statistics

Oh man, this is not gonna help our IsoPPP+ [Patrick Barron]

I will get back on the UFR horse soon, promise, but every January/February I like to grab all of the year's play-by-play data, painstakingly repair the damaged bits, and recreate the information that (other) internet nerds used to. This all goes into those stat boxes I make for HTTV, which I've started working on in earnest the last few weeks.

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While I'm at it I thought it might be useful to put together a companion piece to discuss the statistical profile of Michigan and other teams of interest. I also figured I could make it a reference point for those boxes in the future, and also explain some of my decisions.

Feedback is most welcome; I took Stats 404 in college and have been trying to figure out the rest as I go.

Resources:

  • College Football Data (CFBD). A good starting point. Free. You can download tons of raw stuff from them, including play-by-play and drive data. A lot of it's in admittedly rough shape, but they've done the hard part of scouring NCAA box scores.
  • Football Outsiders. Most stuff free. Home of FEI and its NFL equivalent, DVOA. Fremeau's Efficiency Index is based on drive efficiency.
  • 247 Database. Compare against rosters to see who's coming and going.
  • Pro Football Focus. Their grading is suspect but they have all kinds of useful snap data.
  • Bill Connelly. SP+ rankings remain the most predictive of all fancystats.

Also I did a data dump on Tempo.

[Hit THE JUMP for the deep nerding.]

This saved ND a lot of yards. Nico deserves credit for 15 at least. [Patrick Barron]

Not enough of you know about collegefootballdata.com, which pulls an entire season's play by play data. With not too much extra work you can download this and find out all kinds of things that we used to lazily rely on Bill Connelly to provide. Like for example, returning Big Ten receivers who had 20+ targets sorted by yards per target when you include pass interference:

[Discussed after THE JUMP]

This won't get you a whistle. [Marc-Grégor Campredon]

It began with a conversation over Morgan & York sandwiches about why Michigan is always behind the rest of the country in free throw rate. The question is how do players, and teams, consistently "draw" fouls. And it bothered me that the rhetorical answers sounded more like Stephen Bardo/Dan Dakich truthisms than scientific wisdom.

  • To the aggressive go the spoils.
  • Star players earn respect from the refs.
  • You gotta be a man to play in the Big Ten
  • Fouling that guy is smart because he's only a 60% free throw shooter
  • That's the kind of call you get at home.

Except one. The simple answer is you earn whistles by going to the rim (and Michigan doesn't go to the rim). This turns out to be as true as it is obvious:

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An r-squared of 0.35 says these things are connected, but it's clearly not the only thing going on. So I figured I'd do this: substitute an expected free throw rate based on % of shots at the rim, then look at other numbers and see if there are any patterns.

And where better to start than the Dakisms, each with a ring of truth:

  • More off-balance defenders around you equals more opportunities for one to foul you.
  • The nature of good rim players is they can contort themselves to turn attempted blocks into glancing contact
  • The Big Ten does seem to officiate more loosely than other conferences (we notice this at tournament time every year)
  • Hack-a-Shaq is a thing, though when you account for the value of a foul to count both against one of your player's five and in the bonus/double-bonus math, it's not quite the 0.60 PPP you think it is.
  • Home court advantage is a proven thing, and was a wild runaway thing in the Big Ten through January (a span over which Michigan had the misfortune to play 6/9 conference games on the road).

Not to mention refs are a breed of fallible humans who have their own ideas of what for and when to blow a whistle, and are influenced more or less by yelly coaches, and grew up hating Michigan, and are committed to screwing us because of something Bo said about Jim Delany, and there's a great conspiracy…

Let's try math instead.

[After THE JUMP: Math.]