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You should know by now that I’m a huge nerd. One of my prouder nerdy accomplishments was developing the MLS Elo ratings. Since posting those ratings and the pdf file that explains how I formulated everything I’ve received a couple e-mails a month from people asking for advice on how to do something similar or just thanking me for the work I’ve done.

There’s nothing cooler than getting emails like this from people. So if you’re building something, put it out there for people to see. The response you get may surprise you.

As I said, I plan to read 50 books this year and this was #1.  Technically I did start the book before January 1, but it’s 700 freakin pages and I still read 300-something this year, so I’m counting it.

Simmons does a handful of cool things in this book which centers around his quest to rank the 96 best players of all time in order to fill out his hypothetical Hall of Fame.  The writeups for each player are enjoyable and well researched, so if you can get past the fact that he’s still a Celtics homer you should enjoy it.  Other fun wrinkles: the top 10 “what-ifs” of all time (What if Dr. J had never gone to the ABA?), the top 10 teams of all time (’96 Bulls got jobbed), his “wine-cellar team” (12 best players’ single years to making an unbeatable basketball team), and a fascinating few pages covering an interview with Bill Walton that makes me wish he was my grandfather.

Yeah it’s long, but it’s one of the best books out there if you want to learn more about professional basketball in America, and want to do it with some humor.

If you like basketball and have a few months to kill, definitely check it out.

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

And now here we are.  The final entry.  Part 3.

How coaches from one conference vote for various conferences

I only looked at the six BCS conferences here because I have to imagine you don’t care very much about the differences in voting between the Sun Belt and Conference-USA.

There’s not a whole lot to say here, it shows up pretty much how you’d expect.  Conferences rank their members higher, rank conferences close to them hire (ACC and SEC, Big 12 and Big Ten) and rank teams who are toss-ups with their own much lower (Big East ranking Florida 6th).  I think that the Pac-10 wins “Worst voter” award, although the ACC is pretty close thanks to the breadth of bad votes (mostly due to Bobby Bowden).

I hope you’ve learned this by now, but click the pictures to get a full sized version.

ACC Teams

Big 12 Teams

Big East Teams

Big Ten Teams

Pac 10 Teams

SEC Teams

And one final little nugget, a breakdown of how the top 25 would shake out under each conferences voting patterns.  The numbers to the right of the team are the number of points they earned.

And now, part 2

How coaches from BCS conferences and mid-majors vote

The point of this is to see whether or not coaches in BCS conferences are making an obvious attempt to keep mid-major teams lower in the rankings, and thus lowering their chances for BCS games.  One reason to do this would be that mid-major teams in lower bowls means more money for the six major conferences to individually split among their members.

Similarly, the mid-major coaches may want to see one of their own do well, and thus will try to rank them higher than they probably deserve.

This one is going to be more pictures and less talk. Click any picture for a full-size version.

First, the votes for BCS teams by BCS conference and mid-major conference coaches.

And now votes for mid-major teams by these two groups

While the numbers do show a bias for coaches to vote for teams in their same classification there isn’t a huge difference, especially in the BCS Bowl spots.

Some of the biggest differences: Nebraska, Wisconsin, Arizona, Houston and East Carolina.

The part I like the most about this is the effect on the bottom end of the coaches vote, the last teams some coaches add to their top 25.  Oklahoma, UNC and UGA only received votes from BCS conference coaches.  Troy, Nevada and Middle Tennessee State only received votes from mid-major coaches.

One more picture: the top 25 (and other receiving votes) for each classification

Not a huge difference between the two until you get into the middle rankings.

This is part 1 in what will probably be only a 3 part series, although I’d love to do more if I find the time.

The whole purpose behind this is to find evidence of bias in the secret poll that accounts for 33% of a team’s chance at a BCS bowl. The three things I am looking at initially are as follows:

1) The effects of coaches voting for their own team
2) How coaches from BCS conferences and mid-majors vote for these two classifications
3) How coaches from one conference vote for various conferences

This is part one, and part two will hopefully be up in the next day or two.

The effects of coaches voting for their own team

It seems kinda silly, first of all, that you would ask a coach who works 16 hours a day 340 days a year to rank nearly a quarter of the 120 teams playing DI-A football. Now add that to the fact that they are allowed to vote for their own team, who they are infinitely more familiar with than anyone else out there. Do you think there’s a 1% chance that Steve Spurrier watched a Wisconsin game this year even though he ranked them 20th?

So, here is a nice little breakdown of the coaches whose teams ended up receiving at least a single vote. I used the points formula instead of ranking (25 points = 1st place, 24 = 2nd, etc) so that averages make more sense. (click the picture for higher resolution)

So, as you can see, most coaches’ for their own team are inflated (props to Mike Riley, Jeff Tedford, Steve Spurrier, Ken Niumatalolo and Mark Richt for being the most fair. Tressel fans: obviously he did well also, but it’s harder to rank yourself higher when there are 5 undefeateds and 2 obviously better teams).

Now, some people could go through these and say that other coaches did decently too. “Hey, Mike Leach didn’t vote much higher than the average of people who voted for Texas Tech!” you could say. And that’s correct, but it’s also correct that 52 out of 59 people also didn’t even have them on their ballot, so giving them their second highest ranking (behind Bo Pelini, I can’t wait for the conference analysis) is pretty bad.

On average, coaches gave their team 2.23 more points than a random voter, and 0.87 more points than a random voter who we know voted for his team.

