Sunday, February 10, 2013

Optimizing Conference Scheduling for Tournament Selection: Part II, College Basketball

This is Part 2 of a two-part post about conference scheduling in college sports. I submitted a version of this for inclusion in this year's Evolution of Sport competition at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March. Since they didn't accept it, I decided to post it here. Part 1 can be found here.

Since college football won't be very topical in March, I want to close this discussion with an example from college basketball. Now, the goal in college basketball is a 68-team, single elimination tournament. Of those 68 bids, 31 are reserved for the winners of the respective conference championships. The remaining 37 are handed out by a selection committee on the basis of body of work during the season. Since no one can watch every game, the committee gets some help by the Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI.
Now, again, the formula for the RPI isn't spelled out, and there are various bonuses for winning on the road and so on, but the RPI is estimated to be 50 percent strength of schedule. And wouldn't you know it: the RPI is very consistent from year-to-year, with a correlation coefficient of about 0.75.


What's at stake? Well, if you miss the NCAAs, there's always the NIT, and I've seen teams estimate that they can clear about $25,000 to $50,000 from a good NIT run. But make the NCAAs, and Forbes estimates that your conference gets just under $2 million per game to distribute to its members. Remember that year VCU went to the Final Four? That brought in a little under $9 million for the Colonial Athletic Association.

So yes, scheduling is very important in college basketball, and I've read articles that suggest the Missouri Valley Conference punishes members that schedule soft out-of-conference games that bring down their strength of schedule. But could they be doing more?

Here we have an example of another mid-major conference, the Atlantic 10, from the 2010-2011 season. The previous year, 5 of the A-10's 14 teams won at least 19 games. That's usually good enough to be a borderline tournament team, but the A-10 only got 3 bids. In 2010-2011, the A-10 had 6 teams with at least 23 wins. And they got ... the exact same number of bids, for the exact same teams. Here you can see their conference strength of schedule as compared to their previous season's performance, and no surprise: winning doesn't correlate with the next season's strength of schedule. Note that each team played 16 conference games: you play everyone once, and then three teams twice. For the record, the teams in gold made the NCAAs in 2011, and the teams in blue missed out.


But if we take last year's performance into account, we see a drastic improvement in the average opponent's ranking for each of the top six schools – over a 60% improvement, in fact. And again, with the exception of the outlier of Fordham, strength of schedule matches up better with last year's play all around. Now, this won't necessarily guarantee you more tournament bids, but it'll improve your rankings and your public perception, and that might just be enough to get you off that dreaded bubble.


Now obviously this is not a finished product. The calculations and the sample schedules I used were strictly back-of-the-envelope stuff: there's no accounting for home-field advantage, which could be useful, and I'm almost positive the results I generated aren't optimal. And I'll admit, this won't work for every conference. You'll notice I didn't include any of the Mountain West Conference teams because there's no wiggle room: there are nine teams in the conference in football, so every team plays every other team once. That's it.

But if you're the commissioner of a college sports conference – and, with all the turmoil lately, you might be one and just not know it yet – consider all your options before you set that schedule. Take a good long look at that filet mignon. And then take a good long look at those cheeseburgers.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Optimizing Conference Scheduling for Tournament Selection: Part I, College Football

This is Part 1 of a two-part post about conference scheduling in college sports. I submitted a version of this for inclusion in this year's Evolution of Sport competition at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March. Since they didn't accept it, I decided to post it here. Part 2 is due Monday.

In 2008, the Boise State Broncos of the Western Athletic Conference were ranked 9th in the final BCS standings. That same year, the TCU Horned Frogs of the Mountain West Conference were ranked 11th. Now, in part because neither school was in one of the power conferences like the SEC, both teams were passed over for the most prestigious bowls, and met in the Poinsettia Bowl. Both teams earned a payout of $750,000.

The next season, Boise State finished 6th in the BCS standings, and TCU finished 4th. This time, they met in the Fiesta Bowl, one of the four games in the Bowl Championship Series, and earned a payout of $18 million each. Same teams, very similar regular seasons, 24 times more money. 24 times! That's the difference between a filet mignon with crab meat on top at Smith and Wollensky, and two cheeseburgers – no fries – at McDonald's.

And that's just the monetary benefits. That doesn't even count the national exposure for recruiting, or the increase in freshman applications that typically follows athletic program success.

So, naturally, if you work for a school like Boise State or a conference like the Mountain West, you want to know, "What can I do to improve my chances to get into the biggest bowl games and get that BCS money?" My talk will describe how conferences can improve their members' chances by stacking their conference strength of schedule.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Site News: One Month 'Til Sloan...

A little while ago, I wrote about an Evolution of Sport proposal that I submitted to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Today I found out that the proposal was not selected for this year.

But that's the extent of the bad news. I will still be at the conference in Boston this March, and will be tweeting all weekend (and maybe writing a recap once it ends). I also get a couple free blog posts out of it. I'll be posting the first half of my talk Friday, and the conclusion on Monday. For now, here's the abstract, which was at least competent enough to get me into the second round of the competition:

The championship of the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision is determined by the formula established by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Under this system, schools affiliated with smaller conferences (e.g., Boise State and Tulane) are hindered by their strength of schedules. The non-conference games played by these schools are typically determined years in advance, but the conference games are announced a few months before each season. The scheduling of these conference games is dominated by fixed divisions based on geography; as a result, schools from smaller conferences with BCS aspirations are often saddled with suboptimal conference schedules, forgoing games against superior in-conference opponents in order to play weaker schools in the same arbitrary division. To prevent this, we propose non-automatic qualifying conferences use a relegation-style system to assign teams to each division. In defense of this, we show that year-to-year records in major college football programs are strongly correlated, such that last year’s top teams are more likely to be this year’s top team. We further demonstrate that such a system would have significantly improved the conference strength of schedules for several previous BCS contenders. This proposed system will therefore give schools from non-AQ conferences the greatest chance to make a major bowl game, resulting in greater revenues and exposure for the conference as a whole and each of its member institutions. We conclude by showing that similar schemes could be used to improve the reputation of teams in other sports, including the so-called “mid-major” conferences in NCAA Division I basketball.

Of course, I welcome any and all feedback on this topic.