you would think that anyone that's professionally trying to win games would want to pursue every avenue that could give them any sort of advantage, or even in the case of the Titans, put them on a level playing field with their competitors.

Matthew Sullivan 22:58

Yeah, I've I've heard they've made great strides. I think they were by their peers voted second most improved analytics department in the NFL. That's a pretty obscure title, but you know, it does speak to your point. It seems like they're they're correcting that course now.

Russell Ries 23:13

I'm glad for that. And I didn't know that. That's cool that they got uh voted that, though. That's that's good. Okay, my final question for everyone is not a sports question. It is what is your favorite restaurant in Nashville?

Matthew Sullivan 23:27

I've spent the most money at Baja Burrito, which is a fantastic place to eat. Great people work there. I think the one of the best meals I've had in my life was at Kisser a few weeks ago, Japanese restaurant. I just can't wait to go again. In fact, it it made me want to take cooking classes. Not that I could ever reach the the level of of the chefs there, but I I just couldn't believe how good a meal could be. I mean, it didn't cost an arm and a leg, so I'm a big fan.

Russell Ries 23:55

Kisser, that's a great answer. And Baja burrito as well. What's your uh go-to Baja order?

Matthew Sullivan 24:01

It varies, but usually a burrito on Chipotle with either the Tempico pork or the grilled salmon. And I I like the spicy sauces.

Russell Ries 24:11

Nice. Yeah, I like that Tempico pork as well. Talking about Kisser, my wife and I recently met some friends at the new Chinatown out in Antioch, which at the moment is just like a really incredible grocery store. If and when you start taking those cooking lessons, you can go get any kind of rice. Any I mean, they got multiple styles of soy sauces and uh just anything you anything you could think of. It it's a really cool spot if you haven't checked it out yet.

Matthew Sullivan 24:37

That's one of the great things about Nashville is I think maybe less than a mile and a half from me, I can get to a Korean grocery store, an Indian grocery store, and I can get to a Mexican grocery store. So I've got all kinds of spices, all kinds of things available to me that just would have been hard or impossible to get in Nashville when I was growing up.

Russell Ries 25:00

Yeah, totally. I feel like the one thing that we're kind of still missing on the food scene, at least for me, I would like to have just sort of like authentic northern Chinese food, the kind of thing you can get down in Atlanta on like Old Buford Highway at Masterpiece or at North China Eatery or some of these places. I'm gonna make myself too hungry talking about it, but I I do wish we had a little bit more of that. But I do think also we're on the come up.

Matthew Sullivan 25:24

Yeah, it's wild to see Nashville as the destination for foodies now. I never thought that that would happen when I grew up here.

Russell Ries 25:31

Yeah, it is wild. I used to do a little cooking and I worked at Flight back when it was like one of the few kind of fine dining places in town. But to think of sort of what the scene looked like then compared to now is just kind of crazy to think about. Moving right along then, I mentioned it earlier. Turns out I did not beat you in fantasy football last year because you were not in the fantasy football league. And the year before that, I believe you convincingly beat me. So we'll we'll leave that aside. But you have done some really interesting and cool stuff with fantasy sports and with data modeling around sports, and I wanted to kind of dive into that with you because I just think it's really neat to hear about. But I want to start with sort of how did you initially get into fantasy sports, or did you get into the data side first, or sort of what brought you to that?

Matthew Sullivan 26:22

Well, I went to grad school at Northwestern. I was in grad school for a PhD program in English, and while I was there, I worked with a professor named Martin Mueller, who had this wild idea that Shakespeare had actually plagiarized his own earlier plays because he had a financial stake in in the theater company. So the quicker he could pump plays out, like he directly stood to benefit from that, because new plays would typically mean you know, more paying customers. So we did like an early form of text mining on Shakespeare's place to find passages that look to have been rewritten from earlier plays. I wasn't even sure I believed it at the time, but it turns out that that he was on to something. But while I was there, I I realized that I I enjoyed the the data part of what we were doing more than I actually enjoyed the text itself, and decided to shift my career from that PhD in English to to working in tech. So I I started building models somewhere around the early 2000s. And when that became something I did with sports, it would have been 2005-2006, which was the first time I played fantasy football. Once I figured out how it worked, I was hooked, started building spreadsheets with macros that could calculate player values on the fly during a draft. I started doing auction drafts really early on. And uh every time a player would get bid on, I would update my spreadsheet to see if that player was in the optimal configuration of players available at my current budget. I've been working with fantasy drafts and even in in season management and technology for around 20 years at this point.

