" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

Don’t mess with the Big Ten:
If you’re a great defensive team, you aren’t going to score as many points just because you don’t have as many possessions, because it’s going to take– if you’re a great defensive team and a great offensive team, you still only get so many shots, you’re only going to score [...]

Amen.
Unfortunately, I’m going to guess Digger Phelps will be taking a different methodological approach.

OK, it’s already “later tonight” and the all-Big Ten selections have been released.
Your Spartan awardees:

Kalin Lucas was selected as the conference Player of the Year–and a first-team all-conference pick–by both the coaches and the media.  Chalk up another rock-solid preseason prediction for the all-knowing, all-seeing Spartans Weblog.  (You’ll recall that Lucas didn’t even make the [...]

Rankings Update

AP: #8 (up from #9)
Coaches: #8 (up from #9)
Blogpoll: #8 (up from #9)
Sagarin: #6 (up from #7)
Kenpom: #12 (steady from last week)
RPI: #4 (up from #5)
Bracketology: #2 seed (up from #3 seed)
Crashing the Dance: #2 seed (steady from last week)

Question (that I do not know the answer to): Could we be placed in the [...]

Rankings Update

AP: #13 (down from #9)
Coaches: #14 (down from #9)
Sagarin: #11 (down from #8)
Kenpom: #21 (steady from last week)
RPI: #5 (steady from last week)
Bracketology: #3 seed (down from #3 seed)
Crashing the Dance: #3 seed

Purdue is ranked one spot ahead of us in both the human polls, reflecting that we’re now basically back to being dead [...]

PORPAG
Points Over Replacement Per Adjusted Game
Baseball statistics were my first love, so I thought it would be fun to cook up something as obscure as VORP or BABIP.
But let’s back up:
There was some conversation following my last scatterplot post about how to appropriately interpret the graph in terms of which players have played most effectively [...]

With the offensive rating/usage rate scatterplot phenomenon rapidly spreading through the Big Ten blogsophere (OK, one other guy decided to make one), I was inspired to produced another scatterplot of my own.  Here it is:

The scatterplot includes the top two scorers on every Big Ten team (except for IU’s Devan Dumes, whose offensive rating of [...]