Steal my (frisbee) ideas!

Projects I'd like to see worked on

Economist James Bailey (yes, that James Bailey) has a page of questions he's interested in researching further but doesn't have the time and resources to work on himself. He invites readers to steal his paper ideas.

I thought it might be nice to do the same. Here are some frisbee (and general fitness/training) questions and ideas that intrigue me but I might never get around to writing about.

Some would take a lot of data gathering. Some would take a lot of research that I'm not sure I'm ready to spend the time on. Some are open-ended questions that may have no answer.

Some may be answered already and I just haven't found those answers. If so, please share a link and I'll update the page! If you have ideas of your own, feel free to comment below or post them elsewhere!

This page may not be as "well-written" as I try to make some of my other articles. These are half-finished thoughts, sorted into a few rough categories:

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On-field/strategy/data analysis

Timeouts (#1): Does calling a timeout to substitute in the O-line result in a higher scoring percentage (In the USA semi-pro leagues)? Watching the PUL/WUL I see so many times the offense is subbed on and then turns it over. I'm curious what the stats say.

Timeouts (#2): Does calling a timeout to change the momentum actually work? There's been some inconclusive research into this in the NBA as well. Both of these questions come from my comment on this post:

Using Timeouts Effectively

Disc golf form: In my very elementary knowledge of disc golf, I've gotten the impression that they have a different throwing form (throwing motion) than in ultimate frisbee. Is there a scientifically sound reason for this, or is it just two different cultures that have their two different myths?

From a physics perspective, all that matters to the disc's flight path should be its position, momentum, and the forces being applied to it at the instant of release. So I'd think everything before that is irrelevant. (Perhaps it's all about needing to throw around a defender?)

(Note that by throwing form, I'm not talking about release angles which are obviously different based on the disc's characteristics & intended flight path)

Hammers: Are teams aggressive enough throwing over-the-top throws—what does the data say? What is the right balance between riskier throws and forcing the defense to not over-commit to one side of the field?

Double teams: Are double-teams actually effective in the AUDL—what does the data say?

Gender difference in point blocks? My intuition watching lots of frisbee has been that there's more handblocks/footblocks in women's games. Can any data tell us whether this is true, and if so any theories why it might be the case?

Value of pulls: How much does it benefit a team to have better pulls (note that better doesn't only mean "longer")? I've written about pulls here, and there are some links to other discussion in that article, but I'm not satisfied with the answers. What methods would we use to isolate the effect of "team A pulls better than team B", when it's correlated with "team A is generally better at frisbee than team B"? And how does the importance of pulls change at different levels of frisbee?

Where's our revolution? We've seen a number of data-driven 'revolutions' in major sports over the years — football teams going for it on fourth down much more often, basketball teams shooting three-pointers, baseball teams using drastic shifts on defense. What is the frisbee equivalent of this?

(One thought — many of these examples involve 'edges', in a sense — 4th down being an edge case before a turnover in football, the 3-point line being an 'edge' between 2 and 3. Where are the 'edges' in frisbee that might tell us where these revolutions are likely to happen?)

Similarly, basketball players got much better at shooting three-pointers only after teams realized how valuable they are. Is there an ultimate frisbee equivalent? (Lefty backhands?)

People lay out too much: Laying out and not getting your hand on the disc is a sign that you don't actually understand your own body and its capabilities — I see these layouts far too often. (That's pretty much the whole idea, not sure if it's enough to earn a full article. Some video examples would be nice.)

Great cutters signal with their hands a lot: I've noticed that people who cut really well are likely to spend a lot of time pointing, to communicate with their throwers. I might write this up myself but need to find lots of video examples first.

Update: Just a week or two after I posted this list, Hive Ultimate uploaded this video to YouTube: The Secret to Belgium's Team Chemistry - Non-verbal Communication. It’s maybe not *exactly* the content I would make if I did it myself, but it’s close enough that writing this article is now definitely near the bottom of my priority list.

Are O/D lines actually the best structure? Some teams, like Seattle in the WUL and San Francisco Fury in club ultimate, don't have set O & D lines and just cycle through pods of players. I'm partial to this idea and curious if there's some way to analyze a dataset that would tell us whether this actually "works" without falling victim to all the possible confounding factors.

A collection of dump throws: Too often newer players will only have one way to throw a dump pass. I'd like to put together a video collection of many different examples of dump throws. It would be great to be able to point to one curated link and say "look at all these different examples".

[Added 2024-02-19] Can we prove switching out of zone defense near the end zone is smart? It’s received wisdom in frisbee culture that when an offense gets close to the endzone, a team playing zone defense will shout “fire!” and switch to person defense. Can we use data to prove this is actually a smart strategy? (I don’t have strong feelings either way but I question (more than most people seem to) whether it’s obviously true.)

[Update 2024-02-28: I later came across this 2016 article from Kyle Weisbrod: No Transition Zones]

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[Added 2024-02-28] How do we get good data on whether a given huck is a good decision? Lots of people wonder about the effectiveness of hucking (see here for some AJ Merriman comments on it). How do we advance the science of figuring out whether a given huck was a good idea? Roughly, we’d need to look at the expected yards gained by a huck (for that given hucker’s completion percentage) and compare that to the team’s expected number of yards gained before the next turnover if the player had chosen a short throw instead.

