Speak With Data

I've been wanting to post about Rogue One since it opened in December, but to avoid potentially revealing important plot details I decided to hold off for a while. Since it's been a while... One question that has bugged me the one   two   three  multiple times I've seen Rogue One  is the mechanism of using Kyber crystals as a fuel, either for peaceful purposes or for a superweapon such as the Death Star. (As discussed in the novel  Catalyst , contentious objector Galen Erso conducted research into using Kyber crystals as a source of renewable energy and was mislead into doing military work for the Empire while continuing his research under that guise.) The energy requirements for the Death Star to destroy a planet such as Earth or Alderaan (seen in  A New Hope ; the smaller detonations seen in  Rogue One  on Jedha and Scarif would require a fraction of that), as estimated by students at the University of Leicester in 2011 , is 2.25(10^32) ...

After winning the National Title, Dabo Swinney declared the ACC the best conference in College Football. That was coming off of a tremendous bowl season  for the Conference, as well as a National Title. But this is also after a regular season in which the Big Ten dominated headlines, and the annual discussion of conferences centers of the SEC. Do the numbers back up Swinney's claim? I've updated the rankings from my previous post, and the numbers back up his statement. The ACC, by an incredibly narrow margin (.02 percentage points more than the SEC), had the highest average Pythagorean expectation. That is despite their top team, Clemson (93.15%), being third in Pythagorean expectation behind Alabama (98.61%) and Michigan (97.09%). They also lead the pack if you use an Olympic Average to remove the impact of outliers. The Olympic Average, designed to prevent corrupt judges from rigging Olympic Figure Skating, takes the average of all but the maximum and minimum of a set...

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...

Earlier in the silly season  coaching search, the top two coaching candidates floated by Purdue's fan base were Western Michigan's P.J. Fleck and former LSU head coach Les Miles. In recent days, it has appeared neither may end up in West Lafayette. Yesterday, news-ish broke-ish that a deal was done-ish with Purdue and current Western Kentucky head coach Jeff Brohm.  Western Kentucky was revealed to be beginning its own coach search, while coach without an agent Jeff Brohm stated no deal existed and he would not think about future plans until after the C-USA championship game today. Another name floated was current Air Force Academy head coach Troy Calhoun. Which are two odd choices when considered together; at Air Force Calhoun ran a run-heavy option offense (although he has experience coaching quarterbacks in the NFL under Gary Kubiak) and Brohm's offense at WKU was a pass-oriented spread offense. Using the same methods I used to look at Purdue's last few coaches , I...

With last Saturday's loss in the Bucket Game against IU, the Darrell Hazell era at Purdue is over (well, yes he was fired mid-season, but since interim coach was assistant Gerad Parker I would consider it a continuation). Hazell, much like predecessor Danny Hope, was fired for a lack of on-field success. Hazell was hired to re-energize a program lacking direction during the Hope era, and potentially return to the success of Joe Tiller's early years. While it is obvious that Hazell failed in those goals, what is the magnitude of that failure? I'm going to look at two factors: recruiting (using recruiting ratings from Rivals) and on-field success (using Football Outsider's S&P+, which is an opponent adjusted metric calculated for offense, defense, and special teams reflecting efficiency, explosiveness, field position, and finishing drives ). Figure 1 Figure 2 Typically, a team's talent is the driving factor for their performance. In college football, th...

This past weekend, I went to see Disney's new (and very good) animated film Moana . There was a (genre aware) exchange between the title character and the demigod Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson  Maui regarding whether or not the title character was a princess. Maui's evidence is as follows: she  a) is "daughter of a chief," b) "wears a dress," and c) has  "an animal sidekick." Of course, the definition of princess is typically understood as a woman who fit one of the two descriptions: is daughter of a monarch, or the wife or widow of a prince (in turn defined as the son of a monarch, a monarch in his own right, or the wife of a princess). Disney markets 11 individuals as "Disney Princesses": Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel and Merida. They also market the two female protogonists (and daughters of monarchs) of Frozen, Anna and Elsa (who is in fact a monarch), in a similar man...