More Madness

Back in March, I posted a diatribe about D's NCAA tournament madness. Now, I should have known better, but I didn't think the madness would affect other sports as well. Silly me.

First, baseball, an accountant's dream sport with the endless statistics and averages and scoring quirks. During a graduate class project last year, D came up with the "FlemStat," a truer reflection of a player's batting performance than the standard percentages and averages. For example, it does not take into consideration RBI's since that is dependent upon other players' batting. He downloaded years of statistics to determine who, according to the FlemStat, was the greatest hitter ever. (I think he said the Babe.) And now he uses it to predict who should get MVP awards at the end of the season.

This year, with the crazy college football season, he has made his own statistical ranking of all 130 NCAA Div I football teams. His version awards wins and losses point values and he tracks the rankings of each team in a team's schedule. For all 130 teams. Every week. Then he analyzes his Top 25 ranking against the AP, Coaches', and BCS polls. He's trying to figure out the bias in those polls and is convinced that his is the only truly mathematical, non biased ranking.

I told him to write a letter to someone.