Russell Ries 28:05

Okay, I I gotta go back to the fact that Shakespeare plagiarizing himself is what led you into fantasy football in a roundabout way, which I love, and that's so cool that that paid out. And that Martin Mueller, you said the professor's name, that that he was on.

Matthew Sullivan 28:21

Are you gonna back check me now?

Russell Ries 28:23

No, I just want to learn more about it. I might try and find like a link to his work. That's really cool stuff to me. Like that we can use analytics and data to prove that Shakespeare was plagiarizing himself in order to get more work pumped out. That that's I think incredibly cool. So you said it started around 2005 or six. Do you have any early sort of favorites from that era, like fantasy guys? I know LaDainian Tomlinson was huge then, and there was Peyton Hillis for a few years there. Were there any early ones that you finally remember kind of like hitting on?

Matthew Sullivan 28:55

Yeah, it's it's funny that you said Tomlinson because that was my first thought. Probably one of the others that's maybe a little bit more obscure is Marcus Colston, who was classified as a tight end, I think, for the Saints, but you know, was actually one of the leading wide receivers, his at least his breakout year. So I think a lot of people won fantasy leagues that year because they could put one of the best wide receivers in the league in their tight end slot. Yeah, I remember that pretty fondly.

Russell Ries 29:20

Man, that's remembering some guys right there. Marcus Colston, great call out. When you started creating these spreadsheets and building out these macros, what's the thought process there early on to sort of start breaking down positional value or finding your optimal price in a draft?

Matthew Sullivan 29:36

It's easier in football because in in football, uh, you don't typically have categories like you do in in roto baseball, or a lot of people play categories with basketball, but fantasy football is almost always points leaks. So positional value, that's really the main question that you're trying to solve at that point. And there's a you know well-documented concept of value-based drafting on the internet. But uh quarterbacks score points, running backs score points, wide receivers score points. Quarterbacks typically score more points than anybody else. Most good fantasy players take them near the end of a draft, unless you can get someone like Josh Allen without overpaying. And value-based drafting just you find the number of teams that are in the league. Say if there's 10 teams in the league, you find the player with the 10th ranked projections, and that's your your floor. You know, in my spreadsheets, that person would have been a zero, and then the the top ranked quarterback would have been just the difference in points. So that kind of levels up the playing field, and it makes it pretty easy to compare apples to apples. You know, how much more valuable is this running back than this quarterback?

Russell Ries 30:46

Here you break it down like that, it makes total sense, but I don't think I would have arrived at that. Like I kind of know, all right, there are fewer running backs, so I probably try and take if I can get a workhorse early, I'll do that. Or, you know, if I can get a high scoring receiver and then yeah, quarterbacks, depending, but to turn it into numbers and into points is very smart.

Matthew Sullivan 31:06

So have you it feels like that's the only way to do it to me, Russell. So it like it it blows my mind sometimes, and and I'm not I'm not like denigrating you. No, no, denigrate away. But like I'll sometimes see people ask questions online like, if I use these scoring settings in my league, how is that going to skew things? And I'm like, haven't you run the numbers yourself? I just assume that people do that. And it looks like a lot of people just, you know, have ranking sheets or you know, just have like this, like you said, just a general idea of you here here are the players I'm gonna target. I don't think that that's the way that you do a fantasy draft. I think you just react to whatever value is available, you know, when it's your turn to pick. Or I prefer auction drafts. So is this player worth one dollar more, or should I have a completely different configuration of players that doesn't include this player at a dollar more?

