Harvard Sports Analysis Collective

Regarding: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/sports/ncaabasketball/16score.html?_r=1&ref=sports
  ————— 
If the Berger-Pope study (NY Times, March 15) becomes widely accepted, we eventually will see accounts like this.
                             WILEY’S BRILLIANT PLOY
Battling against University’s fabulous five for the National Championship, State trailed by a single point as halftime approached.  We know from Berger and Pope’s work that wins stem more often from one point […]

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HSAC was mentioned in an article about a Harvard grad who founded a fantasy baseball company.  I hope you find it interesting.  http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526940

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Rondo’s Triple 14.
Rajon Rondo’s triple double Wed night in Boston’s comeback win
over Dallas involved 19 points, 15 rebounds, and 14 assists.  His
“max-min” of 14 (14 maximizes the minimum category) means he
actually actually had a “triple 14″.

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My below response is regarding an HSAC discussion about ‘proportional point-spread hypothesis’ that we’ve been having over the past several days.  It started as follows: Professor Morris, inspired by the early lead Arizona took over the Eagles, posed a question regarding point spreads, specifically, how the points should be thought of as being distributed over […]

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Chris Paul (New Orleans) just set the streak record for steals.  He “only” averaged 2.69 steals, so how did he avoid games with 0 steals?  If the Poisson distribution applies, mean 2.69 steals/game = 285 steals/106 games, he should have had about 7 games with no steals in 106 games. But he had none.  Zero!  […]

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As you know, the Patriots “need help” in order to reach the playoffs, partly because they hold no tie breakers if they tie another contender in the standings.
If we assume NE beats Arizona (home) and Buffalo (away) they’ll be 11-5 (that’s no slam dunk, maybe around 50%?), what then is their chance […]

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Tampa Bay won their 18 game season series with Boston, 10 games to 8 (and took the AL East pennant by those 2 games, exactly).  Past wins decide titles, but in comparison to runs scored, how much should past won/lost records be counted when making predictions?   Bill James’ “Pythagorean” formula (also implemented in ESPN’s “Cool […]

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Mike Greenwell has just been voted into to the Red Sox’ HOF. On Sep. 2, 1996 he had one of the most amazing offensive games ever, batting in all 9 runs in a Red Sox 9-8 win over Seattle. Five other players have had more RBI in a game (the record is […]

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I was quoted by Alan Schwarz in his NY Times Sports article
Jan 29, 2008 about a 1/29,000 chance of a 3-team trifecta in
one city.   Click here for the article.
Alan and I both have been asked about this number,
    E.g.   “Where did the “1-in-29,000 come from?
            Is that based on winning the championship,
            having the best […]

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I want to congratulate HSAC for having a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Our paper, written by (alphabetically) Alex Ahmed, Alex D’Amour, Bobby Swift, Brad Oglevee, Carl Morris, Drew Peterson, Haibo Lu, and Rohit Acharya entitled “Improving Major League Baseball Park Factor Estimates” was accepted just before the […]

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