HSAC is a Harvard student organization dedicated to quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management. This blog is student-run and features the original contributions of Harvard undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and affiliates. HSAC does research for several blogs and newspapers. Please contact us at harvardsportsanalysis@gmail.com with questions about our work or if you are a blog or newspaper interested in our research services.

Ivy League Hoops and Efficiency Margins

By John Ezekowitz

One very effective statistical measure to analyze college basketball is Efficiency Margin. The concept behind EM, like a lot of the best stats, is sublimely simple: track how many points per possession teams score and allow, and see which teams have a positive margin. A team that wins a 70-60 game with 60 possessions is said to have an Efficiency Margin of .1 (1.1 Points per Possession – 1.0 points allowed). The losing team would have a -.1 EM.

The incomparable John Gasaway at Basketball Prospectus has done a great job popularizing the stat, and every Tuesday he tracks the EM’s for the 10 biggest college basketball conferences during conference play. But what of the Ivy League, HSAC’s little corner of the college basketball world? Although much of the drama was taken out of the conference title race by Harvard’s two losses, Princeton has risen up as an unexpected challenger to Cornell’s hegemony. After the jump, I have compiled the Efficiency Margins for the Ancient Eight, with interesting results.

Part II: The NFL Wedge Ban & Its Effect on Kick Returns (Super Bowl Hype Edition)

By Jonathan Adler

The NFL outlawed the wedge in 2009

Earlier this season, I examined whether the NFL wedge blocking ban had meaningfully affected kickoff returns through the first eight games. (View November’s post) Back then, at the season’s midway point, I found that the wedge ban had not caused a statistically significant change in kick return length. But a lot has changed since November. The Seahawks hired Pete Carroll, the Redskins fired Jim Zorn, and Al Davis spent New Year’s shooting bullets at Tom Cable’s feet screaming, “Dance, Cable! Dance!” The past few months have brought considerable changes to the league, but was the effect of the wedge ban one of them?

Intended to enhance player safety, the ban prohibits more than two players from blocking together. Before the ban’s first season, coaches, players, and the media wondered whether new blocking schemes would result in free-running kick returners or dominating coverage units. Now that the 2009 regular season has concluded, we can see the complete results.

The New Golf Math: Bringing the Stat Revolution to the PGA Tour

By John Ezekowitz

While other sports such as baseball and basketball have had statistical revolutions over the past decade or so, golf has been stuck in the stats dark ages. Watch a PGA Tour broadcast and you will see the same stats quoted over and over again: putts, greens in regulation, fairways hit, driving distance, total putting, sand saves, etc. Perhaps, if one is lucky, there will be a stat about a player’s average distance from the hole.

While these stats are important, just as say points are in basketball or batting average in baseball, they are often flawed indicators of success or efficiency (as those two aforementioned stats also happen to be). Now that PGA Tour Shot Tracker can give us information on literally every shot hit on the PGA Tour, its high time golf had its statistical revolution. Join me after the jump as I propose the first in a series of new stats for golf.

(Supplement to the) Guest Post on the LoHud Yankees Blog

By David Roher

I wrote a guest post for the LoHud Yankees Blog that appears this morning. I’m very grateful to Chad Jennings and Sam Borden for giving me the opportunity to write a piece for the best beat blog in the business. The post is about Joe Girardi’s decision to have Jose Molina catch A.J. Burnett in the playoffs, instead of having Jorge Posada do it.

But it’s really an introduction to an idea of mine, Result-Change Probability. I suggest you read the article for more info on it. I’ll be developing it more later as we approach Opening Day. I’ll take the space here to clarify/expand some points I made over at LoHud.

The Media, Mark McGwire, and Chew

By David Roher

Mark McGwire may have taken steroids, but he didn’t get the mileage out of them that Mike Lupica has.

Lupica benefited from the 1998 home run chase, publishing a book about it a few months after its conclusion. Unlike McGwire and Sammy Sosa, however, Lupica isn’t under any scrutiny for his ‘98 output. Few question the media’s lackluster effort to discover the performance-enhancing drug problem. Rather, the steroid era continues to provide material for his columns. Whenever there’s any PED-related news, Lupica is bound to say something. He didn’t disappoint after McGwire’s belated admission yesterday. Absent, as usual, was any hint of contrition about trusting Mac in the first place.

