Speak With Data

Football's back. And so is doing math with it and being frustrated with it. Given its week 1, and the sample sizes are incredibly low, everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Rondale Moore Wins The Small Sample Size Heisman If there is a single thing to come out of last Thursday's game, it is the incredible talent of the true freshman from Louisville. Moore's numbers, on first glance, are absolutely incredible: Figure 1: Purdue Individual Rushing Statistics [1,3] Figure 2: Purdue Individual Receiving Statistics [1]  Moore's pure explosiveness is the difference between the Purdue rushing attack ranking 2nd in the nation and it ranking 30th (tied with Colorado). While that would still be a pretty potent attack, being second only behind Oklahoma is a nice place to be - even if a small sample size plays a big role in that [1,2]. Figure 2: Rondale Moore Rate Statistics Per Quarter [1,3]  One interesting thing to note: Moore was his most explosi

Isaac Haas, after fracturing his elbow in a first round win over Cal State Fullerton, could miss the remainder of the NCAA tournament (although practiced today with a brace, so all hope is not lost). Haas’s dominance in the paint has been a critical part of the Boilermaker offense all season, so missing him could be devastating for the Boiler’s chances of reaching a Final Four. But how devastating [1]? Per sports-reference, Haas’s Box Plus Mins (i.e., contribution over an average player to points over 100 possessions) is 3.9 on offense, 2.8 on defense, and 6.6 overall (sports-reference’s rounding at one decimal place produces an error that means defensive and offensive numbers do not add to exactly the overall). Combining that with KenPom’s team efficiencies per 100 possessions, one can estimate what the impact of Haas’s contributions being lost would mean. The loss of Haas would dramatically impact the Boilermaker team, dropping the team from a +26.90 rating on KenPom (i.e. expe

Yes, I know the bowl game was almost a month ago and I promised a significant amount more content than I actually produced. However, the current project in my day job has taken most of my time, bandwidth, and energy, so that significantly delayed this post. But it’s here. Finally. The stat summary for Purdue’s first bowl victory since before I became a brother of Kappa Kappa Psi. Purdue Quarterback: ACLs Not Required Elijah Sindelar is only the latest player to have suffered an ACL tear as a result of whatever is in the West Lafayette water causing the injury endemic for Boilermakers of all sports. Sindelar’s performance while playing injured since the Northwestern game as been pretty decent, including the Foster Farms Bowl [1]. Figure 1: Purdue Individual Passing Statistics [2,3] Sindelar, with only a single functioning knee, threw 53 passes for 396 yards, with a completion percentage of 62.26% and 6.61 yards per dropback. Given the Boilers were facing an Arizona de

It’s official! Purdue is in a bowl game! On 27 December at 8:30pm EST on Fox the Boilers will take on the Wildcats of Arizona in the Foster Farms Bowl. This preview will include both information about the destination and sponsor in addition to the football preview. If you just want football talk, skip to the heading “Didn’t We Already Beat Arizona This Season?” Where Is This Game? The Foster Farms Bowl is held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, where the San Francisco 49ers “play football”. Santa Clara is just outside San Jose, CA, and is known for being where Levi’s Stadium is and being home to the Santa Clara Vanguard. Look, I’m not from California, so the only things I know about this town are related to football and drum corps. Google is from California, and so provided these lovely maps to help place Santa Clara. Figure 1: Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, and the San Francisco Bay Area [1] For those attending the game, you have the option of three airports:

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

Kinnick Stadium is a place where strange, strange things happen in football. Like, for example, the irrational Hawkeye win over Ohio State this year. This weekend’s Purdue win wasn’t quite one of those strange things; S&P+ gave the Boilers a 49% chance to win (Purdue +.4 point spread), which makes this barely an upset, even if Vegas had Iowa as a 6 point favorite. Still, it’s a huge win, keeping bowl hopes alive for another week, and setting up a Bucket game with the winner going to the postseason. It was yet another day of mediocre offense and pretty good defense, but it got the job done [1,2]. Holy Sacks Batman! Purdue has struggled to apply pressure to opposing quarterbacks for most of the 2017 campaign; coming into this week, they had averaged a sack on 4.79% of dropbacks (FBS average 6.26%), which has contributed to the defense’s vulnerability to the pass (prior to the game v. Iowa, they allowed 6.54 yards per dropback, compared to an FBS average of 6.32 yards per d

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