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Training

There are many training ideas that I'd like to know more confidently whether I should believe the science. Can trust what I've read in these books? Blogger Scott Alexander has a series "Much More Than You Wanted To Know" where he breaks down the papers behind various ideas (see here, for example). Digging deep into the science to tell us which papers have good methodology / can be trusted, and which can't, while keeping it readable for non-experts. I would love to see the same for:

(Note: For all of these, the studies that actually answer the question may not ever have been performed yet...Assume these are both a request to understand the science and a request to do more science, where needed.)

Collagen: Does supplementing our diet with collagen really help our body build cartilage/ligaments/muscles? See previous discussion here and here. What do we really know about how tendons/ligaments/cartilage grow and change over time?

Knees over toes: Once you strip away all the hype, does the Knees Over Toes Guy's ideas actually work?

External focus: Is the coaching concept of 'external focus' over 'internal focus' actually legit? See my previous book review The Language of Coaching.

Similarly, has his idea of using metaphor as a coaching tool been proven effective?

Breath: How important is breathing through your nose, really? I believe there's some value in it but I don't totally trust James Nestor's book — he gets a bit over the top with a few of his claims.

Cold: Does cold training work? (Wim Hof-type stuff). I'm sure there are resources, I've just never yet looked into it deeply myself.

What does the science say about game-based learning? There's a lot of interest recently in game-based practice structures. Example one: see my review of How We Learn to Move. Example two: see the recent book published by bettereveryday coaching. What does the research say about how well this actually works? (I actually started researching this question for an article myself, but I'm not confident I'll ever finish it.)

How do injuries happen? I've noticed I often get injured when I'm in my best shape. I have this idea that injuries can happen when our muscles get strong enough to help us do things we've never done before, but our ligaments/tendons/bones/cartilage (which grow much more slowly) haven't had time to catch up. Is there any truth to that? Or is it always the case that having stronger muscles leads to less injuries because the muscles protect the joints?

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Miscellaneous (off-field)

Directory of online ultimate: There should be one website that lays out the entire 'frisbee internet' — blogs, Substacks, news sites, well-known twitter users, podcasts, local summer league websites, etc.

Chinese ultimate news: I'd love to see more English-language (and easily available on places besides WeChat, etc) reporting of the Chinese ultimate scene, which has exploded in the last few years.

Keep old projects updated: There's a few older projects (by other people) that I'd love to see stay up-to-date so we can continue to see our frisbee culture evolve. The data on gender-equity in who touches the disc (see here and here and here) in mixed is one example that comes to mind. I also remember one tracking the average score differential at Nationals, though I can't find the link. (Edit (2023-09-02): This post on scoring heat maps is also the type of thing I’d like to see more of.) This unfinished project by Understanding Ultimate is another one I’d like to see further developed.

Frisbee aerodynamics: there are some papers out there analyzing the aerodynamics of a frisbee, but as an aerodynamicist myself I feel like I could do a better job bringing that data to life...

Give more structure to my blog: I write various articles about questions that intrigue me. Could I help people get more out of the blog by laying things out in a more clear overarching structure, the way a book might? (I don't plan to actually write a book because I think the embedded videos are too important to my articles.)

Best beginner resources? What are the best resources available (for free) to teach newer players the important frisbee concepts (vert stack, ho stack, zone defense, cutting, etc etc). Do they already exist or are there still ways we can still benefit the community by making better videos than currently exist? Is there a page with links to all the "best" videos/articles about each topic?

(I tend not to make beginner content because (a) there's already a lot out there and (b) it's often less interesting to me intellectually. But it may be one of the highest-value projects if there's a way to teach more beginners, more effectively)

Fix old Ultiworld content — As mentioned in my post on the give-and-go, a number of old Ultiworld articles have video clips that no longer load. An in-the-know reader tells me it’s probably related to the death of Gfycat. I’d like to think we can rehabilitate some of these articles, perhaps the authors still have the original GIFs saved somewhere…

Make sure my content doesn’t suffer the same fate — How can I make sure my own articles don’t suffer the same fate of the Ultiworld articles mentioned above? Should I download a copy of all the clips used in my articles in case the source videos are one day taken off YouTube?

What content are we missing from Japan (or China)? — I recently came across the Flik Ulti article Hasami: Guarding the Give and Go. It made me wonder how much good ultimate content there is on the Japanese-language internet that we’re missing out on because it’s never been translated. (Same goes for China, but to a lesser extent since their national passion for ultimate is much younger.) Can we share resources and learn from each other?

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Edit (2023-09-19): Added “Fix old Ultiworld content”. Added Understanding Ultimate project to “Keep old projects updated”. Updated “Great cutters signal with their hands a lot” to link a Hive Ultimate video that came out shortly after my article. Added “What content are we missing from Japan (or China)?”

Edit (2023-12-05): Added “Make sure my content doesn’t suffer the same fate”, see above.

Edit (2024-02-28): New questions: “How do we get good data on whether a given huck is a good decision?” and “Can we prove switching out of zone defense near the end zone is smart?”.