Russell Ries 31:58

I mean, I'll be honest. I for me it's it's a little bit of the general plan of like knowing where you are in the draft. I'm mainly snake drafts. I'm not, I I do like one or two leagues a year, and I'm not crazy with it because I think my wife would kill me. But I kind of have a general idea of the first two rounds, but then a lot of it for me is is emotional. It's like, do I want to cheer for or against a particular player? Like I will oftentimes pick players from the Titans division because then that kind of offsets some of the pain of them doing well against the Titans. It's like, oh, okay, well, Brian Thomas scored a touchdown, but at least my fantasy team's doing better for it. And then, you know, towards the end, I'm trying to take a few flyers on lots of times Titans players that I think might hit or whatever it might be. But yeah, I I I imagine that a lot of people are more leaning towards my approach than yours. Just have a little bit of a hunch here or there and have a general idea. And then ESPN puts out their rankings or whoever puts out their rankings. And I think a lot of people will default to that. I wasn't able to attend one of my two drafts last year, and so I just I let it auto draft. And I think I probably ended up having a better draft with the auto draft than I would have on my own. And that was sort of following kind of more your approach is like what do the numbers say? What what dictates based on rankings and whatnot? But yeah, I think for a lot of people it's more vibes-based than data driven, but maybe that's just me.

Matthew Sullivan 33:20

I think some people think my approach isn't fun, but I enjoy it so much more than if I were just winging it. You know, I I think some people do like to do what you're what you're saying, and you know, just pick players that you enjoy watching, you know, don't overprepare, react in the moment, that kind of thing. And that's that's cool. But I get a great deal of enjoyment and gratification from building the system that you know produces the best results. That to me brings a great deal of joy.

Russell Ries 33:47

Dude, I totally understand that as well. And so I used to be in a dynasty individual defensive player, like the whole, you know, the whole thing. And I remember during the offseasons, I would try and build out some data on my team, other teams, identify needs of people and sort of plan out my draft that way. And creating that, I ended up with pages on each team. And there was real enjoyment in that for me and a sense of pride to have hold out data, pulled out information that I could utilize to get a leg up. So I totally understand the joy of building it and generating your own data and then being able to utilize it effectively. Like I I can totally understand that. So, having built out all these things and being involved in creating data around this stuff for the last 20 years, have you noticed any sort of trends or any changes in the way fantasy works or how people approach fantasy? Are there any things that you're seeing now that you didn't see when you first started doing this?

Matthew Sullivan 34:52

I think most players are generally smarter now. Lots of players use you know paid subscription sources. So again, fantasy football, like football guys, is one that I used to use a few years ago. Uh really good content there. There's kind of like universally known best practices at this point that 20 years ago we didn't all share. Just small things like if there's a Thursday night game in the NFL, then if you're gonna play one of those players, don't put them in your flex slot because you know, when Monday night comes around, if someone gets unexpectedly injured, you want to have the most freedom possible to take someone off the free agent pool and put them in that slot. You don't see other players taking quarterbacks early as often or defenses as often. Just the internet and the you know, Reddit has made it easier, I think, for for people to share information about strategies that work and strategies that are suboptimal.

Russell Ries 35:47

Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't know it was called streaming at the time, but I remember kind of being early to streaming defenses and kickers and just thinking like, I'll just pick up whoever matchup based. And then a few years ago that started seeing that term, and it's like, no, darn it, everybody's doing it now.

Matthew Sullivan 36:04

That's actually what I'm doing right now, is I'm drafting at least 25 teams and drafting the worst possible teams that I can. I've I've actually written code that takes the the players with the lowest projected points in the SPM. And I'm just filling my rosters with them because I'm just gonna stream every position all year. I don't think that that's going to be a winning strategy, but next year it'll give a baseline so that if you want to punt an entire position during your draft, you know about what you can expect if you just stream that position all year. Instead of you know drafting a tight end, let's say in the fifth round, you can draft another running back just with an idea of if I just pick up whoever I want every week, I'm probably gonna score 120 points or something like that.

