SB Nation User Blog: Elihu

"Something for Joey" on ESPN Classic tonight

Elihu — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:56:48 -0000

ESPN Classic is showing "Something for Joey" tonight (Sunday) at 8:00 Eastern time. For those of you that haven't seen it and have ESPN Classic, now you can finally see it. Of course, if you have seen it and want to watch it again, you could do that, as well.

I wasn't whether to do this as a fanpost or fanshot, but decided that there really wasn't a link or specific image to post so I went with the fanpost. I really hope that by now I have met the seventy-five word minimum.

Yellow-Out -- Lame Excuse Poll

Elihu — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:49:28 -0000

via assets.sbnation.com

As a public service to Pitt fans, I think we should come up with the best lame excuse for this yellow-out picture. I bet some of you can come up with better excuses than what is listed in this poll. Add yours as comments & if enough people reply to your idea, I will add it to the poll. (I'm assuming I can add items later. If not, we're stuck with what I came up with.)

Poll

The explanation for this picture is:

Pitt scientists are working on a top secret invisibility project for the military. This picture shows how successful they are.

13 votes

If too many people gather in one place, it would be too inviting a target for terrorists. If more people were in this picture, the terrorists would win.

26 votes

There are more people attending the game, but they all just happened to go to the bathroom at the same time.

24 votes

63 votes | Poll has closed

You can ask DC a question

Elihu — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:53:03 -0000

You can ask DC a question

Sporting News Today has a feature that lets you send in questions to a sports personality. They pick the five best questions & publish the them with the answers. Today, they have Darryl Clark listed. Go to the link above or below and at the bottom, left of the page they have the info.
http://www.sportingnewstoday.com/20090603/?pg=3

Bradley talked to BC

Elihu — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:57:06 -0000

Bradley talked to BC

I think BC knew they wanted to hire Spaziani, but I thought it was interesting that they talked with Bradley. Maybe Scraps is looking to get out, too.

Take 2: Comparing how teams did against their opponents' averages

Elihu — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:00:58 -0000

I changed the spreadsheet. There isn't any new data, but I added a function to calculate the values. This makes the formulas on the spreadsheet simpler, but adds more processing behind the scenes. What does this mean to you? If you just want to see the deltas for the teams that were listed before, you don't need to get the new copy. There isn't any new data. If you want to be able to add more teams or other stats, it is much easier to do now. There are notes at the bottom of the spreadsheet describing how to add things.

Thanks for all the comments on the original fanpost (http://www.blackshoediaries.com/2008/12/17/695763/comparing-how-teams-did-ag). I realize this doesn't give you an exact comparison of different teams. I'm hoping it could be a starting point for getting others to consider how distorting some straight stats are without a reference point. If somebody wanted to play with the function to use standard deviations, etc. that would be great, but I'm not planning to do that. By adding the function and simplifying the data on the spreadsheet, I hoped to make that easier for someone else to do.

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/delta.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/Delta.htm

Comparing how teams did against their opponents' averages

Elihu — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:02:25 -0000

I wondered how to make more sense of some of the statistics we see when people try to compare teams that don't play each other. I thought it would be interesting to see how a team did compared to what that team's opponents averaged. What I mean is that if a team averages 150 rushing yards a game against teams that average giving up 100 rushing yards a game, that is more impressive than averaging 175 yards rushing a game against teams that average giving up 200 yards rushing a game. So, anyway, I did a first cut at a spreadsheet that compares yards passing, yards rushing and points for both offense and defense for some of the top teams. I found the results interesting. USC's defense is more impressive than I thought it would be. I plan to make some changes to how I calculate the values to make it easier to work with, but I posted what I have so far. Please reply if you have any questions or comments.

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/delta.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/Delta.htm

New BCS Spreadsheet - 12/8

Elihu — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:00:59 -0000

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

East Carolina, Buffalo & Rutgers all showed up for the first time in the human polls since I started doing this, so they got added to my spreadsheet.

Remember that I caclulate the number of human voters in each poll based on the total points. So if you are playing with the values for teams, the total points has to stay the same. If you add 20 points to one team, you must subtract exactly 20 points from one or more other teams.

New BCS Spreadsheet - 12/1 (Posted 12/3)

Elihu — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:50:10 -0000

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

Sorry this is so late. I made some changes to my resume that is linked to by the spreadsheet & I wanted to get that up before posting this. So, if you find yourself looking for a talented & experienced software engineer for an job in Massachusetts, be sure to check out my resume. Thanks.

New BCS Spreadsheet - 11/24 (Posted 11/25)

Elihu — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:05:44 -0000

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

A couple of notes:

Massey's web site says that Georgia is 7th & USC 8th, but the official BCS standings seem to indicate they are reversed. It might be that the Massey website includes Sunday's game that had some affect. I used the values from the Massey web site.

Since I calculate the number of voters based on the total points in the human polls, if you play around with the points for some team(s), you should make sure that the total number of points in that human poll is the same. Meaning, that if you add 20 points to one team, you need to subtract a total of 20 points from one or more other teams.

New BCS Spreadsheet - 11/17

Elihu — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:21:58 -0000

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

I've made some more behind the scenes changes to have it more automated. It will now calculate the number of voters for the two human polls instead of me having to add up the number of first place votes listed. (One of the polls had 113 voters this week instead of the usual 114.) It will also search for the row containing James Madison instead of me having to keep track and pass that row number to the function. (Any team ranked lower than JMU in a computer poll gets bumped up a place.)