Super Bowl Hype Drive: Naming Wrongs

I'm only going to write this once: it's the Super Bowl, not the Superbowl. It is a bowl that is super. The name was ripped off from the Super Ball, a popular 60s children's toy (which seems ironic given how touchy the NFL is about Super Bowl-related copyright infringement). You'd expect this to be related to the rise of Twitter hashtags, but the pandemic predates the Fail Whale (which, incidentally, is never called the "Failwhale").

I don't get it. No one talks about the "Rosebowl" or the "Worldseries" or the "USOpen" or "Daytona500". Last year's game didn't feature the "Newengland Patriots" and "Newyork Giants". This year's game isn't in "Neworleans". The winner doesn't get the "Vincelombarditrophy".

So please, guys, it's two words, both capitalized. From now on, let's only use "Superbowl" if we're referring to Clark Kent's dishware (shipped with him from Krypton, of course, and able to serve heavy gravies in a single bound), or maybe a really excellent bird of prey.

...a superb owl? Anyone? No?

All right, fine.

How Much Is a Win Worth to an NBA Team?

Last month, I used J.C. Bradbury's free agent valuation method to determine how many wins the Red Sox expected Mike Napoli and Shane Victorino to contribute to the team in 2013. That worked fine, but suppose we want to build a similar model for the NBA. Again, we'll use the basic system Bradbury outlines in "The Baseball Economist" (ch. 13). Here, Bradbury found a relationship between revenue, wins, and the size of the city a franchise plays in.

All three of those variables are readily available. For city size, we'll use the population of the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) each team plays its home games in, as reported in the 2010 U.S. Census*. Revenue is available through Forbes' Business of Basketball listings. This data is almost exactly one year old -- suggesting that it covers the 2010-2011 season, and not the recent lockout-shortened 2011-2012 season. This is better for our purposes; I don't want the compressed schedules and reduced number of games to interfere with my results.

* - And the Canadian equivalent for Toronto, with the hope that the two have very similar methodologies.

Bad Beats: Sagarin's Predictor Rankings and the Bowl Games

I promised more updates, but that obviously hasn't happened. There are three reasons behind this: first, the million distractions of the holidays got in the way, as tends to happen; second, I've been working on my Evolution of Sport proposal for the upcoming Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and third, it's harder than you'd think to type with these broken thumbs.

Maybe I should explain.

A coworker of mine is in a weekly football pool: for each NFL game, guess which team will cover the spread to win fame and fortune, etc. The pool keeps going into the playoffs, but since there aren't that many playoff games, he's also required to pick any six college bowl games against the spread. Last year, he told me, he used some good guessing and coin flipping to go 3-3. This year, he wanted to do better.

Red Eyes, Luggage Carts, Can't Lose

Just something quick: the Big East released its 2013 conference schedule yesterday. It's an interesting exercise in realignment madness. I computed the distance between each school using this tool. This first table provided the total miles each team travels to get to its road games, along with its longest trip.

Evaluating MLB Signings, Part 2: Madness

Last time out, we asked how good the Napoli and Victorino signings were for the Boston Red Sox. Using J.C. Bradbury's method, we established that we need to do the following:
1. Figure out how much a win is worth,
2. Figure out how much an individual player contributed to his team's wins, and
3. Convert that number of wins into a dollar value.

Evaluating MLB Signings, Part 1: Methods

After their 2012 season went down in flames, the Boston Red Sox were active during the recent winter meetings, signing 31-year-old first baseman/catcher Mike Napoli to a 3-year, $39 million contract, and 32-year-old outfielder Shane Victorino to a 3-year, $37.5 million contract. The moves were modest when compared to past offseasons, but the question remains: will the Sox get value from their new acquisitions?

Site News: FoS at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Quick update: I recently submitted an abstract to the Evolution of Sport section of the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference, held in Boston March 1-2, is two days long and features a plethora of notable sports journalists, sabermetricians, and front office personnel.

And maybe yours truly.

I found out today that my abstract has been accepted into the second round. The next step is a video submission fleshing out my idea, which will be judged by the panel. If they approve, I get 15 minutes on stage at the conference.

I don't know how much of my proposal I can share, so I'll keep it under wraps for now. If it gets accepted, you can see it at the conference, or once they upload the video to their website; if it doesn't get accepted, I'll write it up and post it here.

Until then, I'm working on analyzing the recent Red Sox signings of Mike Napoli and Shane Victorino. Did the Red Sox overpay? How do these contracts compare to those of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, which the Red Sox took great pains to pawn off on the Dodgers?

Wish me luck!