Russell Ries 36:48

That is interesting. So I take it that you run a number of experiments each each season, each year that it comes around. Is that sort of to continue to build out your data sets?

Matthew Sullivan 36:59

Yeah, when when I was most involved in fantasy sports about 10 years ago, I would usually have 75 teams either in baseball or football or basketball. And 25 of those teams would be built to win, and 50 of those teams would be built to try out different strategies or to establish those baselines I was just talking about. So I would have 25 baseball teams where I just streamed the hitters every day so that I knew the next year, if I wanted to stream a catcher instead of spending for a catcher, I could expect a certain amount of production. So that's that worked really well. The post to win usually did really well. And even you know, lots of those 50 teams would finish pretty high, but they were the ones that gave me the ammunition for next year. So it was kind of like the cycle, you know, train with the two-thirds of the team so that you can win with the other third.

Russell Ries 37:50

So in a sense, you actually had a fantasy farm system where you were kind of kind of developing your future teams. That's very interesting. You mentioned fantasy baseball, and you told me once previously about some of your exploits and accomplishments with fantasy baseball. Would you mind sort of running down some of that?

Matthew Sullivan 38:09

Yeah. So, like you said, playing fantasy sports does take up a good amount of time, especially if you you start doing research and you want to take it seriously. So I went from using Excel spreadsheets to draft teams to to writing Python scripts to actually do the drafts. So that involves reverse engineering the ESPN API. And I could then just hook my team up and let it draft in in the way that I was describing earlier, it would be constantly recalculating values that it would unemotionally draft the best team available, either with the draft slot that I had or with the budget that I had in auction drafts. And then if you if you've got that many teams during the season, obviously that would be a full-time job just to set the lineup every day. So I've built bots that would set the starting lineup and actually add and draw players every day based on matchups, particularly important in baseball. The ESPN standard league rules at the time really encouraged streaming that you're just talking about. There was a limit on the number of pitchers you could start in a season. There was no limit in the number of hitters that you could fill, and no limit on the number of innings your pitchers pitched. So I would try to hit 200 starts. My algorithm would hit 200 starts with the pitchers, and I I would pick up starting pitchers off the waiver wire that just had really good matchups. Playing in, you know, pitchers' parks, playing against poor-hitting teams, and fill up the the other pitching slots with either closers or middle relievers to get saves or to help my ERA and whip ratios. I typically did not touch those teams. All I did was set up the code that drafted and managed the teams. And in 2016, the SPN used to publish leaderboards for the worldwide teams in a category. And in Roto Baseball in 2016, I finished first, also in 2017. In 2016, I actually had seven of the top 10 teams and 15 of the top 35 on their worldwide leaderboard. And it was all done by bots that were just, again, unemotionally picking the players with the best matchups on a given day and holding on to a pretty small core of players that shouldn't be dropped. And the the number of players that are actually good enough in ESPN standard baseball rules to hold on to all season is surprisingly small. It's maybe a pool of maybe 40 players. Oh wow.

Russell Ries 40:37

So did you see a lot of variance in those teams, or was it a lot of like the same roster with a few tweaks on the edges?

Matthew Sullivan 40:43

I would end up with a lot of the same players. Uh that's one of the reasons I really like to do auction drafts. You know, in the great Mike Trout years, I would bid a third more of my budget on Mike Trout. And then when I say I, I mean the machine would calculate the projected value of all the players and would spend a huge amount of money on Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw in his best years would would get a huge chunk of the pitching budget. So I would end up with some very similar teams, not always identical, but I I would normally end up with a lot of the same players. And ESPN doesn't actually have a live chat anymore in their draft rooms, probably because of the toxic conversations that used to take place there. I would always laugh when people would tell me that I was doing it wrong and that I was going to finish last. Because I I knew that spending most of my money on a handful of players was actually the best strategy. In some cases, I would spend all of my budget on five players.

Russell Ries 41:39

So is a Shohei Otani sort of that that guy now?

