Oh What a Feeling.... March 1st District results

 Oh, What a Feeling!  I had that Irene Cara "Flash Dancing" song going through my head as I analyzed last night's results for Boy's and Girl's Missouri basketball districts and thought about today.  I suppose James Brown's "I feel good" would have fit too, but I didn't think of that song until I wrote this post.

My wife and I are pretty excited about today.  She has helped me score over 70 freshmen, JV, and varsity games for two grandsons off of, often, very good, and, sometimes very bad live streaming.  We have not attended one single game this season, but we have earned our team statistician stripes.  

For tonight's district game, we are going to score it live.  At the game.  We have had our covid shots, we have our masks and stadium chairs and we will take our scorekeeping teamwork to our first game of the year.  What a feeling!  Win or lose, it should be an exciting experience.  I might be singing James Brown after the game.

Back to yesterday, I was feeling pretty good about the Missouri basketball ratings until I got a twitter message from Jon Dykstra up in Maryville about my rating of their girl's team.  After he was done hooting and hollering, I realized I had a math error in one of my tables.  Jon, in jest, even accused me of putting Maryville in Iowa.  Yikes.  

I did have Maryville rated #5 in my 810varsity top 20 poll but had published a district rating table with them at the bottom of their district.  I will blame it on gremlins.  Instead of a formula transfer from my rating table to the district table, I had a number.  A low number.  And I could easily understand Jon's distress over my district rating table.  So I fixed it and all is good in Maryville and NW Missouri this morning.

I don't mind feedback on the ratings because I find math errors or discover new game results that help improve the ratings.  But I work with data, not feelings.  When I see someone say they have a feeling about a game, it means that they haven't done any homework.  They just have a feeling and they say "feelings are neither right nor wrong, they just are".  I have always followed the motto, "In God we trust, all others bring data".

So here is the data.  I work in statistics and I check my work (most of the time, LOL) and people help keep me honest (thank you, Jon).  So how did the model do in yesterday's first round of class four, five, and six games?

For the Girl's games, the model predicted 87%.

For the Boy's games, the model predicted 84%.

I guess that is why I had Irene Cara's song going through my head.  It was a good feeling.

Here's the analysis with ratings, predicted spread, game score, and actual spread.  I have highlighted in red the games that were "upsets" for the model.  I did not include the forfeits. 




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