Earlier this week, I linked to an interesting auction-based proposal to help improve fairness in NFL overtime games. Right now, the coin flip gives the winning team a boost more often than not (the only exception is if the winning team mistakenly takes the ball but has a VERY weak offense relative to its defense, or, likewise, if the losing team has a VERY strong defense, relative to its offense).

The idea of the auction is to give each team “accurate” odds of winning by having them bid for the ball, using starting field position as currency. As you bid to start deeper and deeper in your own end, the odds of you scoring before your opponent drop. At some starting field position for each team (maybe around the 17 yard line), the odds should be close to fair

There’s a new paper out this month by Casey Ichniowski and Anne Preston concerning the NCAA tournament and the NBA draft (thanks to my PhD buddies Chris and Felipe for passing it along). Their argument is that unexpectedly strong tournament performance (especially team performance) causes players to be selected earlier in the NBA draft. This isn’t a bad thing though — in fact, they suggest that these strong tournament players tend to outperform their draft position in the NBA.

I believe their results saying that tournament performance affects draft position (this has also been shown by Chaz Thomas in an undergraduate thesis, and by David Berri, Stacey Brook, and Aju Fenn), and I mostly believe their results that strong tourney performers should be drafted even earlier, though their set up is a little odd for this second issue.

The clearest way to show that teams make mistakes in the…

While watching the ending to the Texas/Cincinnati NCAA tournament game, it felt like deja vu. Because it was. In other big games this season, Texas’ deficit followed a similar course.

This is game-flow data (moving left to right) compared to the advantage/deficit in points at a particular time during the game.

A classical problem in probability, which I learned about from Freedman, Pisani, and Purves’ book Statistics (pp. 238-240 in the fourth edition) is that of Galileo’s dice. Galileo was asked why, when rolling three fair dice, a sum of ten occurs more often than a sum of nine; he answered this question in Concerning an Investigation on Dice (from the University of York’s history of statistics page). It had previously been argued that since

10 = 6 + 3 + 1 = 6 + 2 + 2 = 5 + 4 + 1 = 5 + 3 + 2 = 4 + 4 + 2 = 4 + 3 + 3

and

9 = 6 + 2 + 1 = 5 + 3 + 1 = 5 + 2 + 2 = 4 + 4 + 1 = 4 + 3 + 2 = 3 + 3 + 3