The most damaging aspect about Lupica’s and others’ take on steroids isn’t the selective memory, though. It’s their myopic focus on the benefit of the drugs. There’s a lot of anger that McGwire wouldn’t say that steroids helped him hit home runs. I admit that this is a dubious claim, but the fact is that we don’t know for sure about how many extra home runs he hit as a result. I would guess that the addition of two expansion teams in ‘98, which decreased the average talent level across the league, inflated home run totals more than steroids did. (Roger Maris hit 61 in an expansion year as well.) A change in the composition of the ball itself, a popular theory at the time, still hasn’t been ruled out.

What Went Wrong with the Hall of Fame Vote

By David Roher

At least no one voted for Pat Buchanan.

It seems to me that most of the negative response to this afternoon’s Hall of Fame vote is going to be focused on Andre Dawson’s getting in, which is unfortunate. I wouldn’t have voted for him, but he’s a borderline case, and, no matter what, a great ballplayer who had an excellent career.

I hope that most people focus on the deserving candidates who didn’t get in, like Bert Blyleven, Roberto Alomar (both of whom will almost certainly get elected next year), Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez and Barry Larkin, among others.

There are a lot of reasons that the BBWAA might have overlooked these guys, but I think the answer is pretty simple: BBWAA voters don’t appear to change the number of candidates that they vote for, regardless of the number of qualified candidates.

Does Coach Age Predict Performance? (Yes, but be careful.)

By David Roher

I’m introducing the Speed Limit Coaching Corollary. If the coach of your favorite team is older than 55, or if your team is about to hire someone who’s older than 55, there’s a good chance you should start preparing for a frustrating stretch of football. — Bill Simmons

When I was developing the overweight coaches study, I figured it’d be a good idea to record each coach’s age. Given the tendency for weight problems to occur in our more advanced years, age could have been a confounding variable, one that affected both RAP and whether or not the coach was overweight.

It wasn’t. But I realized that age would be just as interesting to look at alone. After all, Bobby Bowden is stepping down as Florida State’s head coach after the Gator Bowl, and there’s a lot of thought that his age has prevented him from leading FSU effectively. And unlike the weight analysis, where I had to act like I was the only the judge on a version of “The Biggest Loser” without any scales, the number in question is freely available for every coach. So I decided to look at age using Simmons’ above column as the framework for the 2008 and 2009 seasons. He was focusing on the NFL, but D-I football is a good substitute.

The result? The Sports Guy is definitely on to something: among older coaches, there is a negative correlation between RAP and age. But correlation does not equal causation, and there are plenty of exceptions. Much older coaches like Bowden don’t have much to do with it and thus still shouldn’t be discriminated against.

What is the chance of an NBA comeback when down by 35?

By Professor Carl Morris

The Kings mounted the second largest comeback in NBA history.

The Sacramento Kings came back to win on Monday night (Dec 21), when down by 35 points against the Bulls in Chicago with 20 minutes and 50 seconds (20:50) left.  When two even NBA teams play the chance that the trailing team would win from that situation is about one in 24,000.  Let’s take an in-depth look at the calculation…

What Do Professional Athletes Have in Common With Bankers?

By Daniel Adler

Jerry Jones and his owner brethren and Bud Fox and his Wall Street cronies are both indebted to the government for some of their riches

Today, we will examine two industries.  Neither produces a tangible product.  Both have close ties to the government and receive billions of dollars in government assistance.  Both pay their top performers millions of dollars.

Wall Street firms such as AIG, which received $90 billion in government funds, and sports teams such as the Dallas Cowboys, who received roughly $325 million to build the monument to excess that is Cowboys Stadium, have more in common than being run by white males.  Employees in both industries reap huge benefits due to government assistance.

No Less Worth Despite Their Girth: A Study of Overweight Coaches

By David Roher

If you missed Saturday’s post on RAP, a new college coaching stat, you should read it here.

Do heftier coaches like Mark Mangino perform worse as a whole?

When Kansas’ Mark Mangino and Notre Dame’s Charlie Weis departed at the end of the regular season, many took the opportunity to mention their weight problems. Most of it is as a joke. But some are very serious: Jason Whitlock said Mangino’s weight was at the core of his poor performance and firing.

After these events, and an HSAC board meeting in which the topic was suggested, I decided to see if heavy-set college football coaches performed any differently than their less corpulent counterparts. The result? According to RAP, in 2008 and 2009, coaches performed the same regardless of whether they were overweight. For more details into the study and the results, read on.