As the season approaches, I took a few minutes to update our rivalry statistics. Good luck to all the managers this season. Let’s all hope the A.C. Slaters doesn’t get their 4th championship this year since we’ll never hear the end of it. We’ll start with a recap of where we were before the last season.
2019 Game Differential
First a look at the game differential from before last season. Game differential is just wins minus losses. A positive game differential means you win more than you lose and vice versa. Most of us hover right around the baseline. A.C. Slaters and SuperFly Eagles have the biggest positive game differential, although it isn’t even really close with Slater’s having a 20+ game lead on SuperFly (clarification added by request of SuperFly who also mentioned that they’ve lost the title game 3 times). A.C. Slaters, one of two teams with 3 championships, is the clear winner here with a nearly 35 game swing. As for the negative the Tu brothers bring up the rear with NeverPlydShenanigans just over 10, and Turtle Power with an impressive 35+ negative differential.
2019 One Sided “Rivalries”
Next we’ll take a look at the match-ups that have a 60% or greater winning percentage. I limited the data set to a minimum of 5 total games, so sorry to the newer managers since it’s unlikely you’ve played anyone 5 times. As you probably expect after looking at out game differentials, Turtle Power is on the wrong side of the two biggest winners. Hollywood and A.C. Slaters both hold roughly 90% winning percentages over Turtle Power. SuperFly Eagles rounds out the top 5 with spots 4 and 5 with A.C. Slaters and inhouse SWAT holding 12 – 5 records against SuperFly.
2019 Rivals
Finally for 2019, we look at the rivalries in our league. Again, i’ve limited this to a minimum of 5 games, and the win percentage is between 45% and 55%. There’s only one active 50/50 rivalry in this data set, and it’s Forgotten Brown vs NeverPlydShenanigans. There are several one game matchups and it will be interesting to compare after last seasons games.
2020 Game Differential
Not a whole lot of movement for the game differential numbers. A.C. Slaters differential moves from nearly 35 to under 30 while Turtle Power gets closer to the 40 game mark. Also of note is that inhouse SWAT went from a slight positive to a 0 game differential. I’m sure they’ll be looking to come out strong in 2020 to get that number back up.
2020 One Sided “Rivalries”
Good new for Turtle Power, they’re no longer at the top of this list. Hard As SoftServe takes over the top spot with a 5-0 record over Hollywood. Obviously, one season isn’t going to drastically change these numbers. The odds of you playing someone twice are already a little low, but playing someone 3 times is only going to happen if you both make the playoffs. It is possible we’ll see more movement in the rivalries due to the fact that they are closer to even splits.
2020 Rivalries
We had a little bit more movement here than we did in the other categories. We’ve had a few rivalries get dropped from our list. As expected, the rivalries near the top and bottom of our list have been flipped. Forgotten Brown was able to win both match-ups against Slaters to move to a 13-9 records, removing them from our list. inhouse SWAT also picked up another win over Brown to move above 55% to remove that game. NeverPlydShenanigans managed to even the series with Slaters.
Conclusion
Looking over the data to write this I see some small data issues that can be cleaned up. On the whole, the analysis here is accurate, but there appears to be some issues in the dashboard reporting in the model that may be leaving out records that should be included. I’ll dig into it when I have some time, but it shouldn’t affect any of the reporting during the season. Good luck to everyone in Week 1 and look for the regular (well…somewhat regular) weekly column in By the Numbers. I’ve also got the data from last year to determine the theoretical winner. I’ll write up a port about that soon, too.
Boo Boo 