Speak With Data

Explanation of format available  here. Boiler Up! Sources: http://kenpom.com/ http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/purdue/2017.html http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/kansas/2017.html

An explanation of the Offensive and Defensive Ratings. Explanation of format available  here. Boiler Up! Sources: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ratings.html https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2017-march-madness-predictions/womens/ http://stats.ncaa.org/

Over the past few days, I've been posting "Numbers-Only Previews" of Purdue's men's and women's NCAA Basketball tournament games. Why a number's only previews? Partially, my own laziness on not wanting to spend all the free time I have writing full articles for each game in both tournaments. Primarily, I know while watching games I'd prefer to have a concise reference of important stats to better inform myself about the teams than a large block of text I have to slog through to get the same information. I also like to just have the numbers, and be able to reach my own conclusions of what they mean, rather than be given someone else's opinion. The previews contain tables of information. The first is a team table, stating:  Overall rankings (KenPom for the men, Sagarin for the women)  The possession adjusted scoring offense and defense (for men, these are the KenPom strength-of-schedule adjusted numbers; for  women, they are the points scored/a...

Explanation of format available here. Boiler Up! Sources: http://kenpom.com/ http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/purdue/2017.html http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/iowa-state/2017.html

Explanation of format available  here. Sources: http://stats.ncaa.org/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2017-march-madness-predictions/womens/

Explanation of format available  here. Boiler Up! Sources: http://kenpom.com/ http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/purdue/2017.html http://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/schools/vermont/2017.html

Tonight, the bracket for the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Tournament was revealed; unsurprisingly, the undefeated NCAA basketball 107-win-streak-holding UConn team was the number 1 overall seed. 107 wins dwarfs the previous record, the UCLA Men's 88 wins under (my fellow Boilermaker) John Wooden between January of 1971 and January of 1974 (1). The probability of a team to have 107 straight wins, given a naive assumption of a 50% chance of winning, is 6.1630E-31% (2). Ignoring the rounding resulting from using 64 bit floating point arithmetic, that is roughly a 1-in-162,259,276,829,213,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. For comparison, the diameter of the Universe is "only" 5.5E23 miles (3), and the odds of winning the Powerball Jackpot is 1-in- 292,201,338 (or 0.0000003422% probability) (4). One would have to win the Powerball 3.8 times to equal the probability of a NCAA basketball team having a streak like UConn has. Of course, UConn is no average team who woul...

It's March, which means the weather will even more Indiana-y (1), the variety of seafood specials at restaurants will increase, and baseball will be in Spring Training. MLB's preseason, in which the 30 teams play around 30 games each (2), is longer than the 4 game NFL preseason or 8 game NBA and NHL preseasons. Which begs the question: since the sample size is larger, might it be more predictive than the NFL's preseason?  Sparked partially by the following Facebook post by my brother-in-law, I decided to determine if that 7-0 record is a sign of optimism for the upcoming season (if you are an Angels fan). Using data from ESPN of the 2003 to 2016 Spring Training (3), and Lahman’s Baseball Database (4) for the 2003-2016 regular seasons, I compared the Pythagorean Expectations  of each team's Spring Training and Regular Season performance. By using the Pythagorean Expectation, a better sense of a team's quality is determined than the win-loss record, with less v...