Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

Over the past 4-5 years, I have been fascinated by the subject of probability and variance on both college football and basketball. Specifically, I became interested in how the probability of victory changes with the Vegas point spread (which is still the most reliable predictor of the outcome of individual games). I have written quite a bit about this in the past, so I will just summarize those findings briefly now. There are several observations that I have made using a set of data from the "prediction tracker" website that covers data from 2004 through 2018.  First of all, teams that are favored by "x" points tend to win by an average of "x" points.  That data is plotted here: Furthermore, you can calculate the variance (i.e. the standard deviation) of the final score difference as a function of each point spread.  This value is a little above 10 points, with a fair amount of scatter, which increases a bit as the spread get larger. That data is...

Even though COVID-19 robbed us all of the 2020 version of March Madness, there are still a lot of interesting questions that we can ask about the Tournament.  One particular topic that I thought a lot about last year is the question, "What are the odds to correctly pick the results of the entire tournament?"  As we will see, this is actually a much more complex question than it might appear on the surface. As you might expect, I am not the first person to think about this problem.  Warren Buffet  perhaps stimulated most of this discussion in 2014 when he started to offer multi-million or even $1 billion dollar rewards for different variations on a perfect bracket, either just up to the Sweet 16 or a full perfect bracket.  Largely in response to this publicity, math and stats gurus started to take aim at answering the question as to how likely it was that Buffet would need to pay up. There is one extremely simple way to think about this problem.  If you ...

Do to the unprecedented events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we will never know who would have won the 2020 Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament.  Granted, MSU was clearly surging, and Joe Lunardi, Nate Silver / 538, and my own simulation all came to the conclusion that MSU would have cut down the nets, but in reality the 2020 Tournament will go down as another example of "what could have been" for MSU fans. Unfortunately, the history of MSU basketball is littered with these types of "what ifs."  For example: What if the clock hadn't stopped in Kansas City in the 1986 Sweet Sixteen, allowing top seeded Kansas to force over time against Scott Skiles' scrappy MSU squad? What if the officials would have noticed that Kenny Anderson's shot to force over time in the 1990 Sweet Sixteen game against Steve Smith's team actually was launched after the buzzer? What if Alan Anderson hadn't hurt his knee during the 2005 NCAA Tournament run? What ...

Back in 2015, I went down a bit of a math rabbit hole based on a curiosity of mine. I wondered if it was possible to quantify the performance of coaches and teams in the NCAA tournament in ways other than simply wins and losses, Final Fours, and National Titles.  In particular, I wanted to quantify under and overachieving in March. Along the way, I developed a few metrics that compared each coaches' and team's performance to the average performance of all other coaches / teams in similar tournament situations. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that others had also formulated a similar metric called "PASE" (Performance Against Seed Expectation).  My metrics were mathematically a bit different, and I settled onto two, one that I call PARIS (Performance Against Round Independent Seed) and PAD (Performance Against exact seed Differential).  Three years ago, I gave a pretty detailed mathematical description of each metric and summarized notable coaches performance ba...

Under normal circumstances, this weekend would have been a celebration of college sports.  This weekend and the Monday that followed should have been the culmination of what in my eyes is the greatest annual sporting event: the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament. But, these are not normal circumstances. While sports everywhere are currently on hold, it is fun to imagine a Universe where COVID-19 never existed, and where this weekend in Atlanta, the Final Four went ahead as planned.  In that subset of universes, the final game was just played.  In the one specific universe that I have been covering over the past month, this is how things played out. National Semifinals In the first game of the evening, the result was No. 5 Ohio State defeated No. 8 Saint Mary's College, 67-64 The Buckeye led throughout, but the Gaels refused to go away.  Ohio State needed a stop with 5 seconds left, follow by some clutch free throws to seal the win.  OSU advanced to the...