The University of Maryland bought out the head coaching contract of Ralph Friedgen in 2010. So given there has been some time since his departure, I thought that I would return and look at Maryland's performance under head football coach Randy
Edsall over the last two years (who was the former head football coach of the University of Connecticut) as compared to the 2008, 2009 and 2010 seasons under head football coach Ralph Friedgen.
First let's take a look at the production of the University of Maryland Terrapins football team for the last three years under Friedgen. Starting with the 2008 season, the Univ. of Maryland football team finished 8-5 overall including a Humanitarian Bowl victory over Nevada. Maryland finished as the #70 most productive team in the Football Bowl Subdivision using my Complex Invasion College Football Production Model Ranking, which is below average for the "league" as a whole. The Terrapins were below average on offense, with the #77 ranked most productive offense. On the defensive side of the ball, Maryland was almost average - with the #62 most productive defense. All of this against an average (strength of schedule (SOS) = 57.46) than the 2008 season's average SOS of 62.94. Maryland's most impressive victory came against the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model #14 ranked California Bears of the Pac 10, and their worst performance was a 31-0 loss to the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model #94 ranked University of Virginia Cavaliers.
In 2009, in terms of the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model Maryland was ranked #107 in terms of overall production, which
was one of the worst teams in the FBS that year, facing a strength of
schedule equal to 54.50 - which is average as compared to the average SOS for 2009 of (62.97) and finished 2-10 in the regular season. Maryland's
best win was against the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model #11 Clemson and
their worst loss was to the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model #100 Virginia again.
In what turns out to be head coach Friedgen's last year (2010) as head football coach in terms of the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model Maryland finished the regular season at 8-4 and was victorious in the Military Bowl over East Carolina to finish 9-4. Maryland finished as the #28 most productive team overall in the football bowl subdivision with the
#45 ranked offense and the #21 ranked defense. The Terps faced an average strength of schedule of 63.85 as compared to the overall league SOS of 63.05. Maryland's
best win using the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model was against #37 North Carolina
State and their worst loss was to the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model #50
Clemson Tigers.
Notice that Maryland had significantly increased their on-field production in 2010 as compared to 2009 or 2008, and yet Friedgen was bought out. So how has the football team performed under the last two seasons under new head football coach Randy Edsall?
Under Edsall's tenure Maryland has been rather pitiful. Starting with the first year with Edsall in charge (2011) we see that Maryland finished the regular season at 2-10 and in terms of the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model the Terrapins were the #96 most productive team in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Maryland played against an average SOS (64.50) as compared to the league average SOS of 63.57. Maryland's offense from the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model was ranked #84 and their defense was ranked #96. All-in-all not the best start for Edsall.
The big news for Maryland in 2012 was the announcement that they will be changing conferences, moving from the ACC to the Big 10. I have a short overview of the Terps in 2012 around the time of their announcement. Now that the season is complete, let's take a final look at the Terps in 2012. Edsall's team finished 4-8 overall playing against a SOS of 67.50 which is within the average range of schedule strengths given the "league's" SOS for 2012 was 65.53. In terms of the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model, Maryland finished as the #94 ranked team overall with the #114 offense, but having the #33 defense. So while Maryland had difficulty with the football last season, they were above average without the ball. The Terps best game was a 27-20 win over #86 Complex Invasion College Football Production Model ranked Virginia, and their worst performance was a 17-20 loss over Complex Invasion College Football Production Model ranked #100 Boston College.
Maryland's defensive productivity is a glimmer of hope for next season given an otherwise dismal season. If Maryland's defense can replicate their defensive performance from 2012 and improve their offensive performance, Maryland looks to be much better overall. Those are two big "ifs", but that is why they play the games.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
NCAA FBS Competitive Balance - Part III
Previously I have looked at competitive balance in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) for all games played in a season (regular season FBS games, regular season Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) games and post-season bowl games), and then for just regular season (FBS and FCS) games. Now what I want to do is just look at regular season games against only by FBS teams. To do that I have deleted all the standings data associated with football opponents that at the time were not FBS teams.
To provide some perspective, I have included in the table below all three Noll-Scully competitive balance measures for the 2002 through 2012 NCAA FBS seasons. You will notice that competitive balance is about 6% worse using only the regular season FBS standings data (column 3) as compared to the full standings data (column 1). Given that the Big 10 and SEC conference have been talking about increasing the number of regular season conference games, I would expect that competitive balance would actually decrease by a small amount, as some teams that would have played an FCS school (and most likely won that game), will now have to play against a better opponent and have a lower winning percentage and thus lead to more competitive imbalance (higher Noll-Scully number).
