Fantasy Sports and Math News Update

Just received this news update from Dan, creator of Fantasy Sports and Math:

Two years ago the University of Mississippi surveyed 144 teachers who were using fantasy sports in their classrooms. The results were shocking and are listed on my home page. The results indicated fantasy sports were playing a major role in increasing enthusiasm and academic achievement.

Last fall the University of Mississippi went straight to the students, as they surveyed nearly 350 students and 10 teachers who were using fantasy sports in math class. Ole Miss is still going through the data, but for now one result stands out: 40% of the female students (compared to 34% for the male students) reported that their math grades were higher compared to the previous year when they were not playing fantasy sports. What does this mean? I am not sure, because no one knows how many students are actually using fantasy sports to learn math. Thus, we do not know if 350 students is a representative sample. Simply put, the greater the number of teachers and students who participate in the survey, the more accurate the data . Teachers ask me all the time if they can do anything to help. Well, I would really appreciate it if teachers could fill out the survey by clicking on the button at the bottom left of the home page. To all those teachers who have already participated, thank you.

In other news, the NFL stats sheet is up and running. The sheet lists all of the stats you need, so students do not have to spend time reading boxscores. This saves a considerable amount of time. I did have an issue today where a player (Darren Sproles) was not listed on the sheet. That has been rectified. If you notice other players who are not showing up on the sheet ( who have played and scored or gained yardage), please let me know. A couple of teachers asked why interceptions and fumbles for defenses are not showing up. It is because defenses do not earn points from interceptions or fumbles recovered. I purposely designed the scoring systems that way, because it would just make everything more complicated for the students and would require more time. I also had a couple questions about the default scoring system. In hindsight, for several reasons I should have made the default scoring system based on a common denominator of 24. Total points equation number 10 on page 16 is probably more appropriate for most students.

Good luck this fantasy season. My top fantasy pick is DeAngelo Williams, who averaged more fantasy points per-start last season than any other non-quarterback. Contrary to popular opinion, I think he is the best back in the game, and I believe he will have more fantasy points at the end of the season than Adrian Peterson, who will probably have difficulty staying healthy.

Have fun,

Dan

Read more about my experiences using fantasy sports in my classes here.

Sports Statistics: This Is Taking Forever!

The last week or so of Sports Statistics has gone by quite s-l-o-w-l-y. My students are working hard, but the FSM-recommended method of collecting stats is way too cumbersome. Students are directed to the NBA Scoreboard on the New York Times website, where they search by teams playing each day instead of the players. It's taking forever to tally our scores and get them up to date (a problem exacerbated by sporadic attendance).

I had thought about how easy it was to look up a player's stats in each game of the season on NFL.com, and realized that NBA.com must have a similar feature. By clicking on "Players" and finding an individual player's page, you can click on "Game Logs" and see only their stats. I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. I guess I was just so happy to have my students working so diligently that I didn't want to rock the boat.

In any case my students are all at different points, so on Monday we will play catch up. I decided to set a moratorium on tallying stats last Wednesday (our last class), so by Monday students should be caught up using the new, quicker method. I think I'll also suspend tallying stats over the break--if we have to come back on January 5th and count up two weeks worth of stats, we'll never be able to do anything else besides adding up stats.

I created a new weekly stat tracker that will work if students are going to NBA.com to find their players' game logs. It includes space for 4 games, but can very easily be stretched into 5-6 and still fit on a single page.

Weekly Stat Tracker (via Google Docs)

Sports Statistics: Tallying Stats, Pondering Freakonomics

I don't think I can recall a project or activity I've done that has fully engaged students as much as this fantasy basketball project has. The students are dead silent all period, tracking down games where their players were active and writing down all of their relevant stats. They spend most of the time online using school-supplied laptops, yet they're not chatting, checking MySpace or anything you'd typically expect them to do when given unfettered Internet access.

The class only meets Monday and Wednesday, so the Thanksgiving holiday set us back just after we set up our teams. There was no real draft; students concentrated on making their teams fit under the salary cap outlined in the game rules. Each player was assigned a value before the season started, so there were a lot of bargains to be had with the first few weeks of it already behind us. In fact, anyone left off the "price list" is automatically priced at the minimum value. Celtics center Kendrick Perkins wasn't on the list, for example, so I placed him on my own team (yes, I set one up as another motivational tool for the students once we really get going).

Last Monday, the Internet wasn't working, so we weren't able to finish tallying stats for the first 2 weeks of games. We read a section from Freakonomics about sumo wrestlers cheating to lose, and how statistics prove it.

