My Sox-Fan Wife Is Laughing...

2017 Weekly Boiler Stat Summaries: Week 13, v. IU

This is the first time the Bucket has been home since I was a junior at Purdue – the first year of Darrell Hazell’s tenure in West Lafayette. I am not nearly a good enough writer to capture my happiness in this moment. Purdue spent my entire post-college life (and half of college) being a joke nationally with very little to be proud of on Saturday afternoons in the fall. In just one year the narrative has changed. The Boilers won five games against FBS competition (a winning percentage of 11.36%) and three conference games (9.09%) during the 48-game Hazell era; in a single season, Brohm has won six FBS games, including four in conference, for a 50.00% winning percentage overall and 44.44% in conference. And with 6.8 second order wins (wins expected based on per play success rate) per S&P+, one may say that Purdue underachieved in the win column compared to how the Boilers played. Jeff Brohm has done something incredible this year, and capped it off with a win against IU – finally b...

Making a Spreadsheet, Checking It Twice, Gonna Find Out When It's Socially Acceptable to Listen To Christmas Music

It’s that time of year again. And by that time, I mean the time when you aren’t sure if it’s too early to hear Christmas music yet. Is it OK to walk into a certain coffee shop chain in early November and grab a seasonal beverage that can barely call itself coffee? Is it too early to hum a carol when I’ll be waiting to get on a plane the day before Thanksgiving? While driving to your favorite Black Friday activity (the correct answer is skeet shooting or watching football), should the speakers be spreading holiday cheer? Or do you need to wait until you break out the advent calendars to put on a festive record? To answer this age old question, I’m trusting the fine Google searches of my fellow Americans. Using Google Trends data from 2012-2016, I’m going to compare each week of the years’ average searches for the term “Christmas music” as a percentage of the maximum to determine when Americans start listening to Christmas music [1]. Figure 1: Christmas Graph, Oh Christmas Graph ...

This Year's Bowl Season Was As Bad For The Big Ten As It Looked.

After this year's bowl games, the narrative that developed among the sports media was the Big Ten, after what seemed like a historically strong regular season, proved to be weak after a terrible bowl performance. But how bad was that bowl performance? To find out, I compared the actual performance of the conferences to a set of 10,000 simulations of this year's bowl games, excluding this Monday's National Championship Game. To create the simulations, I used log5 and Pythagorean expectations, as I did previously for the NFL and MLB . However, because of the variability in strength of schedule in college football, using actual points scored for the Pythagorean expectations would be inaccurate. Instead, I'm using the Football Outsider's S&P+ ratings of offense and defense (referenced on 1/4/2017), which adjust for strength of schedule and account for efficiency as well as performance. To rate the performance of each conference, I found the percentile of t...

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