Posting since it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in the CAC forum.

Hey Andrew, its not as funny when you're on the side of it!

Andrew got me on the regression equation kick. Here's one for predicting "conference wins"

Conference Wins= 18.44 - (.141)x1 + (.654)x2+ (1.786) x3

Where x1= Avg skills of team (Total Avg minus durability, work ethic, rebounding)

x2= Avg rebounding

x3= Avg Offensive knowledge (where 12= A+ and 1= D)

It's not pretty b/c the avg skill is negatively sloped (making y intercept 18.44) but it adds significantly to R^2 which is .89. I also created a very loose category for offensive knowledge that accounted for the fact that it is much harder to move players though the "A" category than C and D category. I therefore made D="1" C="3" B="6" and A="10." I averaged in only those players who played at least 10 minutes a game to create an average for the team. This turned out to be a very important factor b/c it was not correlated to the rebounding stat- where nearly every other stat I tried to put in was correlated with Rebounding.

Ummmm....just out of curiosity, what do you guys do for a living? I am not used to being the dumb one in the group, but it appears as though that is the case here! I haven't thought about regressions since my *shutter* statistics class in undergrad. ;)

I'm a teacher- but getting a Masters in stat. So sadly, I do this for some weird form of entertainment. The equation suggests that the average skill of the team has no impact (or really a slightly negative impact!) on the number of conference wins a team has. For every additional 3pts in avg. rebrounding you can expect two more conference wins a year. And for every one pt increase in avg. offensive knowledge (see odd scaling above) you can expect nearly two (or 1.7) more conference wins. Now, this prediction equation can only be true if every other team makes no improvement--but I think it does shed some light on the importance of offensive IQ at the same time deemphasizing other individual offensive categories.

I'm a former high school math teacher/basketball coach turned actuary. This is a normal form of entertainment for my ilk.

I'm also in the National Championship game. Hopefully it goes well.