I have a variety of NFL datasets that I think might make a good side-project, but I haven't done anything with them just yet.Coming to this site made me think of machine learning algorithms and I wondering how good they might be at either predicting the outcome of football games or even the next play.It seems to me that there would be some trends that could be identified - on 3rd down and 1, a team with a strong running back theoretically should have a tendency to run the ball in that situation.Scoring might be more difficult to predict, but the winning team might be.My question is whether these are good questions to throw at a machine learning algorithm.  It could be that a thousand people have tried it before, but the nature of sports makes it an unreliable topic.
Can machine learning algorithms predict sports scores or plays?
machine learning;sports
There are a lot of good questions about Football (and sports, in general) that would be awesome to throw to an algorithm and see what comes out. The tricky part is to know what to throw to the algorithm.A team with a good RB could just pass on 3rd-and-short just because the opponents would probably expect run, for instance. So, in order to actually produce some worthy results, I'd break the problem in smaller pieces and analyse them statistically while throwing them to the machines!There are a few (good) websites that try to do the same, you should check'em out and use whatever they found to help you out:Football OutsidersAdvanced Football AnalyticsAnd if you truly want to explore Sports Data Analysis, you should definitely check the Sloan Sports Conference videos. There's a lot of them spread on Youtube.