On the heels of my revamp of the College Basketball Team Comparison feature, I've also updated the College Basketball Player Comparison feature.

I've made two big changes. Now, if you select the Career option in the player's seasons drop down, it shows career totals for every stat, not just the basic stats. That means you can see career averages for all the tempo-free stats. Moving forward, these career stats will be updated automatically after every game so they should remain current (previously I updated career stats after the season).

The other big change is I've added a charting option. Now you can see charts for career trends and intra season average trends based on the seasons you select. You can chart up two different stats (I could allow more, but the charts become hard to read).

Here is an example comparing some of the best point guards in the nation.

I'm interested in any feedback!

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

I'm happy to announce the first StatSheet-powered IPhone App is now available. It is called StatFix and as you loyal StatSheet followers might guess, it is based on the StatFix.com site. If you like StatFix.com, you should check out the StatFix IPhone app. 

This is just the first of many planned IPhone apps. I've developed a partnership with a Chapel Hill firm, Two Toasters. A great group of guys that develop IPhone apps.

To showcase the IPhone apps we develop, we created a new website which I've added to the StatSheet Network. It is called Statful.com. Check it out.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

The SID of a major university asked me recently how they ranked among all schools in terms of "experience". They play several freshmen and sophomores and felt they had one of the younger teams in the country.

That led me to create the Experience Tracker. The initial version doesn't do much in the way of complex analysis, it just shows how teams rank among "average class year per minute". Essentially, I take each player and multiply their minutes played with their class year (Freshmen = 1, Sophomores = 2, Juniors = 3, Seniors = 4). Averaging this out over a team creates a single number that is the average class year per minute played. A number close to 4 indicates that juniors and seniors play a lot whereas a number close to 1 indicates freshmen and sophomores play a lot. I also show some comparisons with average class year per minute and winning percentage.

The result? Across the NCAA, it doesn't look like "experience" matters a whole lot when you look at a really high level (look at the scatter plot at the bottom of the Experience Tracker page). If you dig down into some of the conferences, experience seems to matter more for some than others. For example, there doesn't seem to be much correlation at all in the ACC, but there seems to be a very close correlation in the West Coast. This may speak to the fact that teams in the smaller conferences tend to have similar talent levels so as the kids get older, the teams get better. Whereas in the ACC, a couple of big time recruits coming in can change the whole complexion of a team. But this is really just an educated guess since there doesn't seem to be a very well defined pattern across conferences.

I'll admit, this is just my first attempt at doing this. To properly measure "experience", I'd be better off actually measuring a player's career playing time. A sophomore that started every game as a freshman and played a bunch of minutes is likely to be more "experienced" than a senior that played sparingly his whole career until starting as a senior. In the second version of the Experience Tracker, I'll account for that as well as providing drill downs for specific teams so you can see how teams trend over the years in terms of experience.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

I've made a lot of changes to the team comparison feature. If you liked this feature before, you are going to really like it now. Among other things, you can now compare overall stats, opponent stats, conference stats or conference opponent stats going back to 1996 for any division I team. By clicking on the "Chart It" link beside a stat, you can get a line chart of the season-by-season final value for that stat as well as the intra-season season average trend (if you've selected this season or last).

Here is an example: UNC vs Duke

I have a few more changes planned in the future with this feature, but this is getting closer to what I originally envisioned. Ultimately, I'd like to help show more clearly which team is "better".

Soon I'm going to add similar capabilities to the player comparison feature so stay tuned for that.

I'm interested in any feedback about these changes or if you have any ideas or suggestions for future changes.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

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