About Me

My name is Brian Salerno and I am a recent graduate of Southern Methodist University’s Master’s of Applied Statistics and Data Analytics (MASDA) program in Dallas, Texas, USA. My career interest is working in data analytics and research. I firmly believe that you can augment any decision making process with good data! My primary personal interest is sports and sports wagering, which is perfect for personal research because there is readily available data, provided you can write scrapers. The vast majority of my work (including this website) is done in R, but I also utilize Python and SQL often.

Some of my smaller personal and school projects are listed under the Projects tab above. The CBB tab has links and descriptions of my past work with NCAA Basketball and March Madness modeling. The eSports tab has some of my work pertaining to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) data and analytics.

During the 2020 Coronavirus situation, I began to watch eSports, specifically Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Since there is not much publicly available in the realm of CS:GO analytics, I decided I would spend the summer gathering data and publishing some small research studies. These are available under the eSports tab above. Creating a new local PostgreSQL database from scratch and using scrapers to add to it was a great way to gain some valuable experience and pass some lockdown time! Additionally, for a remote Sports Analytics class in the Fall 2020 semester, I was able to use the data that I had gathered to design an R Shiny app to display some of the visualizations and modeling I had done. The app writeup is listed under the “Graduate Projects” section of the Projects tab above.

Prior Experiences

Prior to my graduate studies at SMU, I was the Video Graduate Assistant at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. At Arkansas, our video team gathered all FBS and FCS film weekly as well as managed a team of around a dozen students. While our main duties consisted of ensuring practices were filmed and put into our XOS database, my main weekly task was to integrate Pro Football Focus (PFF) data with the video clips of each play. Doing so enabled the staff to generate interactive reports, as well as filter through video clips to create cutups. Additionally, I created shell scripts to move exported film files into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server. Doing so saved me about 5-6 hours of manually moving files! Ultimately, we acquired around 130 TB of coaches’ film, TV copies, and other miscellaneous video.

Before moving to Fayetteville, I completed my Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Statistics and Sport Management at Southern Methodist University. Additionally, I worked for the SMU Football video staff for my final two years, where I helped re-organize the XOS database by changing the folder structure to be more user-friendly (or coach-friendly). I also was fortunate enough to be the sideline filmer for the football games, which enabled me to travel across the country!

Here are some of my favorite pictures from my experience in football thus far:

Sunrise over SMU’s Ford Stadium

Sunset over Tulane’s Yulman Stadium

Cowboys Stadium