Curse You, Nate Silver

OK, not really. I am a big fan of the Silver one, and his application of quantfied reasoning to realms rife with superstition.

But his Super Bowl Analysis got me wondering about the data. He uses a stat called SRS, Simple Ranking System, from pro-football-reference.com. They have a nice linear algebra explanation of it on their blog. Mr. Silver used this stat to consider whether good defense or good offense was more conducive to winning. By looking at the top 20 in each category, he concludes defense is the key. Or more of a key than offense.

Always fabulous and frequently mathy Foxtrot.

I got to wondering about the differences. Maybe what mattered was your offense to opponents defense, or vice versa. I started putting his data into a spreadsheet, but because teams are rarely exceptionally good at both (exceptions 68 Colts, 96 Packers), there wasn't enough data. I was surprised to find that Pro Football Reference is free and an awesome resource for data. So I started filling in a spreadsheet, figured I'd tumblr it and people could fill in the rest if they were interested.

I got hooked, which is why I say, "Curse you, Nate Silver."

Turns out my idea about the differences was only mildy predictive. I took NFC Offense - AFC Defense and compared to AFC Offense - NFC Defense. ("How is that different from NFC Total SRS  - AFC Total SRS?" I would ask students if I had them this semester.) Here's the Google spreadsheet.


There's definitely some things to notice there. My next thoughts were to compare defenses, offenses, and finally to look where those two agree.


Bad news for Baltimore. When a team is favored in defense and offense, they've won about 3/4 of the time. So Raven fans you should be getting 3:1 odds when most people are feeling it's pretty close. Looking at these numbers, you could consider it the 4th or 5th biggest upset should Baltimore win. No 68 Jets or 07 Giants, but significant.

What do you notice about the data?

Premier League - welcome back!

After the usual tedium of the International games  the Premier League is back this weekend. Now, you're probably wondering why on earth I'm commenting on this on my NQT Mathematics blog!? Well, it's because with the premier league games returning so does my weekend 'routine'.

Throughout my GTP year last year my weekend's largely consisted of planning lessons, marking books, creating resources etc all whilst watching whatever game was on that weekend and of course Jeff and the boys on Soccer Saturday. This may not sound like everybody's 'ideal' weekend and I'm sure it's not, but for me it allows me to get everything done that I need to whilst enjoying the things I enjoy at the same time. Having the football on in the background whilst working has been a successful working environment for me and it doesn't get in the way of the things I need to do. Now, compare this with someone who, for example, likes going cycling of a weekend, going shopping, cooking etc I can't see the two things being able to happen simultaneously - and a lot of people would suggest that they shouldn't be. But it works for me and that, I suppose, is my point...with the sheer amount of work that comes with being a teacher (not just an NQT) it is finding what works, for you.

It's not only a working environment that the football allows me either - last year I created this Soccer Saturday ppt display to have up in class at the start of my lessons. The ppt slide contains all the key information students need for the lesson and even includes scrolling text. It is all based around the Sky Sports News info screen/vidiprinter whilst the football results are coming through. As of yet I haven't used this in class this year, but having reminded myself of this, with the return of Jeff and the boys, I am pretty sure it'll be featuring in M6 (my classroom) this week!