To provide some perspective, I have included in the table below all three Noll-Scully competitive balance measures for the 2002 through 2012 NCAA FBS seasons. You will notice that competitive balance is about 6% worse using only the regular season FBS standings data (column 3) as compared to the full standings data (column 1). Given that the Big 10 and SEC conference have been talking about increasing the number of regular season conference games, I would expect that competitive balance would actually decrease by a small amount, as some teams that would have played an FCS school (and most likely won that game), will now have to play against a better opponent and have a lower winning percentage and thus lead to more competitive imbalance (higher Noll-Scully number).
| Season | Full | Regular | Regular FBS | |||
| 2002 | 1.539 | 1.527 | 1.651 | |||
| 2003 | 1.612 | 1.599 | 1.702 | |||
| 2004 | 1.462 | 1.458 | 1.549 | |||
| 2005 | 1.435 | 1.399 | 1.518 | |||
| 2006 | 1.579 | 1.560 | 1.633 | |||
| 2007 | 1.458 | 1.451 | 1.544 | |||
| 2008 | 1.458 | 1.466 | 1.588 | |||
| 2009 | 1.519 | 1.512 | 1.620 | |||
| 2010 | 1.526 | 1.508 | 1.581 | |||
| 2011 | 1.515 | 1.486 | 1.592 | |||
| 2012 | 1.579 | 1.561 | 1.698 | |||
| Average | 1.516 | 1.503 | 1.607 |
Thursday, June 20, 2013
NCAA FBS Competitive Balance - Part II
Yesterday I blogged about competitive balance for NCAA FBS from 2002 to 2012, and reported that the NCAA FBS is very similar to the NFL. I also gave a reason why different leagues of the same sport have similar levels of competitive balance, but different sports have different levels of competitive balance. Today, I want to clean up one issue that I mentioned yesterday - that the data I was using had both regular season and post-season (bowl games) results in the standings data. For comparison purposes, I will include the Noll-Scully competitive balance metric with the bowl games as well, which is the column labeled "Full" and just the regular season standings data labeled "Regular".
As you can see from the table above, the NCAA FBS "league" is a little more competitive without including the bowl game results. (Remember, the closer the Noll-Scully gets to one the more that the league would have an equal playing strength in a statistical sense). So, with the average over the time period moving from 1.516 to 1.503 over the last eleven years, competitive balance excluding the bowl games improves by less than one percent.
That still leaves the question about how much would the "leagues" competitive balance change if I excluded non-league games. Non-league games would be games played against FCS schools. I will work on figuring out which teams are FCS schools for the eleven seasons, and then drop them from the standings data and re-calculate the Noll-Scully competitive balance metric. I hope to get to this tomorrow, but no guarantees.
| Season | Full | Regular | ||
| 2002 | 1.539 | 1.527 | ||
| 2003 | 1.612 | 1.599 | ||
| 2004 | 1.462 | 1.458 | ||
| 2005 | 1.435 | 1.399 | ||
| 2006 | 1.579 | 1.560 | ||
| 2007 | 1.458 | 1.451 | ||
| 2008 | 1.458 | 1.466 | ||
| 2009 | 1.519 | 1.512 | ||
| 2010 | 1.526 | 1.508 | ||
| 2011 | 1.515 | 1.486 | ||
| 2012 | 1.579 | 1.561 | ||
| Average | 1.516 | 1.503 |
As you can see from the table above, the NCAA FBS "league" is a little more competitive without including the bowl game results. (Remember, the closer the Noll-Scully gets to one the more that the league would have an equal playing strength in a statistical sense). So, with the average over the time period moving from 1.516 to 1.503 over the last eleven years, competitive balance excluding the bowl games improves by less than one percent.
That still leaves the question about how much would the "leagues" competitive balance change if I excluded non-league games. Non-league games would be games played against FCS schools. I will work on figuring out which teams are FCS schools for the eleven seasons, and then drop them from the standings data and re-calculate the Noll-Scully competitive balance metric. I hope to get to this tomorrow, but no guarantees.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
How Balanced is NCAA FBS competition?
A question that I have been thinking about lately is how does the NCAA FBS compare in terms of competitiveness to other sports leagues? In other words, we hear a lot about one conference having the best teams overall, but that would mean that other teams in that conference would have to be some of the worst, since they play a majority of their games each season against excellent conference rivals. So how balanced is NCAA FBS football competition?
In our book, The Wages of Wins, we take a look at competitive balance using a measure devised by Roger Noll and Gerald Scully, which we call the Noll-Scully competitive balance measure. Basically, what it measures is the actual standard deviation of winning percent in a sports league relative to a standard deviation of winning percent if wins and losses were randomly distributed, using the binomial distribution. The closer a league gets to one the more balanced the league from a statistical viewpoint.
