Team Rank Strength ARIZONA 1 4.761 VILLANOVA 2 4.349 KANSAS 3 4.295 FLORIDA 4 4.241 CREIGHTON 5 4.215 WISCONSIN 6 4.034 SYRACUSE 7 4.023 DUKE 8 4.009 LOUISVILLE 9 3.830 VIRGINIA 10 3.794 WICHITA ST 11 3.759 MICHIGAN ST 12 3.675 IOWA ST 13 3.556 UCLA 14 3.553 MICHIGAN 15 3.523 IOWA 16 3.518…

From Mark Cuban: “Everyone majors in sports marketing. There is no more worthless major. “ blog maverick I had the pleasure of going to an SMU Basketball game this past week. It wasn’t a huge game from a standings perspective. It wasn’t a big rivalry game.  It wasn’t a game between 2 powerhouse teams. It…

I saw this “infographic” as few days ago and saved it as a draft in my blog.  The source of this graphic was a Newsweek article entitled “Two Numbers: It Pays (A Little More) to Flip Burgers Down Under”.  The article itself was fairly interesting, but this “infographic” is terrible.  Basically, this image consists of…

No one enjoys biostatistics -Slate I cite myself as refutation of your silly claim. Cheers.

This past Thursday, I attended a book reading at Booklinks Booksellers in Northampton, MA. Benjamin Baumer and Andrew Zimbalist were reading from their new book, The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball. Approximately 30 baseball starved fans braved the cold New England night to learn a few things about sabermetrics and baseball analytics. It was…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: (Update: Click here for Part II, as Sloan updated its ticket policy and is now awarding all poster-winners 1 free ticket) The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) has sold out every year since its 2006 inception, garnering the attention of ESPN, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and countless other worldwide media…

Originally posted on The Lab and Field: UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments below, and my response As a newly-minted PhD student, I was talking with a friend about writing papers.  “Use LaTeX”, he said.  I thought he meant the rubbery material commonly found in lab gloves.  But apparently not.  LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is…

I just came across this article with the following headline: As many as 988 million birds die annually in window collisions. Wait, what?  Almost a BILLION (with a “B”) birds are killed every year by flying into windows?  That’s an outrage!  Let’s tear down all of our building and get rid of all our windows…

His decision to punt from the Seattle 39-yard line with his team trailing 29-0 early in the third quarter elevated football-coach risk aversion to something more like hyper-milquetoast performance art.  -Josh Levin Full article

Introduction Recently I tweeted the following question: “Does the spread of an NFL game predict how exciting the game will be?”  If closer games are considered more exciting (I think most people will agree with this), then games with smaller spreads should be, on average, more exciting than games with larger spreads. So how do…