As we sift every report looking for clues about what the Vikings might do with the #23 overall pick, it’s worth noting this particular Wall Street Journal story about data scientist Jared Lander and his analytics-based assessments of this year’s prospects.
Lander is a professor at Columbia and is called by the piece “a rising star of data science.” His method involves running “variables thousands of times through an ensemble of machine-learning algorithms.” In other words, this guy’s incredibly smart and he knows his numbers.
There are lots of analytics people out there, but why are Lander’s findings particularly worth noting?