Former Casa Grande Star Out Performs the BCS Computers
by Andy Morales on Sep. 30, 2009, under SportsMaggie Wigness was an all-star shooting guard for the Casa Grande Cougars. She made second team in her region in basketball and was also a good softball player.
Maggie Wigness
Casa Grande frequently finds itself playing as a Phoenix area team or as a Tucson area team. To get any kind of recognition in that situation is a testament to her ability on the court.
Wigness went on to play basketball for Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. It’s a two-year liberal arts and sciences school for women. This was a perfect situation for the Valedictorian.
She earned Academic All-American honors while playing for the Comets.
She went on to attend Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon to finish her undergraduate program in computer sciences……
The NCAA does not have a playoff in place for Division I football. It has relied on the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) to bring two teams together for a “championship” game since 1998.
Sports writers were largely responsible for selecting champions before the BCS through a bowl alliance. I can see how dumb that situation was now.
Portions of the BCS are taken from polls, computer rankings, strength of schedule and losses.
It has also proven to be far from perfect…
Harvard University hosted the 2009 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports on Saturday, September 26.
According to Harvard, the Symposium on Statistics in Sports will be, “a meeting of statisticians and quantitative analysts connected with sports teams, sports media, and universities to discuss common problems of interest in statistical modeling and analysis of sports data. The symposium format will be a mixture of invited talks, a poster session, and a panel discussion. Students in particular are encouraged to submit abstracts; a prize will be awarded to the best student poster as decided by a panel of judges.”
The program is broken up into four sections. One of those includes a section for student speakers.
Only three students were invited:
Evaluating New Pitching Metrics using a Point-Mass Mixture Random Effects Model – Blakeley B. McShane, Department of Statistics, Wharton School
Do Hitters and Pitchers Vary in their Sensitivities to Changes in the Quality of the Opposition? – Daniel Porter, Columbia University
Using New Iterative Methods and Fine Grain Data to Rank College Football Teams – Maggie Wigness, Pacific University
Symposium co-organizer Mark Glickman told the Oregonian that, “It is exceptionally rare for one of the speakers to be an undergrad, like Maggie, and that doesn’t even recognize the rarity of her coming from a small liberal arts college in Oregon,” Glickman is an associate professor of Health Policy and Management at Boston University.
Wigness explained that college football ranking accuracy comes down to who has the best algorithms. For the rest of us that means “sets of mathematical and computer instructions.”
She discovered that her algorithms came out to be more accurate than the BCS for games between 1998 and 2008 at a rate of 60 percent to 56.6 percent.
Her methods are similar to the BCS but she gives more weight to different categories.
According to the Oregonian, Wigness was able to raise her accuracy to 70 percent when she added interceptions and third-down conversions.
Wigness was quoted, “We didn’t look at the human factors at all. I think there’s a benefit to human input but they can be biased.”
Her formula only uses computers and not polls. I wonder how some basketball teams such as Duke would feel about that?
Courtesy The Daily Mail
I’d take Maggie’s algorithm on a championship over a sportswriter’s opinion any day.
NOTES: Maggie’s sister, Bailey, plays softball for Casa Grande and has committed to play for ASU next year….she is also smart.
The Symposium will be published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis soon:
