Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Is This Lead Safe?

As a fan of college basketball, you probably ask yourself this question during every game you watch. And now, you can finally answer that question accurately thanks to Bill James. Many of you may be familiar with Bill James as he is well-known in baseball and has had much to do with the popularization of "sabremetrics." In this article on Slate.com, James reveals his statistical formula to determine the safeness of a lead. Enjoy!

Posted by Chad at 11:04 AM

2 comments:

Marcus said...

Hi Guys,

Great post about whether a lead is safe or not.

I have more than a passing interest in sabermetrics (I keep a copy of Win Shares on my bookshelf) really like how this type of analysis is applied to basketball.

Anyway, I took the formula and decided to use it with the Arkansas / Georgia game to see when their lead was "safe" (you should see the formula I had to use--it is crazy).

I chose this game because Georgia led from wire-to-wire and it would be easier to apply the formula without messing with absolute values--the data that I have shows that Georgia reached the "safe" threshold at 17 seconds to go in the game.

I can send the spreadsheet along if you guys want to try it with other games.

March 19, 2008 8:20 PM
Josh said...

Thanks for the comment. That's some interesting stuff. If you don't mind, we'd love to check it out so hit us an email.

bizarrojoelunardi@gmail.com

March 19, 2008 9:05 PM

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