Preseason Sunbelt Conference Football Coach Poll

Recently Florida International University was voted as the pre-season favorite for winning the Sunbelt conference in football this coming season.  Below are the coaches first place votes, and total votes from the pre-season poll.  Next to that are the wins and losses from last season (including any post-season bowl games).  Finally, the last three columns are the rankings (out of 120 NCAA FBS schools) in terms of the NCAA production model for the team's total production rank, offensive production rank and defensive production rank.  You will note that most teams in the Sunbelt Conference are ranked below average (higher than 60).

I think I will come back to this at the end of the season and see how well the coaches (and last years model's ranking) relate to the end of the 2012 season for the Sunbelt conference.

School	1st Place Votes	Total Votes		2011 Wins	2011 Loses	2011 Total	2011 Offense	2011 Defense
Florida International	5	92		8	5	64	84	29
Arkansas State	2	85		10	3	35	66	7
Louisiana-Lafayette	2	81		9	4	78	78	71
Western Kentucky	1	70		7	5	91	107	66
Troy	0	60		3	9	109	105	106
Louisiana-Monroe	0	47		4	8	68	88	33
Middle Tennessee	0	42		2	10	105	95	105
North Texas	0	36		5	7	96	93	94
Florida Atlantic	0	23		1	11	114	119	85
South Alabama	0	14		-----	-----	-----	-----	-----

Note: South Alabama is not officially in the Sunbelt conference as they will be finishing their two-year wait moving from FCS to the FBS.

NHL Post-Season Goalie Evaluation for 2011-2012

Now that the NHL playoffs are over (congrats to the Los Angeles Kings), let's take a look at how the goalies performed during last season's playoffs.  I calculate goalies post-season performance in the same way as I have previously done, with the exception that I am calculate the coefficient on post-season goals against, instead of using the regular season in the Wins Above Average calculation.  Here are the results for the 2012 NHL playoffs.

Rank	Player	Team		WAA		SV%
1	Mike Smith	PHX		0.427		0.944
2	Jonathan Quick	LAK		0.416		0.946
3	Braden Holtby	WSH		0.196		0.935
4	Henrik Lundqvist	NYR		0.167		0.931
5	Cory Schneider	VAN		0.122		0.960
6	Craig Anderson	OTT		0.076		0.933
7	Pekka Rinne	NSH		0.071		0.929
8	Jaroslav Halak	STL		0.020		0.935
9	Tim Thomas	BOS		0.011		0.923
10	Johan Hedberg	NJD		0.003		0.929
11	Jake Allen	STL		0.000		0.000
12	Scott Clemmensen	FLA		-0.004		0.920
13	Jose Theodore	FLA		-0.010		0.919
14	Antti Niemi	SJS		-0.035		0.914
15	Brent Johnson	PIT		-0.048		0.667
16	Roberto Luongo	VAN		-0.061		0.891
17	Martin Brodeur	NJD		-0.086		0.917
18	Brian Elliott	STL		-0.102		0.904
19	Sergei Bobrovsky	PHI		-0.112		0.722
20	Jimmy Howard	DET		-0.121		0.888
21	Corey Crawford	CHI		-0.141		0.893
22	Ilya Bryzgalov	PHI		-0.351		0.887
23	Marc-Andre Fleury	PIT		-0.430		0.834

Top 10 overpaid NBA players by my good friend and co-author Dave Berri.

The list:

10. Tyrus Thomas, Charlotte Bobcats (overpaid by $12,459,225)
9. Deron Williams, Brooklyn Nets (overpaid by $12,784,867)
8. Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas Mavericks (overpaid by $12,851,295)
7. Corey Maggette, Charlotte Bobcats (overpaid by $12,862,248)
6. Mehmet Okur, Brooklyn Nets (overpaid by $12,988,657)
5. Chris Kaman, New Orleans Hornets (overpaid by $14,613,480)
4. Amar'e Stoudemire, New York Knicks (overpaid by $14,918,309 )
3. Antawn Jamison, Cleveland Cavaliers (overpaid by $17,402,350)
2. Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers (overpaid by $19,693,258)
1. Rashard Lewis, Washington Wizards (overpaid by $21,167,231)

NCAA FBS Conference Moves

Sports Illustrated has a very nice piece on the recent changes in NCAA FBS conference members.

NBA Attendance Analysis

One of the topics that I talk about in Sports Economics is the impact that a lockout has on attendance.  Obviously, with a lockout the total number of people that attend all league games for that season will fall as there are fewer number of total games played.  Yet that does not really get at the issue at hand.  So, one way to tackle this problem is to use intervention analysis.  In essence, intervention analysis is a time series statistical technique that examines how the average value of a series of numbers changes given a specific intervention.  Specifically, we looked at how the first difference in the average value of total league attendance changed due to a strike or a lockout, given that attendance is non-stationary over the time period that we were looking at. This is exactly what we did in chapter 2 of the Wages of Wins.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, I cannot first difference the attendance data for the current NBA season, since the next NBA season (2012-2013) has not been played yet.  Thus intervention analysis is not currently possible to analyze the impact of the NBA lockout.

So, using total league attendance does not help, since the number of games played is different, and it is too soon to use intervention analysis.  Is there any alternative way to figure this out?  Yes.  One is to perform a t-test on the means of attendance.  So, I downloaded the team-by-team attendance data from ESPN, and entered and sorted the data into Microsoft Excel, and then calculated a t-test on home team average attendance for the 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 NBA teams.  The result of the t-test was that team-by-team average home attendance was not significantly different over the two seasons.  In other words, statistically speaking there was not a great enough difference in the two data series to say that one is different from the other; and thus I would conclude that the NBA lockout did not have a statistically significant impact on average NBA team home attendance between those two seasons.

Alternatively, one could just plot the data over the last few seasons and look to see if there is any visual difference.  While this is not all that technical, it does give some additional evidence that fans did not respond much because of the NBA lockout.  Here is a line graph of average NBA home attendance over the last four NBA seasons.  The line in blue is the 2011-2012 lockout season.


Average NBA Team Home Attendance:  2008/09 to 2011/12

Scoring in the NBA can be Deceptive

Dave Berri has a nice article on how total points scored by NBA players can be deceptive.

USA Today's Latest NCAA Finance Database

The USA Today has published it latest NCAA finance database.

Here is some highlights from the University of Iowa:

	Ticket		Student		Total		Scholar-		Coaching		Building/		Total
Year	Sales		Fees		Revenue		ships		Staff		Grounds		Expenses
2011	$23,180,905		$564,680		$93,353,561		$9,362,572		$29,016,057		$21,863,477		$88,057,486
2010	$21,815,895		$525,707		$88,735,093		$8,585,730		$26,197,937		$14,944,085		$74,438,196
2009	$21,922,358		$525,941		$79,971,143		$8,755,400		$24,453,669		$13,703,314		$71,116,911
2008	$19,103,235		$1,487,795		$81,515,865		$7,579,781		$23,166,018		$16,003,409		$71,602,594
2007	$21,731,819		$1,494,706		$80,832,070		$6,722,602		$21,376,108		$15,161,903		$70,469,589
2006	$20,086,445		$1,495,060		$73,321,227		$6,652,458		$21,063,488		$6,420,286		$59,224,861