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F1 Track Starting Grid and Final Result Correlations
The correlation number in the chart below shows how much the drivers’ final position in the race is explained by their starting grid position. The highest possible correlation of 1 would indicate that every driver finished in the exact same position as they started in. A correlation of 0 would mean there is no relation between starting and finishing positions and a negative correlation would mean that a lower starting position will produce a higher finishing position.
Most Common MMA Nicknames
The MMA nickname game is a world of its own. The nicknames range from super-serious to self-deprecating to (attemptedly) funny to ironic to post-ironic. Here are some of the most commonly used ones. (Click for bigger)
A Map of UFC Fighters by Country
Here’s the world map highlighting the current UFC roster’s home countries. In cases where the fighter has multiple nationalities e.g. Israel Adesanya, the one that is displayed on the UFC broadcast is used. (Click for bigger)
Most Popular Cities for the UFC
Here’s a basic bar graph. Depicted are the 25 cities who’ve hosted the most UFC events. (Click for bigger) Obviously, UFC’s hometown Las Vegas comes in first. Now, let’s see the top cities of the last 5 years. Cities with fewer than 3 events have been filtered out. (Click for bigger) Aside from Las Vegas, these cities could be considered to be a part of UFC’s regular rotation. New York being the only other city hosting more than one event a year splitting duties between MSG in Manhattan and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Survivor Filming and Airing Schedule
This is a visualisation I made. It’s really true. (Click for bigger)
Does Dallas Mavericks Have The Best Offense Ever?
Before the NBA season was shut down, there was a lot of talk of Dallas Mavericks having the best offense in the NBA history. On its surface, it seems true - 116.7 is the highest offensive rating (the estimated number of points a team will score in 100 possessions) any NBA team has ever had. However, the context in which the number has been achieved matters too. Here’s a chart of the league average offensive (and defensive) ratings:
Every Survivor Episode Rating on IMDb
My lockdown binging show of choice has been Survivor. With 39 completed seasons, watching all of them is unlikely so I turned to trusty IMDb to see which are the good ones. So here are all the Survivor episode ratings visualised with a hard to read but thematic font. (Click for bigger)
Most Outlying Scoring Performances in NBA History
Shake Milton scoring 39 points yesterday was quite an outlier from his career average of 6.2. In fact, it was such an outlier, it made me wonder if it’s the biggest outlier ever. Spoiler: it wasn’t. The biggest outlier ever measured in standard deviations from the players' career average was, in fact, Mario West scoring 13 while averaging 0.9 points per game. Here’s the all-time top 50: player_name matchup game_date career_ppg sd pts deviations Mario West NJN @ PHI 2011-04-01 0.
Rock paper scissors in the UFC
Last Saturday fella by the name of Dan Hooker beat Paul Felder in a UFC fight. Last September, Felder had beat Edson Barboza who in 2018 beat the aforementioned Dan Hooker. That, my friends, is a rock paper scissors situation. Counting only fights in the UFC, three fighters have wins over each other in such a way 237 times. There would be hundreds more if we were to include other fight promotions.
Game-Winning Buzzer-Beaters in the NBA
Basketball-reference just released a dataset of every NBA game-winning buzzer-beater ever. Let’s take a closer look, then. A total of 772 shots. Here’s the season-by-season distribution: On average you would expect there to be 16.5 game-winning buzzer-beater in a 30-team 82-game season. This year’s 5 is way behind the pace. Most of the shots have been at the rim: The players to make at least five are as follows:
Over and Underachieving Countries in European Soccer
An interesting thing to look at, I thought, was to see how international football teams perform when measured against how they would be expected to perform based on the nations' demographic, economic, climatic, and cultural variables. First, here is how the teams are rated based on the average score of the past 15 months in FIFA Rankings: (blue is better, red is worse) Now, no surprises there - generally, the big countries in the West are strong, the smaller ones in the East are weak.
NBA Players Who Play Every Game
On a recent New York Knicks broadcast, the commentators lamented the fact that only 21 players played in all 82 regular season games last year. The implication being that it’s not that many. But, how does it compare historically? So, he was right - there is a downwards trend.
Comparing NBA player and fan votes for the All-Star game
The NBA released the All-Star starter voting results this past week. Part of the formula for deciding the All-Stars are player and fan votes. I thought it’d be interesting to see where the two groups vote differently. (Media members also vote but since there are comparatively so few of them, I’ll be ignoring them for now.) After normalizing the player and fan votes, we get the following chart: Technically, I could just compare the player and fan vote ranks, however, that would leave a lot of information off the table.
Winning a Debate at The Soho Forum
The Soho Forum is an Oxford-style debate series that takes place in NYC. So far there have been 39 debates(and one “discussion”). Oxford-style means that the audience is polled on the resolution before and after the debate and the winner is decided by comparing the two polls. At The Soho Forum, the person increasing their vote percentage point more is considered the winner. Though there are alternative ways to score an Oxford-style debate, which I will be looking at at a later date.
Finding The Challenge GOAT: Eliminations
What’s better than America’s fourth favorite sport - Real World/Road Rules Challenge? Not many things I can think of. To start the search for the True Statistical Challenge GOAT, looking at the elimination challenges is a good(easy) place to go. While not the be-all and end-all, they are straightforward one-on-one(usually) competitions unlike many daily and final challenges. Ignoring social and political games, these are mostly a measure of physical skill.
Most Points Scored in the NBA by Minutes Played
A few days ago Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 37 points in 21 minutes against the New York Knicks. That made me really wonder if that’s the most points anyone’s ever scored in the NBA in 21 minutes. Well, turns out, it isn’t. The most anyone ever scored in 21 minutes was Quintin Dailey who scored 38 points in 1986. And here is a hard to read visualization of the top scorers at each minute played since the 1983-84 season: (Click for bigger)
Comparing RAPTOR and RPM
When fivethirtyeight.com launched their new all-in-one NBA player ratings before the 2019-20 season, it was very exciting, very exciting indeed. That rating is called RAPTOR. We can only guess how it’s made or what it means but it does offer an alternative to ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus, which some consider to be the best all-in-one rating. It’s impossible to say which one is more “accurate” (it isn’t but I shan’t be doing it today) but we can compare the two rating systems in how their evaluations of players differ.
Tracking The UFC PPV Sales
(Click for bigger) With UFC moving their pay-per-view events exclusively behind ESPN’s paywall in 2019 and thus ending any access to accurate sales numbers, it’d be a fitting time to look back at the numbers for the whole run. The biggest PPV events are highlighted by text and color-grouped by the star fighter: Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey, Brock Lesnar, Georges St. Pierre, and Jon Jones. The vertical dotted line marks the sell of UFC to WMG-IMG.
Fantasy Basketball Correlation Matrix
The matrix is based on the 2019-20 NBA season’s per-game standard scores of the top 200 players. This could be used as a guide for possible punting strategies. There are many players with non-standard statistical contributions, however it might be a good idea to keep within standard lines to have the biggest potential player-base and to minimize categorical waste. The players can be divided into 3 main groups: ft-fg3m-pts-ast-stl blk-reb-fg tov Based on actual basketball roles, the first two groups are smalls and bigs.