A Couple More Econ Ideas

- Announcers talk all the time about "icing the kicker" - calling a time out just before the opposing team's kicker is going to kick a field goal at the end of the game. I'd be curious to look into whether it actually has any effect. It would be relatively straightforward if you could get your hands on a good dataset: look at situations where a coach did ice a kicker, ones where they could have but chose not to (I think this is rare), and ones where they did not have a time out and so could not. Compare "ice" vs "did not have a timeout to ice" and consider whether it affected performance.

- Along the same lines, basketball coaches very often call timeout when their team is doing badly over the last few minutes. The analysis is not as clear but you could look at something similar.

These are in the general category of "test out the conventional wisdom from some sport." I think this would be pretty interesting, and I think there would be decent interest from economists and the general public. Economists are going to be a lot more interested if the result is "teams are throwing millions of dollars (via winning fewer games) by making bad decisions" rather than "announcers are stupid."