In The Wages of Wins, we report that for the NFL, from 1922-2006 that Noll-Scully competitive balance metric had an average of 1.56 and for the AFL (1960 - 1969) the Noll-Scully metric had an average of 1.58. We also show that other types of sports have similar measures of competitive balance among different leagues. One sport that we did not report was NCAA football, and here is a first pass at clearing up that oversight.
So, I got the NCAA football schedules from 2002 to 2012 and calculated each season's Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance. The first is with all the games that were played in each season, which includes both bowl (post-season) games and games against non-FBS teams. To be fair, when we calculated the Noll-Scully for the NFL and the AFL we did not include post-season games and there were no games against non-league opponents. In the coming days, I will re-calculate the Noll-Scully deleting out the post-season games and then deleting out games against non-FBS teams and report each in a separate blog post. As for now, here is the full sample over the last eleven years.
You will notice that the Noll-Scully does not change very much from one year to another and that the average over the 2002-2012 seasons is fairly similar to the NFL and AFL over the time periods reported in The Wages of Wins. This fits with our extension of Gould's hypothesis that the underlying population playing a sport has an impact on it's level of competitive balance. (Gould was trying to explain the disappearance of the 0.400 hitter in MLB). Our extension is that the increase in the underlying population of individuals playing a particular type of sport and having particular skills impacts the level of competitive balance in the sport. So we argue that given the tiny population of people seven foot or taller makes basketball less competitive than a sport like soccer which does not rely on drawing highly skilled players from such a small population. Given that soccer is the world's most played sport, it should be the most competitive and overall soccer has a lower Noll-Scully competitive balance measure than say hockey, baseball, or basketball.
In our book, The Wages of Wins, we take a look at competitive balance using a measure devised by Roger Noll and Gerald Scully, which we call the Noll-Scully competitive balance measure. Basically, what it measures is the actual standard deviation of winning percent in a sports league relative to a standard deviation of winning percent if wins and losses were randomly distributed, using the binomial distribution. The closer a league gets to one the more balanced the league from a statistical viewpoint.
In The Wages of Wins, we report that for the NFL, from 1922-2006 that Noll-Scully competitive balance metric had an average of 1.56 and for the AFL (1960 - 1969) the Noll-Scully metric had an average of 1.58. We also show that other types of sports have similar measures of competitive balance among different leagues. One sport that we did not report was NCAA football, and here is a first pass at clearing up that oversight.
So, I got the NCAA football schedules from 2002 to 2012 and calculated each season's Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance. The first is with all the games that were played in each season, which includes both bowl (post-season) games and games against non-FBS teams. To be fair, when we calculated the Noll-Scully for the NFL and the AFL we did not include post-season games and there were no games against non-league opponents. In the coming days, I will re-calculate the Noll-Scully deleting out the post-season games and then deleting out games against non-FBS teams and report each in a separate blog post. As for now, here is the full sample over the last eleven years.
| Season | NS | |
| 2002 | 1.539 | |
| 2003 | 1.612 | |
| 2004 | 1.462 | |
| 2005 | 1.435 | |
| 2006 | 1.579 | |
| 2007 | 1.458 | |
| 2008 | 1.458 | |
| 2009 | 1.519 | |
| 2010 | 1.526 | |
| 2011 | 1.515 | |
| 2012 | 1.579 | |
| Average | 1.516 |
You will notice that the Noll-Scully does not change very much from one year to another and that the average over the 2002-2012 seasons is fairly similar to the NFL and AFL over the time periods reported in The Wages of Wins. This fits with our extension of Gould's hypothesis that the underlying population playing a sport has an impact on it's level of competitive balance. (Gould was trying to explain the disappearance of the 0.400 hitter in MLB). Our extension is that the increase in the underlying population of individuals playing a particular type of sport and having particular skills impacts the level of competitive balance in the sport. So we argue that given the tiny population of people seven foot or taller makes basketball less competitive than a sport like soccer which does not rely on drawing highly skilled players from such a small population. Given that soccer is the world's most played sport, it should be the most competitive and overall soccer has a lower Noll-Scully competitive balance measure than say hockey, baseball, or basketball.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
2012-2013 NBA Competitive Balance
Now that the NBA finals are upon us, I thought that I would look back at the NBA regular season and calculate competitive balance using the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance. As Dave Berri has written previously and as we wrote in The Wages of Wins, the NBA compared to the NFL, MLB and NHL is rather competitively imbalanced. During David Stern's first 27 years as NBA commissioner, the NBA averaged a Noll-Scully competitive balance of 2.8 for the seasons 1984-85 to 2010-11. So looking back at the 2012-2013 NBA regular season, I have calculated the Noll-Scully equal to 2.81 (using the sample standard deviation of winning percent) and 2.76 (using the population standard deviation of winning percent). In either case the NBA is similar in its measure of competitive balance as it has during the last three decades.
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