So last Wednesday was spent tracking down all of the stats from November 19th (draft day) through December 2nd. When we had first tried to track stats using the worksheet provided in Fantasy Basketball and Mathematics teacher's guide, I noticed that it lacked a few things:

• There wasn't really a graphic organizer for students to easily write down each player's stats in each tracked category. Thus if they were writing down LeBron's stats for three games over the weekend, they could easily mix up numbers and make mistakes. While my students seem to enjoy the project, I know that they're easily thrown by having too many unwieldy numbers in front of them.
  
• The curriculum's creators direct us to get our stats from box scores on The New York Times NBA scoreboard, which has a language all its own to decipher. There are tons of categories with several ambiguous abbreviations (for example, TOT for total rebounds because offensive and defensive rebounds are given their own columns), not to mention tons of players to sort through. A key for the abbreviation is missing from the curriculum book--in fact, the variables in the "Total Points Formula" don't match them, making things even worse.
• There wasn't enough space for students to add up a player's points, rebounds, blocks, etc and still plug them into the equation we're using for their weekly stats.

So I created a graphic organizer for tracking stats throughout the first two weeks or so (8 games). You could trim it down to columns for 4 games if you were using it weekly. I added part of the original curriculum's worksheet onto the back page of that document, with the total points equation included so they could plug in their values for each category. It seemed to help the students track down each players' stats more quickly and easily, and they seemed to be grateful.

We weren't able to finish yet, so we can't create a leader board with everyone on it, or start doing things with the data we've collected. That's okay--everything we're doing is further investing the students in the process. Even the students who don't like basketball are into the mathematical side of the game. It's a nice change of pace from my usual math classes!

The best part of the class, actually, is working with a colleague of mine who is a die hard basketball junkie (and Celtics season ticket holder) in guiding the class. It's fun to watch him get excited as he gets to expound upon his NBA knowledge to help the kids build better teams. My fellow teachers are so talented at my school that I'm often in awe of them, and constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to work with them.

Stats Tracker for Fantasy Basketball Project (via Google Docs)

More about my Sports Statistics class

Sports Statistics: Using Fantasy Basketball to Teach Math

At my charter school, our faculty teaches both 70 minute long block classes (in my case, Algebra I & II) and at least one 55 minute short block class twice a week. Last quarter, my short block was SAT Math Prep. It was horrible for a number of reasons:

• Students were forced to take it, even though many weren't interested in taking the test any time soon (if ever).
• The class was overcrowded.
• It was at the very end of our 8 hour school day.
• Poor planning and execution by yours truly.

I was determined to make my short block class for this quarter as interesting and engaging as possible. I wanted to give students a chance to earn learn math in a completely unexpected way, almost without them realizing it. A colleague had mentioned a sports statistics class he had taught in the past, and I immeadiately remembered the fantasy sports and mathematics curriculum I tried to use last year.

In that case, we used fantasy football, but it was too late in the season to pick up with that. Besides, football is nowhere near as popular with my current students as it was with my South Texas kiddos. The timing and situation was perfect to use fantasy basketball as the centerpiece of my new class.

The curriculum breaks down as follows:

• Students draft a fantasy basketball team, using player values and a salary cap devised by the Fantasy Sports and Mathematics (FSM) developers.
• Every day in class, students look up the statistics for their starting players since the last class. Since we meet twice a week, this means that players might have played 2-3 times since our last class meeting.
• Each statistical category we track has an assigned value. We use a "total points equation" to figure out our total points for the week.
• As we start collecting more and more data, we'll use it to complete all different types of math problems.
• Besides the project, we'll discuss the growing role of statistics in sports today, reading and analyzing other kinds of data than just those from our fantasy basketball project.
• Grades are based on daily maintenance of their fantasy teams and participation in discussions and related math assignments.

FSM directs users to the New York Times website to find basketball stats, as it's comprehensive and relatively easy to read and navigate. FSM publishes a teacher's edition and student workbook that provide worksheets for creating teams, tracking data, and applying the ideas to a wide range of math problems:

I can tell you that the students I have, even those that don't know anything about basketball or hadn't signed up for the class on their own, are engaged in the project even in its early stages. I expect things to get even more exciting as we post up weekly scores for the first time, and students get more into the competitive spirit.

There's no shortage of interesting articles and books to read on the subject of sports statistics; indeed, there's an entire industry that's exploding right before our eyes. As I told my students, you could study mathematics and get a job with a company, league or franchise doing things that nobody even thought of just a decade ago.

I'll continue keeping you updated on how the class progresses. In the meantime, if you're interested in exploring this as a possible class, unit or project, here's a recommended reading list:

1. Moneyball - The book that changed baseball, and sports, forever.
2. Fantasy Basketball and Mathematics: Teacher's Guide
3. Fantasy Basketball and Mathematics: Student Workbook
4. Freakonomics (check out the section on cheating sumo wrestlers)
5. "Hoop Data Dreams" [article from the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times]
6. "Fantasy sports now 27 million player, $800 million business" [article from South Florida Sun-Sentinel]
7. More fantasy sports articles here on teachforever.com

Fantasy Football and Mathematics update

It has been very difficult to implement the curriculum from Fantasy Football and Mathematics: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents, Grades 5 and Up (Fantasy Sports and Mathematics Series). It's not because of resistance from the students--far from it. Many keep asking "When are we gonna do it?" and I reply, "Soon!"

