SITW Super Bowl Odds
As of 2:22pm on 12/18/2011.
| Team | SITW Odds | WSEX.com Odds |
| Green Bay | 4-1 | 1.5-1 |
| New England | 5-1 | 4.5-1 |
| Pittsburgh | 7-1 | 11-1 |
| Baltimore | 8-1 | 8-1 |
| New Orleans | 9-1 | 6.5-1 |
| Atlanta | 15-1 | 30-1 |
| Houston | 22-1 | 16-1 |
| NY Jets | 23-1 | 35-1 |
| San Francisco | 24-1 | 18-1 |
| NY Giants | 45-1 | 30-1 |
| Detroit | 45-1 | 66-1 |
| Dallas | 70-1 | 45-1 |
| Chicago | 70-1 | 200-1 |
| Oakland | 160-1 | 100-1 |
| Denver | 160-1 | 30-1 |
| Cincinnati | 500-1 | 250-1 |
Cheers.
NFL Playoff Projections After Week 14
| Seed | AFC | NFC |
| 1 | New England | Green Bay |
| 2 | Pittsburgh | New Orleans |
| 3 | Houston | San Francisco |
| 4 | Denver | NY Giants |
| 5 | Baltimore | Atlanta |
| 6 | NY Jets | Detroit |
Cheers.
StatsInTheWild picks all 35 bowl games
I’ve picked all 35 bowl games based on my rankings. I’ll post my running record as the games are played. (Also, check out my final regular season rankings here.)
And which games am I looking forward to this year? My number one pick for bowl entertainment is the Fight Hunger bowl. This monstrosity of a “bowl game” will feature a UCLA team with a losing record who had to petition the NCAA to even be allowed to play in a bowl game and an Illinois team on a 6 game losing streak. These are the kind of match-ups that I live for.
Record: 21-14
✓=Correct Pick; ✗=Incorrect Pick
| Bowl | Predicted Winner | Outcome |
| New Mexico | Wyoming | ✗ |
| Famous Idaho Potato | Ohio | ✓ |
| New Orleans | San Diego State | ✗ |
| St.Petersburg | Marshall | ✓ |
| Poinsetta | TCU | ✓ |
| Las Vegas | Boise State | ✓ |
| Hawaii | Southern Miss | ✓ |
| Independence | Missouri | ✓ |
| Little Caesars | Purdue | ✓ |
| Belk | Louisville | ✗ |
| Military | Toledo | ✓ |
| Holiday | Texas | ✓ |
| Champs Sports | Notre Dame | ✗ |
| Alamo | Baylor | ✓ |
| Armed Forces | Tulsa | ✗ |
| Pinstripe | Iowa State | ✗ |
| Music City | Miss State | ✓ |
| Insight | Oklahoma | ✓ |
| Texas | Texas A&M | ✓ |
| Sun | Georgia Tech | ✗ |
| Liberty | Cincy | ✓ |
| Fight Hunger | UCLA | ✗ |
| Chick-fil-A | Auburn | ✓ |
| Ticketcity | Houston | ✓ |
| Outback | Georgia | ✗ |
| Capital One | South Carolina | ✓ |
| Gator | Florida | ✓ |
| Rose | Oregon | ✓ |
| Fiesta | Oklahoma State | ✓ |
| Sugar | Virginia Tech | ✗ |
| Orange | Clemson | ✗ |
| Cotton | Kansas State | ✗ |
| Compass | SMU | ✓ |
| Godaddy.com | Arkansas State | ✗ |
| BCS Championship | LSU | ✗ |
Cheers.
Preventing gerrymandering with convexity
I was just reading this from slate.com about gerrymandering, and it struck me that you could, in some sense, prevent egregious gerrymandering by measuring the convexity of the shape of the district and not allowing districts that are extremely non-convex. Apparently, others have also thought of this there are several papers on the topic including “Gerrymandering and Convexity” and “Can Compactness constrain the Gerrymander?“.
Cheers.
NFL Rankings After Week 14
No changes at the top.
| Team | Rank – After Week 14 |
| Green Bay | 1 |
| New England | 2 |
| Pittsburgh | 3 |
| Baltimore | 4 |
| Atlanta | 5 |
| NY Jets | 6 |
| New Orleans | 7 |
| Chicago | 8 |
| NY Giants | 9 |
| Detroit | 10 |
| San Francisco | 11 |
| Philadelphia | 12 |
| TampaBay | 13 |
| Houston | 14 |
| San Diego | 15 |
| Oakland | 16 |
| Kansas City | 17 |
| Miami | 18 |
| Tennessee | 19 |
| Cincinnati | 20 |
| Seattle | 21 |
| Dallas | 22 |
| Denver | 23 |
| Buffalo | 24 |
| Cleveland | 25 |
| Jacksonville | 26 |
| Minnesota | 27 |
| Indianapolis | 28 |
| Arizona | 29 |
| Washington | 30 |
| St Louis | 31 |
| Carolina | 32 |
Cheers.
