Roundup 12/3/11

It's hard to be rational.


Is it the end of the Rex era?

Rookie of the Year watch.

Get your nose out of the spreadsheet and watch the game.

Using PFR's AV to value draft picks. Great work, Kevin Meers. Good comments there too. Would be interesting to redo Massey-Thaler paper based AV but using the new CBA rookie wage scale. Minor caveat--the draft only gives a team rights to a player in his initial contract, not his entire career.

Also from Kevin, the biggest over- and under-achievers according to their draft position.

"He is an irony-free individual who seems uninterested in developing an athletic persona based upon rehearsed machismo or wink-wink self awareness."

Straight Outta Compton.

Estimating hard effects is hard, if not impossible. Related: Small samples mean statistically significant results should usually be ignored. Check out the graph of dwindling effect sizes as sample size increases.

"My favorite example of when good stats go bad is career fumble recoveries. Who do you think might top that list – maybe Jason Taylor or Jim Marshall or Kevin Greene? All those players are on the list but in fact the top 21 slots are taken up by quarterbacks, the same guys who dropped the ball in the first place."

Does winning the coin flip meaningfully improve a team's chances of winning a game? Not this is for all games, not OT. 55% of coin-flip winners have gone on to win this season. I'm not sure that's meaningful. We'd need more season of data to tell. Statistically, there is about an 11% chance of seeing a 55% rate by chance alone. 

Is Aaron Rodgers having the best season of any quarterback ever?

If this doesn't convince people about the value of going for it on 4th down, I don't know what will: "We can also look at the result of those games. The Field Goal Teams went 8-15. The Go For It Teams went 33-13. The teams that went and failed: 15-6. The teams that went and succeeded: 18-7. That’s right, the teams that went for a touchdown, that didn’t take the points on a field goal, won more when they failed than the field goal teams did."

End the penny. Couldn't agree more. Helmet knock--M/R.

No Rex, it's not even 3%. Well, ok, there's a small chance you go on a run, but you also need at least a couple other teams to simultaneously collapse.

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2 Responses to “Roundup 12/3/11”

  1. Ben Stuplisberger says:

    Wow, in the Tebow article they make him out to be a "noble savage." I'm surprised the writer can deliver his tome in an irony free manner.

  2. Jim Glass says:

    Local sportswriters don't strike me as the type who spend a lot of time with their noses in spreadsheets, so I suspect BB was telling them to pull their heads out of somewhere else. :-)

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