The problem is one of time constraints. Our time line leaves little room for extension, creativity or innovation. I have schedule FF every week since school started, after our weekly assessment, but these quizzes have taken my students much longer than expected. Inevitably, we run out of time.

We've finally managed to make rosters and introduce how to calculate weekly scores, but it took 6 weeks. I left the students to do the first week of actual scoring themselves on Friday (see my last post), but the substitute didn't hand out the rosters that were right there on top of my desk, clearly marked and separated by period. Those who were able to do it seemed to do just fine.

Upgrades/Downgrades

1. DOWNGRADE: Having students keep track of starters and bench players has been a confusing extra element on what can already seem like a daunting system. For now, they aren't "setting" starters like you would in online versions of FF, but usually picking their top listed players if they didn't mark anyone as requested. In the future, I'd either create a different roster worksheet than what is provided by FSM that would more clearly designate starters and bench players or eliminate the bench altogether to streamline the administrative part of the game.
2. DOWNGRADE: The activities provided aren't aligned to my state standards. There's a lot of middle school level material. Also, all of them are based on the "default scoring system," which uses all fractions with a common denominator of 48. I don't like that system, and while I can freely change it for scoring, I can't easily change all the built-in activities. In short, I can't use a lot of what's provided.
3. UPGRADE: FSM just developed a system that allows you to input each of your students' teams and print out only their team's stats! No more printing out 20 pages of stats per week to post on the wall (as I did this week), which was already a recent improvement over the nothing available up until this year. I give credit to the FSM company for trying to continually improve the system.
4. UPGRADE: The lack of time issue is only going to get worse as we delve deeper into the fall semester, so I don't see any way around making this an extra credit project. I am working on getting some prizes for the end of the season to keep them involved and motivated, but I can't hold everyone strictly accountable for this on top of everything else we're doing in class. It's just too much. In the end though, there's plenty of students participating, and this makes things much easier on me.
   

Fantasy Sports and Mathematics official website

Click the tag "fantasy football" for more posts on this topic.

Fantasy Football and Mathematics Draft Day

Friday was draft day for our Fantasy Football and Mathematics project. Unfortunately, drafting took far longer than I anticipated. We could have finished with the entire period devoted to drafting, but they were having trouble with the short weekly quiz we did beforehand and took far longer than expected.

After hinting about fantasy football since the first day of school, last Friday I formally announced our project and asked students to start gathering information. I provided a copy of the roster sheet they would need to fill out later so they could take notes during Week 1 of the NFL season. I listed the many ways they could find information about players without watching games (which, understandably, some students didn't want to do):

• Watch highlight shows on local news, ESPN (NFL Live, NFL Primetime, Sunday NFL Countdown, Monday Night Countdown), and FSN
  
• Go to ESPN.com, CBSSportsLine.com, NFL.com, SI.com for ideas
• Type in "fantasy football" in any search engine
• Ask a friend or family member who knows/watches a lot of football
• Read one of the 9 different fantasy football magazines I had purchased
  
• Alternatively, wait until Monday and Tuesday and read our local newspaper, The Monitor, in class (free copies are delivered daily through the Newspapers in Education program)

Most importantly, I emphasized that you don't need to know anything about football to play the game. The great equalizer is the $40 million salary cap. This means that even if you know all the best players in the league, you can't afford to have all of them on your team. Also, students are allowed to pick the same players if they want to, so the background knowledge necessary for your average online FF league isn't needed.

I had to guide many students past the frustration of not knowing anything about football by emphasizing that point--if all else fails, they could do just fine picking anyone that could fit under the cap. Even if you want to see pictures of players so you can fill your roster with the hottest guys (as some of my students are doing) you can. You'll probably have no more or less success than anyone else.

The other side is that even when they did excellent research, as one Pre-AP student did, they might come up with a roster no one (in fantasy or real life) could ever afford:

1. QB - Peyton Manning, IND
   
2. QB - Tom Brady, NE
   
3. RB - LaDainian Tomlinson, SD
   
4. RB - Steven Jackson, STL
5. RB - Frank Gore, SF
6. WR - Marvin Harrison, IND
7. WR - Terrell Owens, DAL
8. WR - Chad Johnson, CIN
   
9. WR - Steve Smith, CAR
   
10. K - Adam Vinatieri, IND
11. K - Robbie Gould, CHI
12. DEF - Chicago
13. DEF - San Diego

I told her she had done an amazing job assembling a great team, but the salary cap was going to make her team a little less like a Pro Bowl roster and more like the Kansas City Chiefs. Based on Fantasy Football and Mathematics' player values, this team would probably cost 2 or 3 times the cap. For example, the 2 most expensive players, Tomlinson and Jackson, cost about $22 million together (and you'd still have to fill 11 other positions).

