from Amazon
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Are byes good… or bad?
Warning, selective sampling abound:
From 1990 to 2001, teams that had byes the first weekend went 39-9 in their first playoff game. That’s an 81% winning percentage. And that makes a lot of sense. Teams with byes SHOULD win a vast, vast, vast majority of the time, right? You have the best of the division winners, rested, playing at home, they should win something like 80% of the time.
I don’t know that it should be 80% though. Just guessing at the talent level of the teams, I’d say you are starting with a 60% chance of winning, add in the home field advantage (now at 65%), and the extra rest (now maybe at 70%?). That would have been my guess. But, with only 48 games, that means 34-14 instead of 39-9. That’s less than 2 SD of difference.
Continuing…
But something kind of bizarre has happened since 2003. That something might just be a fluke or a statistical anomaly, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating. Since 2003, bye teams have gone just 18-14 in their first playoff games.
Presuming again 70% as the baseline, that means 22-10 instead of 18-14. Again, less than 2 SD of difference, going the other way.
Poz also shows us the data for 2002: 4-0 for the byes.
Adding it up, we have 39-9 plus 4-0 plus 18-14 for a total of… 61-23, or a .726 record.
Given that my rough off-the-cuff guess was 70% before I even saw any results, and we actually observe 73%, it’s almost certain that what we are seeing is simply random variation. Joe presents three other possible reasons, but the main reason has got to be random variation around the true mean of 70% (or so).
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 343 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date