I figured there would be at least some value about having a place where we, as a community, would be able to bounce some statistics off each other.

I think after Spongie's great intro to what we need to look at with statistics, I think that having a bit more discussion on what statistics are involved and how to get meaning from them would be a worthwhile investment, where we can get questions, ideas, and try to find some quantitative answers to questions that may be lingering in the minds of both meatballs and non-meatballs alike. This isn't a place to help with your math homework, for sure, but it is a place where asking questions, garnering understanding, and questioning data would probably be welcome.

That said, here's a few conversation starters:

- From Me (AQ)

- The difficulty of the 15th and 16th win (and contrarily 15th and 16th loss) compared to the 13th and 14th win & loss. Seems like that next plateau in wins/loss is to difficult for many teams to get past. Meaning, you don't see a lot of 1 loss or 15 win teams, but why? Why do you see 14-2 and 2-14... If you see more 2-14 than 14-2, what does that mean? Why do you see more low win teams than high win teams? What does that mean for parity?

- From Chucky74:

The piece that interests me is what is the significance of landing on winning side (9-7/10-6) or in the middle (8-8) more of a winning consistency of a coach than the end record of a coach. Randomness versus predictability of year after year record. Maybe take a 32×9 table of the wins of each team over the last nine years as see if Lovie’s shows difference in wins and in volatility?

- Similarly from CrackedCactus

Has anyone done ANOVA analysis on factors of W/L percentages?

- Balkan Bear also has a neat idea

Since I’m on this train of thought, I also wanted to mention that I’ve been considering doing analysis on Matt Forte’s carries by looking at outliers, skewedness, 5-number summaries, Normal, and probability settings.

Just for everyone to know, if you have a dataset or a text based table, using the <pre> tag helps you get formatting nicely.

like this.     it actually captures your spaces.  so you can format a text table