Even though no class finished filling out their rosters, this was a great start because now students have a jumping off point. Many were excited to go home and do "research" over the weekend. Some students told me they had a sibling or cousin who they would seek out this weekend to help fill out their rosters, and I'm glad to both get them excited about school and foster some family bonding.

They must have their roster set by next Friday, in time for Week 3. I expect that students will pick up on how good or bad their team is fairly quickly and be scrambling to make adjustments as the weeks go on. After Week 3, they will learn how to calculate their points. Later, I can incorporate several activities and ideas from the FSM curriculum to extend the project into other areas.

So here's my list of what's needed for draft day:

1. Build pre-draft buzz - Start talking about it ASAP, discuss the information gathering suggestions above, start bringing in newspapers and magazines
2. Player values printouts - Free with the FFM Teacher's Guide (if you have an older edition of the guide you can purchase this year's numbers for $4), or already included in the FFM Student Workbook
   
3. Handout of FF Description and Rules/Fantasy Roster - Again, you can get this from the Teacher's Guide or Student Workbook. This describes the basics including the salary cap.
   
4. FF related magazines - I found 9 different titles out there, but they are expensive (usually a $7+ cover price)

Optionally, Internet access would be helpful so that students could find up-to-the-minute information.

If anyone else reading the blog is using this system, I'd love to hear about it. Please leave feedback or email me!

If only every teacher was like Coach Mangini

Eric Mangini, the young coach of my beloved New York Jets, is known for being a master motivator, game planner, and for bringing surprise guests to camp to help get his team ready to go. Most recently, the best receiver in NFL history and dancer extraordinaire Jerry Rice stopped by Jets camp for a little motivational speaking:

"I just believe in the value of letting players hear how successful people became successful, or how their teams became successful," Mangini said. "The ingredients are really the same, regardless of whether it's football, baseball, basketball, hockey or whether you're at Johnson & Johnson. I mean, it's all the same core characteristics."

...or whether you're in Algebra class. Rice says it best himself (from a more detailed article on newyorkjets.com):

"I practiced every day like it was a game situation."

"A lot of guys really want to get to the Super Bowl, get rewarded. But there are sacrifices you have to make, a dedication to how you do everything possible for your teammates. What you're trying to do is accomplish something together. If the next guy's not doing his job, it's like there's a weak link in that chain."

I try to get my students to take all the incremental tasks as seriously as the major ones--when they do, they're successful. In short, hard work, dedication, and teamwork were essential to Rice phenomenal success. It probably didn't hurt that he had a great, enthusiastic teacher in Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh, who passed away last week.

I wrote about Mangini and Rice instead of the mind-numbing curriculum meeting I've been attending all week because I've written enough about professional development, and since I haven't finished the many projects I'm working on, I wanted to offer something others could actually use in the classroom.

Last year, while researching curriculum ideas, I read about a guy using fantasy football in his math class as an engaging ongoing project. It turned his class around, and it wasn't long before I purchased Fantasy Football and Mathematics and the accompanying Student Workbook.

Basically, the kids have a fantasy team just like you would find on ESPN, Yahoo! or elsewhere. Instead of somebody else calculating the scores at the end of each weekend, the students themselves do the math. They solve algebraic expressions that get increasingly harder as the season wears on, but it's one of those things where the kids don't care that it's math because it's football, and even if a student doesn't care about that, it's still a competitive game played against other students (and every student loves that!).

Along with tabulating the scores, the workbook contains numerous football-themed activities and problems that complement the meat of the idea.

I missed the boat on fully implementing this in my classroom, but when I used bits and pieces to help students decipher word problems, I had great success.

Last year I told my students that every week the Jets won, we wouldn't have any homework the following Monday. I soon had a parent ask me why her son was watching and cheering for the New York Jets (despite the fact we're in south Texas) the previous weekend. I knew then that if I could grab students' attention with a mere mention, the whole system could work wonders for those kids I was unable to motivate last year (and push the rest even farther).

I hope to implement the whole system this fall as a fun experiment, and if so I'll chronicle the ups and downs here. In the meantime, for more information go to the Fantasy Sports and Mathematics official site. There are now resource books on baseball, soccer and basketball depending on your students' interests.

Want to see this in action? Mr. Hagen's Math Class details how one class used the system in a story that aired last year on ESPN's Outside the Lines. Here's the video: