" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

This is a basketball blog.
But this is also a statistics blog.  And the statistics say that 8 out of my last 11 eleven posts have been out about football.  There are three reasons I can identify for this:

I generally blog about what interests me (within the general realm of college athletics) and, at the moment, [...]

Football Outsiders, the leading purveyors of advanced football statistics, are concerned about Javon Ringer’s workload to date, comparing him to current Lion Kevin Smith, who carried the ball 450 times for Central Florida last season:
One of the factors at least partially mitigating Smith’s huge workload last year was that he was playing in Conference USA [...]

Bad News: This is another football post.
Good News: At least the post is based on statistical analysis.
(Bad/good from the standpoint that this blog’s tagline used to be “A statistical look at Michigan State basketball.”)
Brian Hoyer remains an enigma to Spartan fans.  His season stats are pretty mediocre to date: 59-127 (46.5%) for 961 yards (7.6 [...]

Note: It was a busy Saturday at the Spartans Weblog residence, so I only saw about three-quarters of the game.  These musings are, therefore, even more random than my normal football musings.  Nevertheless:

Another monumental performance by Javon Ringer: 198 yards on 44 carries.  The offensive/special teams touch counts are now up to 203 for Ringer [...]

First, a few basketball links:

Eric Lacy reports that Athlon has MSU ranked #14 in their preseason magazine.
Tom Herzog talks about the student part of being a student-athlete. He’s an applied engineering sciences major.  (Hat tip: Spartan Sports Page.)
24 hours straight (roughly) of basketball on the ESPN family of networks to tip-off the season! The Purdue [...]

Nifty graph from the Big Ten Geeks: efficiency margin vs. percentage of returning minutes.  The data indicate Purdue, MIchigan State, and Wisconsin are in good shape.  Indiana, not so much.
In two years, the talent level in the conference looks like it may jump a notch.  UMHoops notes that 12 of the 38 top-150 recruits for [...]

Must . . . not . . . get . . . emotionally . . . invested . . . in . . . MSU . . . football . . . team.
We’re now just 25 days from Midnight Madness (Friday, October 17; haven’t seen any details yet).  Let’s chat about how this basketball team [...]