Friday, October 25, 2013

Applying sports econ to fantasy football

Sit down and pull out a piece of paper, class is in session. Today’s lesson is about competitive balance. We hear this terminology a lot and we have no idea what it means or if it is even a good thing. Let’s face it, we all want a chance to win the championship but each year there are 11 of us who deserved to be called losers. And looking at the season at the half way point, there are four teams that have a legitimate shot at winning. The undefeated Herdsmen, Ladies dig football (and handing out loses to a bunch of middle aged has been dudes), Pat man, and Kronk th Gronk. (You can break into our Sesame Street one of these is not like the other, but you all know it to be true #winningattitude #don’twastemyflavor #that’showiroll #dealwithit.)

But let me introduce a new measure of competitive balance to all you students. It is based on a little subject called statistics. It is simple enough, measure the standard deviation of winning percentage. You want an equation, I got that too.


Calculating the standard deviation of winning percentage this year shows that the Pac 12 division (std dev of wpct = .228) is much more balanced than the Big 12 (std dev of wpct = .305).
Comparing this to other sports leagues, the NBA is the most unbalanced sport with a NS standard deviation of winning percentage of 2.71. NFL and MLB have a measurement of 1.66 and 1.69 respectively.  

So what it the purpose of this post? I just want to let Blazers and Snipers know that you’re doing okay. In fact it can be argued that you are better than the Houston Astros, Tampa Bay Yucks, and the Jacksonville Jaguars.  #cheerup #itcouldbeworse

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