Sports Statistics: Final Project and Final Reflections

My Sports Statistics just ended, and while I had dreams of continuing the class into the 3rd quarter of school (my school offers different classes each quarter in a quasi-college way), they died around winter break. The class was a huge disappointment for a number of reasons:

1. Most of the students in the class were only superficially engaged in the class. Many didn't know what they signed up for and/or didn't want to be there. They were focused and working when they were there, but beyond getting the assignment done, there was little investment in what we were doing.
   
2. Attendance was horrendous. The class ran twice a week, and there were many times when I had a completely different group of students from one class to the next. It's difficult to move on when you're in a constant state of catching up.
3. The FSM-prescribed method of finding stats took too much time. I didn't think of a better method until winter break came around, so we stopped tallying additional stats as of December 16th.
   
4. I didn't have the time to arrange things I wanted like guest speakers and field trips to connect our classwork to sports statistics in the real world. We weren't able to really use the stats in any meaningful way.

I create a simple final project for the course. I asked students to look back at the original player values we had used to select our initial fantasy basketball rosters. Using what we know now--near the halfway point of the season--they have to create the best possible team stat-wise using the same player values. I think it was a good way to bring things full circle.

In the end, I learned a lot, and would approach things differently if we started over. I see the value in this and will try to work it into my regular math classes as an ongoing, extra credit project. I enjoyed experimenting with something different, that's for sure. Click on the sports statistics tag for more posts about my experience with this course.

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