Yearly Archives: 2013

Pre-season ratings have been posted for the upcoming season. When I first started doing these before the 2011 season, I thought I was pretty awesome. It was kind of a big deal to get every team’s lineup data, mix in some limited recruiting info, and produce a rating that wasn’t laughably horrible. But then Hanner […]

Conference USA radically changed its membership in the offseason, but one thing it didn’t change is its refusal to conduct a preseason basketball poll for men’s basketball. It’s an odd tradition for a conference that suffers from an identity crisis. Motto for CUSA basketball: “Hey, we don’t want you to know who might finish where […]

You asked for it for years, America, and now you’re getting it. The algorithm behind the Pomeroy Ratings is getting some tweaks to handle runaway scoring margins. Back before anybody knew about my work, I would do ratings of all kinds of sports. You haven’t lived until you’ve attempted to do ratings for the Western […]

Here’s a histogram of the home team’s scoring margin in all conference games over the past ten seasons. For the most part it has the look of a normal distribution. But it’s not exactly normal. Most noticeably, there’s the lack of data at the values of 1, 0, and -1. There are many fewer one-point […]

There are many ways to measure one’s legacy, but in my opinion one of the best is by how many people name children after you. Shaquille O’Neal’s ultimate mark on humanity isn’t his four NBA championship rings, his two scoring titles, the critically-acclaimed rap album “Shaq Diesel”, or defeating Charles Barkley in the world’s first […]

A lot of times, people who aren’t numerically-inclined will ask me how advanced stats can help them. It’s tough to come up with a useful response because statistical analysis is as much of an art as it is a science. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some basic things that analytics can do. Separating 2-point percentage […]

At some point in the distant past, time of possession became a popular stat in football. Control the ball and you win the game. Eventually, analytically-minded people realized that wasn’t true at all. You controlled the ball because you won the game. A lead added incentive to run the ball more often which drained the […]

Normally in basketball, one needs to spend a possession on defense to earn the right to get the basketball, just as at the grocery store, you need to spend $4.99 to earn the right to consume a frozen pizza. When the opportunity presents itself to purchase two frozen pizzas for that same price, a rational […]

The 113th U.S. Open Championship starts tomorrow, though not much golf will be played on Thursday with heavy rain expected most of the day. This continues a trend at Merion where nearly a half a foot of rain has fallen over the past two weeks. The U.S. Open typically features the most difficult scoring conditions […]

The story this week at the Wells Fargo Championship has been the poor quality of the greens. After a harsh winter and perhaps some questionable efforts to nurse them to health in recent weeks, the greens at Quail Hollow were borderline unplayable days before the tournament began on Thursday. Only the finest care and attention […]