Ultimate punk list (based strictly off the numbers, not any of my own rankings)
5 – Bo Pelini – 6 spots higher than the average Nebraska voter (55/59 voted)
4 – Jim Harbaugh – over 9 spots higher than the average Stanford voter (52/59 voted)
3 – Bob Stoops – one of only two people to vote for Oklahoma, ranked them 23rd (Bobby Bowden had them 24th. We know he’s senile because he had Cal at 19, Clemson at 22, and USC at 23)
2 – Gary Pinkel – one of only two people to vote for Missouri, ranked them 22nd (Ken Niumatalolo had them 25th)

And the #1 total punk who is part of what is ruining college football

1 – Butch Davis – the ONLY PERSON out of 59 coaches who could find a reason to rank 8-4 North Carolina, he ranked them 24th, over Wisconsin and Houston among others.

So, the project I was so keen on finishing was going to look for biases in the final USA Today Coaches’ Poll since they actually release the votes one time per year.

The problem is, I got waaaay too in depth trying to find relationships.  As much as I’d love to research the history of every coach and assistant at each of these schools, I couldn’t do it.  For an example of what I mean, it is pretty awesome and telling that the 3 people who voted Georgia Tech #7 (the highest we received) where Ken Niumatalolo, the Navy head coach who worked with Paul Johnson for 6 years after playing under him, Charlie Weatherbie, who has Navy connections, and Dan Mullen, who played against Georgia Tech this year.  I’d love to be able to go through 59 voters and 42 teams and find all of these relationships and see what they cause.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have time for that so I’m going to stick to how coaches ranked their own team if that was an option, how they ranked teams in their conference, and how they ranked teams in the BCS conferences versus mid-majors.

That should be plenty good enough and I can get it up and finished by tomorrow.

2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference – Call for Papers

So, you’re telling me I can write a paper about something really cool to do with sports statistics, and then if it’s good enough go talk about it in front of people like Mark Cuban, Daryl Morey and Bill Simmons?  Sounds like a plan.

Also, unrelated, applied for Startup Riot 2010 today.  Not to present anything, but just to attend.  So far, this year in conferences has been better than last as Venture Atlanta’s companies were better on the whole I thought, there was a much less crazy lunchtime speaker, Future Media the next day had some cool stuff, and I didn’t piss anyone off in the process of registering.  All around successes, imo.

These are the end of year rankings.

Playoff seeds are written next to the 8 teams that made it.

Freakin tragic that Dallas couldn’t keep their hot streak going for one more game to qualify for the playoffs.  They had such an amazing second half, and would’ve been amazingly dangerous to whoever had to play them.

Overall happy with how things turned out.  LA gets penalized here for winning close games and going 5-3-2 in their final 10 games.  Seattle, on the other hand, gets a big boost by winning their last 3 on the way in, including victories at Columbus and Kansas City.  Yes, even when the opponent is bad, wins on the road are impressive.

In a weird twist, possibly the best matchup of the playoffs is going to be in this first round between Seattle and Houston.  Unfortunately, it won’t mean as much as if they were to meet later on, but fortunately this is the only playoff round with home and away games, so we’ll get to see them square off twice.

LA/Chivas should be a lot of fun too, just to see the derby as a playoff match.  If LA wins, that’ll make for a great Western Conference final as well.

On the East side of things, blech.  I would probably rather gouge my eyes out than watch two New England/Fire games, and the Crew is going to patiently dismantle RSL in a way that is awesome if you’re a fan of the technical strategy they can employ but kinda boring when you want to see teams open up play.

I’ll go ahead and pretty much guarantee a Crew/Fire conference final, if only because it may be the soccer equivalent of those old Heat/Knicks playoffs series and I really want to see these two fan bases against each other.

Since I now spend about 9 hours a day in Nyack during the week I’ve come to appreciate just how beautiful of a village it is.  In fact, a lot of these little river towns along the Hudson are very nice, and surprisingly suburban for being so close to NYC.  I may bring a camera to work one day and go around taking a few pictures to share since there aren’t any real good ones on google image search.

On a completely unrelated note, the Elo ratings for MLS are live again.  I gave them about 10 weeks to recalibrate (which is knowingly insufficient, but I can’t keep them hidden forever!) and I think they did a pretty decent job.   The one obvious problem that I can’t defend is Columbus at #2.

Yes, I believe they are better than other people are giving them credit for, but they aren’t this good.  The problem comes from the fact that ties have so little of an impact on the change in rankings, and Columbus has 7 of those in 11 games.  If they had lost just one or two of those (especially if those losses had been home games) they would be a more middle of the pack team right now, probably 5th and maybe 6th, which is about where I have them in my own subjective rankings.

Also, while I am doing my first bounce between friends’ apartments tonight, I’m going to try to get up a links post now that I had a week to find some cool stuff.

I just spent 2 hours reworking rankings for a soccer league nobody but me cares about, but note that the MLS Elo ratings are going to be back, probably April 15th.  I want to give them time to adjust to the new season, and while that would really take til June or July for them to even start to get a good feel, I figure why not put myself out there for public ridicule from the BigSoccer contingent.

I know this was a pretty boring post, so please except the Elton John video above and the link to Henry Rollins’s house below (it’s for sale!) as my pennance.  I’m going to play golf.

Henry Rollins Hollywood Hills house