Data Collection and Analysis and Fantasy Football?

Football season = math season?

In a prior post I mentioned that my love for math and numbers began with a sports saturated childhood. I watched football, and easily learned the 3 and 7 tables of multiplication, since a field goal is 3 points and a touchdown followed by the usual extra point was worth 7. I even learned a bit of order of operations this way. If a team scored 2 field goals and 3 touchdowns, clearly the score was 2 x 3 + 3 x 7! In baseball, batting averages are expressed as decimals to the nearest hundreths place. Following my boyhood heros like Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell meant that the ability to divide a 3 digit number by another and computing a batting average was a must.

The world of sports has changed over 4 decades. I may be dating myself, but I recall the first, $100,000 a year baseball contract. In today's sports world, the nature of how people follow sports is much different, as is the arithmatic and algebra behind it. Consider fantasy football. In general, fantasy football is a game where you "own" several players at each scoring position, and a team's defense. Through a complex scoring system, you earn points each time they gain yards, score touchdowns, or kick field goals, as well as other more obscure events. It is a mathematicians paradise where every metric is open to interpretation, and every actual event is sometimes agonizing! Thus, the casual football fan becomes a practical mathematician.

After week 1 of the football season, people are looking at their teams and plotting strategy for the weeks and months to come. How many times should I expect a certain running back to get the ball? Will this wide reciever do better or worse this weekend since the defense they are facing is tougher? Notice that weekly, this is about hypothesizing, and then testing a series of hypotheses. If you are more correct than your opponent, in general you win! Ultimately, this is as much a mathematics test as it is a game requiring significant sports knowledge.

As weeks move along, I hope to post a bit more about fantasy football. I will tell you that I am in two leagues and I won in one league, and lost in the other. Oddly enough, I beat my wife who has little, formal mathematics in her background, and list to a friend and coworker who has an MIT doctorate!. Tell me - what games do you play where math that is normally uninteresting becomes intriguiging? If you play a fantasy sport like football or basketball, how do you use math skills that you do not normally use, and do you ever stop and recognize the use of the scientific method in your game play? In any case, let's talk - and of course, let's use math and science to win! After all, they are more than classes in school - they are a key to understanding the world around us!

For a quick, interesting example of how someone has used math to enhance their fantasy football life, go to "The Minitab Blog"!

...and Times are Getting Better!

How could we do multiple dissections?

So summarizing from my most recent blog:

• science is more interesting when you are "doing" science
• even when doing labs, most students do not really learn more

One point of view might be to abolish labs given the above phrases. Another perspective though is to understand how to get what we want out of the lab experience. Let's go back to the gym for a moment.

Basketball players learn to play by repeating complex body motions many times. Shooting, dribbling and passing in different situations require different actions from the body to be performed quickly. Thinking about these as one might in a game of chess would doom one to failure - reaction rules the day. The only way that this is possible is after each action is rehearsed and practiced. Here is the key: It is practiced, and feedback is provided. Feedback! This feedback allows for correction of faulty motions, and improivement of behavior during a game. In other words: learning!

Now, back to the lab. Think back to your lab experiences and ask yourself how many were experiences that were repeated. I suspect not many! Maybe you dissected a frog. When you did this, most likely, you and your lab partner made a mistake. It may have been a small one, or a catastrophic one! In either case, you recieved feedback, perhaps in the form of a grade on your lab report, and then scurried along to new content and another lab. Master did not occur. It was a "cool" experience, and memorable. Yet, were you able to see the impressive leg muscles, or the interesting structure of the frog heart? It is doubtful. What if you had the chance to do the experiment many times, recieving feedback each time? How might this occur?

As technology improves, there are many ways to "skin a cat" (or a lab, or a frog). Suffice it to say that a scientific concept is not something that should be practiced once and only once. After all, that first attempt at a lab is usually awkward at best! Students need opportunities to practice labs, and parts of the scientific process until mastered. That usually means MORE THAN ONCE! Let me leave you dear reader with this thought: "If the labs you did were so much fun that you still remember them, would they not have been far more fun to do several times!"

How this can be practically accomplished without killing many many frogs or depleating stressed school funding will be something that we touch upon together in my next post. I still want to hear about your favorite labs and how they may have been made even more fun, or hear about your least favorite labs!