Matthew Sullivan 41:43

Yeah. In in ESPN, he's eligible in both, he's one player who scores in both hitting and pitching. I think in Yahoo, they actually split him out into two different players.

Russell Ries 41:54

Oh, wow.

Matthew Sullivan 41:55

So there's I I'm not sure about that. I haven't played Yahoo in a while, but I I think that they had decided to have a Shohei hitter and a Shohei pitcher. He actually makes it hard to calculate value because he's so different, but he's one of those that you could easily just spend a third of your budget on him because he's going to help you out in a nine out of the ten normal categories.

Russell Ries 42:17

We're moving rapidly into fantasy football draft season. You mentioned drafting some teams already, and I think particularly once training camp starts kicking off, we'll see a lot of that. Do you have any advice or any thoughts about what people should be looking for heading into the NFL fantasy season?

Matthew Sullivan 42:35

I mentioned I spend a good amount of time on Reddit. And like a lot of other people, I open up the threads on who you're going to draft this year with the number one pick. Is it Bijan Robinson or is it Gibbs? I think those are fun articles to read, or you know, reading articles about potential breakout candidates. Because at the end of the day, none of us are scouts. Um, none of us know you know what the target share is going to look like for the receiving core on a team, or whether the running backs are going to be a committee or not. Like we don't know. I tend to read those articles just for fun, but when it actually comes time to draft, like I said, it's a dispassionate kind of process. And I like to take the best projections I have available and just take the best players available when it's my turn to draft. It sounds simple, but there's just so much randomness to football. For the reasons I was talking about, there's only 17 regular season games, and most leagues, you know, only do 16. Players can have bad days, and it affects you a whole lot more in football than it does in a sport like baseball, where there's 162 games of the season. So I I think a big part of it is just like not overanalyzing it. You know, use the information that you have to do the best job you can drafting and then you know taking care of that team during the season. But no nobody has a crystal ball with football. So, given that, how do you approach rookies? That's really tough. Uh I I'm actually building a Simulator right now that I'm in the middle stages of it. And the hardest thing to do is to project carries for someone like Jeremiah Love on the Cardinals. I have no idea. You know, ESPN's really bullish on him. Most people online think that he's going to get get a ton of carries. Very talented college player. He's going to a Cardinals team that had a pretty bad offensive line last year that currently rosters maybe four running backs. I expect that he'll get the majority of those carries, but I don't know because we've never seen him play in the NFL before. And we've seen really good college running backs not do well in the NFL before. But I'm definitely not going to reach for rookies. I would prefer to at least have a season of track record uh see how a player's going to get used and you know how often he's going to be on the field.

Russell Ries 44:52

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I I I kind of asked that because you mentioned the simulator you're working on. You shared access with me to that, and uh I've really been enjoying and simulating seasons and then checking out what's happening with the Titans. And I like that the simulator feels like the Titans should at least double their win total, but I have noticed that it is not particularly high on Carnell Tate, who I am. I'm a big believer already.

Matthew Sullivan 45:17

So that's actually a bug that I'm working on right now. Creating a an FL simulator is is super complex. Like right now, I think there's more than 60 individual predictive models that predict everything from you know, is this event going to to be a play from scrimmage or is a coach going to call a timeout? If it is a play from scrimmage, what's the formation gonna be? You know, what's the personnel package? Is it gonna be a run or a pass? You know, are they gonna be in hurry up or not? One of the things I think that's affecting Carnell Tate right now is that it's getting the the the simulator is placing him on the field with the right frequency. I think most depth charts has him have him as wide receiver one for the Titans, but it's not projecting his target share correctly. So it doesn't have and when I say correctly, I'm just assuming he'll get a target share that's typical of a of a first wide receiver. Yeah, that's that's something that that I'm going in and correcting right now. But I'm pretty pretty high on the Titans passing game this year too. I feel like they've got three viable wide receivers now and pretty good tight end as well.

Russell Ries 46:29

Yeah, I I'm right there with you, and I'm very excited to have Dable like running the show, and obviously Cam, I think it's it's exciting to feel like we have sort of a potentially competent offense going in. Because I'll be honest, I my longtime coping mechanism with the Titans is that I would just mute the game and put Yakity Sacks on loot. And I mean, literally, like it was it's the only way to make the hurt stop. You just which coincidentally was written and recorded in Nashville. So it is a uniquely Nashville song. I know it's associated with Benny Hill, but that has kind of like I those are the lows that I think we all have sort of experienced as Titans fans in one way or the other. And uh maybe that's why I'm so bullish on Tate. But I I love that pick. I love that they went after him. I do want to ask some more about the simulator because it's been so cool for me to play with. It's literally simulating out games. You can, once it runs, you can look in an individual game, you can see play by play, you can see stats, you can see season stats, you have the ability to look at the aggregate. And you've got some really cool blog posts on there talking about some of the things, some of the ways you drive decisions about like personnel packages or who's starting the games. And I think those are really neat things to get a peek under the hood at. Are you planning to do more sort of posts like that?

Matthew Sullivan 47:56

Or I do plan to do posts like that. Those actually aren't even really public at this point. That that site is is actually up on the internet, but it's it's not being crawled by Google. I intentionally kind of have it dark right now. I'm a longtime subscriber to to baseball prospectus and to fangraphs, which are websites you know devoted to baseball analytics that write really nerdy articles, I think, in I I mean nerdy in the best possible way. And I've just I've loved building this play-by-play NFL simulator just because of all the things I've learned along the way that that weren't obvious to me. It's answering questions for me like if a quarterback that was in a pass heavy offense gets traded or you know moves to a different team as a free agent, is that team going to be pass heavy with the new quarterback, or does the quarterback adjust to a run heavy offensive system if that's where he ends up? And the answer is he's gonna keep throwing the ball. And I didn't realize that before building the simulator. And it makes sense. A team's not gonna bring in a quarterback if it's not a good fit for their system. But you know, quarterbacks' passing rate is is sticky, like it it moves with him across teams. I think Aaron Rodgers is a pretty good example of that. Yeah, I've I've learned things like if you listen to the games, if you're not playing Yakity Sacks and drowning out the announcers, you sometimes hear the announcers criticize certain coaches for for when they call timeouts or when they don't call timeouts. But it turns out there's really not much difference between head coaches and when they call timeouts. It's almost deterministic. They they almost always call them at the same exact points in the game. It's just that someone like Andy Reid doesn't see those situations as often as as some other coaches do, just because his team is either you know, some teams are either up big and don't need to call timeouts at the same time as other teams, or teams play a lot of close games and and end up calling more timeouts. But that again, that's almost completely determined by the situation. Coaches don't vary very much there.

Russell Ries 50:04

Yeah, I know that you hear about people who manage the situations now, like each team will have a guy who says, uh, we go for two or we go for one, and and when to call timeouts. And it does seem like there's sort of a lot of established math behind it. Is that fair to say?

Matthew Sullivan 50:19

Yeah, it warms my heart to see the Lions you know going for it on fourth down almost all the time because the numbers have said that's the right move for a long time. And even the the announcers on TV are going with it. And yeah, I I obviously haven't worked for a football team, but there does seem to be that kind of uniformity. It's not we're not there yet, but it's coming. You know, the Titans famously punted on fourth and two in a tight game a few years ago and got skewered for it. I don't think they would do that anymore.

Russell Ries 50:49

Did you ever read Greg Easterbrook Monday morning quarterback column on ESPN back in the day? Not frequently. I I I've seen it once or twice. He bang the drum on the fourth down, go for it, and he would highlight there was a guy who was a high school coach in Arkansas, and they would always go for it on fourth, and they would always onside kick. They had like six or seven different onside kicks. And I think the team won the state championship like three or four times in a row. It went undefeated. Like it just and he would always be like, yeah, they're doing it again, they're still doing it. This is what it should be. And it is interesting because, yeah, people are finally coming around on that. But it there's so much conservatism in play calling or in in these things that you know, then you get somebody like Sean McVay come out with the 13 package or whatever, and now everybody's gonna do a bunch of tight ends or or whatever it is, who's just like, oh, that worked for you. Okay, let's all do that. And so I think we're still a lot of copycat, but the first time a team wins, wins it all. But having sort of gone for it a lot on fourth down, I think we'll see that C change. So the website, do you want to give out the name or are you waiting a little bit before you kind of go live?

Matthew Sullivan 51:59

Yeah, the site's not actually live yet. Okay. But it'll be uh 75teams.com.

Russell Ries 52:05

And do you have a target date for going live or still just building it out?

Matthew Sullivan 52:09

I would love for it to be up by the beginning of the season or even a month before the season, but I want to get the simulator right first. Really, I'm targeting basketball season because I've I've got most of those projections already in place. But I'm actually in such a good spot to to be ready for the NBA season that if I can push and get things ready for for the NFL season in time, I I would love to make it available to people. Again, like I'm just I'm just more concerned with with having good projections coming out of the simulation than than rushing it out there. Long term. Where I want to go with the site is the ability to simulate games with players from different eras. So to put together either for the NFL or the NBA, like a team with Michael Jordan and Steph Curry and play against, you know, Shaq and Magic Johnson. Or for the NFL, for people like me that want to go really granular, Mike Webster is the center of your team with Tom Brady quarterbacking and you know Tony Dorsett playing running back. That's that's where I want to get. It's there's a a lot of work, and that partly means like piecing together play by play for lots of NFL games for which we don't have play-by-play. The detailed play-by-play stats don't go back very far in the NFL. We're only talking in about 10 years.

Russell Ries 53:28

Another thing that I've noticed, and I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it looks like you've got some extensions on the website for working with fantasy drafts. Like you can actually hook up your ESPN team and have it run.

Matthew Sullivan 53:40

Yeah, I was talking about earlier. I used to use Python scripts to draft my teams, and I I've built a Chrome extension that if you're logged in to the site, on the website you can just set up the kind of draft that you want to have. Say you want to make sure that you draft three running backs before you draft a quarterback, or you want to make sure that you fill out your your flex and your wide receivers, your running backs before you draft a tight end and a quarterback. However, you want to set it up, and there are some presets. You can just join the draft and turn on the full self-drafting mode, and it'll draft the the best team for you based on the projections that you use.

Russell Ries 54:19

That's really cool. And it's got me excited about fantasy coming around. Will users be able to do that for NBA fantasy as well, or is it just a football?

Matthew Sullivan 54:28

No, it's it will be NBA as well. Like I said, that's really been my focus. You asked me earlier if my favorite sport to watch is, and it is basketball. So if I can get football done in time, I will, but basketball for sure.

Russell Ries 54:41

That's so cool. Well, Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to me about this and letting me view the simulator and check it all out in advance. I think it's a really cool thing you're building. I think that a lot of people will really get a kick out of it, and it could be very useful for folks to dominate some leagues either this season or in the future. Let me know whenever you do go live. I'll make sure to let everybody who's listening know. Anyways, uh any final thoughts before we say goodbye?

Matthew Sullivan 55:10

No, just thanks for having me. I think what you're doing is really cool. Specifically just talking about Nashville sports. Yeah, there are so many fascinating stories that you're gonna uncover as you keep doing this. Like I've I've enjoyed listening to your podcast already, and I'm looking forward to to hearing what you do in the future.

Russell Ries 55:28

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do in the future as well.

Outro

Russell Ries 55:33

All right, well, that was my conversation with Matthew Sullivan. My thanks again to Matt for coming on. I think I'd really like to have him back to uh run the model and preview some MBA when the time is right. A reminder that we can be reached on social media at NSH Sports Report on Twitter and Blue Sky. There's also a link in the description if you'd like to reach out to us that way. We'd love to hear from you. I will also be including a number of links that were referenced or possibly mentioned during today's show down in the description. So check those out. We hope everybody has a wonderful weekend. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next week.