drewgriz

Link for the lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNGz-coRK5w

I think the answer to "why not football?" has much more to do with the extremely small sample size that a football season represents.

Basketball has been catching up in the metrics department, even if a lot of the statistics are not very widely publicized. In one of my stats courses, we had a guest speaker who did stats for the university's basketball team, and you'd be surprised at how specific you can get with 50 games' worth of data (e.g. significant patterns in which situations and from which spot on the court you want a specific player to be shooting the ball).

Football's brief season, by comparison, presents a dual problem. First, it takes multiple seasons to build up the same kind of data set on a player/team that you get in a few weeks of baseball. In college, by the time this data is useful (to the same level that baseball data is), the player has graduated. Second, in such a short season, the product of these predictions isn't particularly helpful, as a departure of one or two losses from your estimated mean record makes a much bigger difference in a 12- or 16-game season than it does in a 160-game season. Basketball, I think, splits the difference somewhat, which is why you're starting to get points over replacement stats and the like for individual players that are fairly useful.

What are some current trends in men's fashion that you see petering out soon, and which ones do you think are here to stay? (I'm thinking along the lines of lapel width, slim fit pantseverything everywhere, monk straps, etc.)