It's been about a month since my most recent post related to the Football Match Result Database, so I'd like to give an update on what I've been doing since then.In March I bought a book on relational database design and completed a specifications document for the FMRD. In April I bought another book and […]
I'm a big enthusiast of the International Science and Engineering Fair, and not just because I was a finalist and then a judge. It's a chance to meet a collection of highly talented and highly self-motivated high school students presenting some fascinating projects in math, science, and engineering. To be sure, there are a fair […]
I've been looking at the MFLS statistics and I was thinking of a quick way to assess the value of my players relative to the rest of the fantasy market. I decided to borrow one of the more popular terms from stock market investing to do this — the Price/Earnings ratio. It's really simple, so […]
I had made a mistake in my computation of the Pythagorean. There wasn't an issue with the formula itself; I hadn't calculated the win/draw probabilities out to enough goals. I increased the upper limit to ten to account for the heavy results seen in the Eredivisie and recalculated the Eredivisie table. The results were amazing: […]
Following up on a promise I made earlier this week, here is the final Pythagorean for this season's English Premier League. Team GP GF GA Pts Pythag +/- Chelsea 38 103 32 86 88 -2 Manchester United 38 86 28 85 86 -1 Arsenal 38 83 41 75 76 -1 Tottenham Hotspur 38 67 41 […]
My last post has sparked a question in my soccermetric mind: Are there common features in the offensive and defensive goal distributions for teams with large Pythagorean variances? The Soccer Pythagorean works well at assessing the level of team performance relative to expectations from their goal statistics. It can even predict point totals within a […]
I am so fascinated by Ajax's performance in the league this season, and I'm intrigued that there was such a large gap between the Pythagorean estimate and the actual point total. To be sure, FC Twente's performance also greatly outperformed their Pythagorean estimate. But Ajax's record deserves closer scrutiny because their goalscoring record was so […]
I can't quite believe this has happened — I got top score in the MFLS Prediction League last weekend! When I submitted my score predictions I had a reasonably good feeling about them given the matchups and the scoring trends of the teams. But I couldn't believe it when I saw the final scores come […]
UPDATE (7:29pm, 5/3): Wow, that was quite a tidal wave from the Pacific Northwest! Thanks as always to Sounder at Heart for sending visitors my way. (With all of the readers that I have up there, maybe I should make a visit or something!) For those of you who would like an explanation of the […]
This season's Dutch Eredivisie was a fascinating championship to follow, not just because the storyline of Steve McClaren finding rehabilitation in FC Twente, but also because of the gaudy statistics of Ajax in finishing second. I had my doubts that the Pythagorean formula would be able to predict the total number of points in the […]
