Harvard - Panthers bottom 10 team in 2015

[pstall]

Rebel Yale

[PizzaTheHutt]

you beat me to it! Was my first reaction (and I AM a nerd lol)

[hepcat]

http://abovethelaw.com/2014/01/harvard-law-students-are-the-best-at-making-up-fake-transcripts/

 

Probably made up metrics and stats anyway

[pantherphan96]

Nerds.

[Snake]

Was talking to a girl the other day that is graduating collage with a major in Physical therapy. She wanted to argue that Football and most sports beside Running and Soccer do don't burn many calories and do not require you to be in top shape.  She was looking at it from a pure statistical analytic way that muscles don't burn many calories if they require quick burst of action without duration. So she concluded that Football is not a very athletic sport. This ranking is exactly the same way because anyone who plays football or any sport knows it requires tons of endurance and stamina, just like we know the Dolphins and the Jets are not going to be good. 

 

[Plewis]

Was talking to a girl the other day that is graduating collage with a major in Physical therapy. She wanted to argue that Football and most sports beside Running and Soccer do don't burn many calories and do not require you to be in top shape.  She was looking at it from a pure statistical analytic way that muscles don't burn many calories if they require quick burst of action without duration. So she concluded that Football is not a very athletic sport. This ranking is exactly the same way because anyone who plays football or any sport knows it requires tons of endurance and stamina, just like we know the Dolphins and the Jets are not going to be good. 

 

You watch 2 guys wrestle and you're like oh... they ain't doing much and that's kinda gay.

 

Then you start wrestling and it's extremely tiring and requires lots of stamina. plus it's still pretty gay.

[Daddy_Uncle]

Tell them nerds to shut up. They don't even know what football is

[arbnranger]

I wish I could come up with something witty to say to the author like Matt Damon did at the Harvard bar in Good Will Hunting . But, I can't...so .. Suck it nerd.

[PhillyB]

Colleges are allways outta touch with reality.

i kno rite

[caatfan]

Dave Glenn was making fun of this stupid ranking method on the radio today. Said it was more Kindergarden than Harvard. 

[Devil Doc]

Since Junior Gallette Was Released how are them Harvard Stats now? Hahaha

[shaka]

I work with math and models (not the Igo kind, the nerd kind) occasionally at my job.  Here are my issues with this article:
 

• Uses Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value statistic as a be-all end-all metric. Then immediately from the description of Approximate Value: 

"AV is not meant to be a be-all end-all metric. Football stat lines just do not come close to capturing all the contributions of a player the way they do in baseball and basketball."

• Does not account for team depth by choosing relatively random players.  The top 4 front seven?  Really?  Why not the top 7 front seven?  
• Does not account for injuries
• Rookies have the same value as backups.  That means Devin Funchess has the same value right now as Jason Avant or Marcus Lucas?  
• Ran linear regression with last years data for Elo ratings and found a high correlation which means fart noises pfffffffffffffffttttttttttttttt who cares

No seriously the last point is where statistically he's correct but logically he's really flawed.  Naturally you want to test your model against historical data, but the results aren't really surprising.  It's highly correlated...it should be!  He's taking the final AV of players (which accounts for team success in some way)  and is saying teams with the most AV win more.  The more successful teams are successful?  Well...yes, its right there in the definition of AV.  

 

Using it to project forward is essentially worthless, especially when you're cherry picking your observations.  If he did this based on the entire offensive or defensive rosters and came up with projected rankings I would consider it a little more but it's nothing more than a July fluff piece with some statistical bologna thrown in there.  Not shitting on the guys statistics, they seem to be pretty sound, but the lack of common sense in the application is hard to swallow.  

 

 

[motocross_cat]

i kno rite

glad you get it.

[Scrumtrilescent]

You never just use one test to model a very heterogeneous dataset.  But I did a T-test one time in college!!