I’d argue that your four minute stat is much more a measure of 1) using the whole shot clock and 2) being good at offensive rebounding, than a metric that really suggests how good a team is defensively in spite of contrary evidence (if there is any). Keep in mind I care nothing of the reality whether Mich is good or bad, only the interpretation and of this statistic, which I feel is incorrect. I think there are questions/responses which would are important to address were you to take this stat seriously, and that a different editorial process might have exposed it. TBL can insult me all he wants, but I don’t think there is anything inaccurate in these last two comments.

The intent of the post was to look at how often team’s are at their best – and not simply rank defenses.

I took it all back, so whatever… I still don’t think it’s a useful stat at all, it’s just an exercise in seeing what happens.

That said, have you tried to correlate it to overall defense? Is it predictive of what happens at other points in games? If it doesn’t correlate to points per possession, you have a lot of explaining to do in the source of that variance.

If Michigan has stretches of being awesome but their other metrics don’t suggest they are good defensively, my conclusion isn’t “MLB players die early”, my conclusion is “I’m missing a confounding variable”.

/hope that helps

The intent of the post was to look at how often team’s are at their best – and not simply rank defenses. There was no a priori goal – I wasn’t trying to find a stat that made Michigan look good or NC State look bad. And yes, the 4 minutes choice was simply because of the TV timeouts – I have always viewed the game as successive four minute stretches.

Has anyone taken a screenshot of this fecal ad?

Here ya go! Diarrhea runs down my screen then these words appear.

I think WWoS was being sarcastic, wallace, since he himself is a stat nerd

Not true at all. I actually don’t understand statistics very well at all. I’m a scientist. I’m trained to evaluate questions and answers and reasoning. I have no knowledge or care of the statistical methods, as long as they are appropriate.

Mark should drop by to comment (he did Saturday

Bring back Ronny

Then Mark jumps in (He’s Matt Damon in this analogy) and … well, apples or something.

Did I miss a comment from Mark?

LOL. Check out the “note” at the bottom of the post, and comment 96 from Roethlis …

I saw that before I posted it. Which is my point. The author should have enough experience to know how to properly introduce and validate a statistical method.

The issue comes in that the scientific editorial process is far different from the journalistic one. I’m pretty sure you didn’t scrutinize the methods and justifications, whereas in science, validation comes from peer review and successful defense to criticisms. So it’s very difficult to present a statistical paper with valid methodology in a journalistic forum. If I wrote a stats post without any help, I’d come up with crap too, because you really need opposing forces to come up with a polished product.

MIT? Couldn’t get into Harvard? Loser

Probably couldn’t even get into Notre Dame. Such a pathetic loser

/uncle remus’d

I have enjoyed reading WWoS’s comments here. Reminds me of the guy in Good Will Hunting trying to impress the girl at the bar. Then Mark jumps in (He’s Matt Damon in this analogy) and … well, apples or something.

Is this a guest appearance or will he be here regularly.

Anything on this site that attempts to rationally/mathematically analyze something gets a hearty thumbs up from me.

Regularly. His first post was Saturday. Much more to come.

I’d venture the author doesn’t have much understanding of generalized statistics, if he invents a stat, but makes no effort to validate with other defensive metrics. Does shutdown stretches have a correlation to PPG? D-FG%?

LOL. Check out the “note” at the bottom of the post, and comment 96 from Roethlis …

You just hate all stat posts here, Wallace

I don’t mind a stat post which makes some sense like amount of Kate Upton Jiggling per second.

Spoiler alert. I have just been handed Mr. Bashuk’s next college basketball stats analysis. Purdue’s second half perfomance as related to the amount of times Gene Keady took a dump during a Big Ten conference game at halftime. My sources tell me the dude blew up the Assembly Hall locker room.

Some bio info on Mark. http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=6151

Ginger!