{"id":972,"date":"2009-11-16T11:26:55","date_gmt":"2009-11-16T15:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=972"},"modified":"2009-11-16T11:26:55","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T15:26:55","slug":"winston-sports-statistics-and-decision-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/11\/16\/winston-sports-statistics-and-decision-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Winston, Sports, Statistics, and Decision Making"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"winston\"Wayne Winston, author of famous textbooks in operations research and a new book on math and sports<\/a>,\u00a0 and sports statistics\/decision making guru, has a column in the Huffington Post<\/a>, which certainly catapults him to rock-star status in the operations research world.\u00a0 The entries are also posted on his personal blog<\/a>, where he posts additional material.<\/p>\n

His recent post is on a controversial decision<\/a> that the coach, Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots (US football) made yesterday.\u00a0 With just a couple of minutes left to play, Belichick decided to try for a first down on 4th and 2 deep on his own 28 yard line.\u00a0 If the Patriots had made the first down, the game would be over with a Patriots win.\u00a0 If they failed (which they did), the Indianapolis would need to move the ball about 30 yards in two minutes to score and win (which they did).\u00a0 The alternative would have been to punt, which would then require Indy to move perhaps 60 or 70 yards in that time to score.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of coaches in this situation would punt.\u00a0 Winston suggests Belichick made the right move, given that Indianapolis had a high probability of scoring even from 60 or 70 yards (Indianapolis has the quarterback and team to do so).\u00a0 The result is pretty clear:\u00a0 as long as you believe that Indianapolis had at least a 50-50 shot of scoring after the punt (and in many cases with a lower probability than that), you should go for it.\u00a0 Advanced NFL Stats has a slightly different take on this<\/a>, with the same conclusion.<\/p>\n

I think it is important to note that Winston doesn’t just do statistics.\u00a0 He combines it with decision making.\u00a0 Sometimes that decision making is reasonably straightforward but unintuitive (like the above), and sometimes it is more complicated.<\/p>\n

Winston has done a lot to bring clarity to the complicated world of basketball statistics and decision making<\/a>.\u00a0 I look forward to seeing what he has to say to Huffington’s huge audience.\u00a0 And maybe have him sneak in the phrase “operations research” once in a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wayne Winston, author of famous textbooks in operations research and a new book on math and sports,\u00a0 and sports statistics\/decision making guru, has a column in the Huffington Post, which certainly catapults him to rock-star status in the operations research world.\u00a0 The entries are also posted on his personal blog, where he posts additional material. … Continue reading “Winston, Sports, Statistics, and Decision Making”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}