Yates and significance tests
I was reading the newest issue of Significance Magazine last night, and I came across this quote in a letter that someone had written to the magazine:
The emphasis given to formal tests of significance throughout [R.A. Fisher’s] Statistical Methods…has caused scientific research workers to pay undue attention to the results of the tests of significance they perform on their data, particularly data derived from experiments, and too little to the estimates of the magnitude of the effects they are investigating.” … “The emphasis on tests of significance and the consideration of the results of each experiment in isolation, have had the unfortunate consequence that scientific workers have often regarded the execution of a test of significance on an experiment as the ultimate objective. (Yates 1951)
I feel like this is extremely relevant today where it seems that the only thing anyone ever cares about in studies is the p-value and whether or not it is less than the mythical 0.05 cut-off. But what strikes me most about this quote is that it was written sixty years ago in 1951.
Cheers.
An arbitrary ranking of NCAA college basketball teams – 12/11/2011
Rankings as of noon on 12/11/2011 .
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | AP (12/12/11) |
| Indiana | 1 | 0 | 9-0 | 18 |
| Illinois | 2 | 0 | 10-0 | 19 |
| Syracuse | 3 | 0 | 10-0 | 1 |
| Minnesota | 4 | 0 | 10-1 | |
| Marquette | 5 | 0 | 9-0 | 11 |
| Northwestern | 6 | 0 | 7-1 | 40 |
| Ohio State | 7 | 0 | 8-1 | 2 |
| Missouri | 8 | 0 | 9-0 | 10 |
| Duke | 9 | 0 | 9-1 | 7 |
| Louisville | 10 | 0 | 9-0 | 4 |
| Baylor | 11 | 0 | 7-0 | 6 |
| Northern Iowa | 12 | 0 | 9-1 | 35 |
| Purdue | 13 | 0 | 9-2 | |
| Michigan State | 14 | 0 | 8-2 | 21 |
| Wisconsin | 15 | 0 | 8-2 | 14 |
| Pittsburgh | 16 | 0 | 9-1 | 15 |
| Seton Hall | 17 | 0 | 8-1 | |
| Kansas | 18 | 0 | 7-2 | 12 |
| Xavier | 19 | 0 | 8-0 | 8 |
| San Diego State | 20 | 0 | 9-2 | 28 |
| Connecticut | 21 | 0 | 8-1 | 9 |
| Oklahoma | 22 | 0 | 7-1 | |
| Ole Miss | 23 | 0 | 8-1 | |
| Michigan | 24 | 0 | 7-2 | 20 |
| Saint Louis | 25 | 0 | 9-1 | 32 |
BCS: My offer still stands…….if you want to contact me you can send me a tweet @StatsInTheWild.
Cheers.
One More Arbitrary NCAA Football Ranking Scheme for the BCS – 12/4/2011
Rankings as of 12/04/2011. Previous weeks rankings here.
The BCS explained: It used to be that a national champion in college football was determined solely by human polls. However, human polls are suspect because you are asking each voter to process the results of hundreds of college football games from teams all across the country and form a well thought out, reasoned ranking of the top 25 teams, which is clearly impossible; It’s too much data for a human to handle. That’s why the BCS introduced the computer rankings which could, without personal bias, crunch the numbers and produce a ranking taking all games into account equally. The computer rankings, on the average, do a very reasonable job of ranking the teams. Ultimately, however, the non-human polls, a computational exercise in futility, are simply ignored, as they are overwhelmed by the human polls, and the BCS gets what it wants while it hides behind the computer polls to offer a whiff of legitimacy to the absolute garbage it spews out.
BCS Bowl Team
ACC Big East Big Ten Big 12 Pac 12 SEC Other
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | BCS Rank |
| LSU | 1 | – | 13-0 | 1 |
| Oklahoma State | 2 | – | 11-1 | 3 |
| Kansas State | 3 | ↑↑ | 10-2 | 8 |
| Alabama | 4 | ↑ | 11-1 | 2 |
| Oklahoma | 5 | ↓↓ | 9-3 | 14 |
| Baylor | 6 | ↑ | 9-3 | 12 |
| Stanford | 7 | ↓ | 11-1 | 4 |
| Oregon | 8 | ↑↑↑ | 11-2 | 5 |
| Arkansas | 9 | ↓ | 10-2 | 6 |
| South Carolina | 10 | ↓ | 10-2 | 9 |
| USC | 11 | ↓ | 10-2 | |
| Georgia | 12 | – | 10-3 | 16 |
| Virginia Tech | 13 | – | 11-2 | 11 |
| Boise State | 14 | ↑↑↑ | 11-1 | 7 |
| Michigan | 15 | ↑ | 10-2 | 13 |
| Wisconsin | 16 | ↑↑ | 11-2 | 10 |
| Texas | 17 | ↓↓↓ | 7-5 | 24 |
| Clemson | 18 | ↑↑↑↑ | 10-3 | 15 |
| Nebraska | 19 | ↓ | 9-3 | 20 |
| Houston | 20 | ↓↓↓↓↓ | 12-1 | 19 |
| Missouri | 21 | – | 7-5 | |
| TCU | 22 | ↑↑↑↑↑ | 10-2 | 18 |
| Michigan State | 23 | ↓↓↓ | 10-3 | 17 |
| Penn State | 24 | ↑ | 9-3 | 22 |
| Texas A&M | 25 | ↓ | 6-6 |
And finally, representing the Big East/Big Least: West Virginia
BCS: My offer still stands…….if you want to contact me you can send me a tweet @StatsInTheWild.
Cheers.
One More Arbitrary NCAA Football Ranking Scheme for the BCS – 11/27/2011
Rankings as of 11/27/2011. Previous weeks rankings here.
Some people were not thrilled about my rankings last week when I still had Oklahoma State ranked number 1. For example, one guy critically criticized me by saying: “I’m impressed! You spell very well and your paragraph structure is spot in. That us amazing since it is apparent that you are fucking retarded.” He will be happy to know that I now have LSU ranked number 1.
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | BCS Rank |
| LSU | 1 | 1 | 12-0 | 1 |
| Oklahoma State | 2 | -1 | 10-1 | |
| Oklahoma | 3 | 1 | 9-2 | |
| Alabama | 4 | 1 | 11-1 | |
| Kansas State | 5 | -2 | 9-2 | |
| Stanford | 6 | 3 | 11-1 | |
| Baylor | 7 | 0 | 8-3 | |
| Arkansas | 8 | -2 | 10-2 | |
| South Carolina | 9 | 1 | 10-2 | |
| USC | 10 | 2 | 10-2 | |
| Oregon | 11 | 0 | 10-2 | |
| Georgia | 12 | 2 | 10-2 | |
| Virginia Tech | 13 | -5 | 11-1 | |
| Texas | 14 | -1 | 7-4 | |
| Houston | 15 | 0 | 12-0 | |
| Michigan | 16 | 2 | 10-2 | |
| Boise State | 17 | 4 | 10-1 | |
| Nebraska | 18 | 5 | 9-3 | |
| Wisconsin | 19 | 10-2 | ||
| Michigan State | 20 | 4 | 10-2 | |
| Missouri | 21 | 1 | 7-5 | |
| Clemson | 22 | -6 | 9-3 | |
| Iowa State | 23 | -6 | 6-5 | |
| Texas A&M | 24 | -4 | 6-6 | |
| Penn State | 25 | -6 | 9-3 |
BCS: My offer still stands…….if you want to contact me you can send me a tweet @StatsInTheWild.
Cheers.
NFL Rankings After Week 11
| Team | Rank – After Week 11 |
| Green Bay | 1 |
| New England | 2 |
| Pittsburgh | 3 |
| Baltimore | 4 |
| Atlanta | 5 |
| NY Jets | 6 |
| Chicago | 7 |
| New Orleans | 8 |
| Tampa Bay | 9 |
| NY Giants | 10 |
| Philadelphia | 11 |
| Detroit | 12 |
| San Diego | 13 |
| San Francisco | 14 |
| Kansas City | 15 |
| Oakland | 16 |
| Cincinnati | 17 |
| Tennessee | 18 |
| Buffalo | 19 |
| Dallas | 20 |
| Houston | 21 |
| Seattle | 22 |
| Miami | 23 |
| Jacksonville | 24 |
| Minnesota | 25 |
| Indianapolis | 26 |
| Cleveland | 27 |
| Washington | 28 |
| Denver | 29 |
| St. Louis | 30 |
| Arizona | 31 |
| Carolina | 32 |
Cheers.
Stats in the Wild 