Sports and Numbers

Season Performance Trends

The chart below shows the trend for performance this season.  For each game, a team's offensive, defensive and overall performance is standardized.  Thus, performance indicates how many points per 100 possessions a team would score (offense), yield (defense) or net (average of offense and inverse defense) for a game.  It is based purely on its opponent's adjusted efficiencies and the resulting efficiency of the game played.  The dotted lines represent the best-fit line (linear regression), indicating which way a team may be trending for the season overall.

ANALYSIS:  Things are starting to look better three games after the USC game, at which point there appeared to be no real trends in place.  There is no apparent trend on offense.  The low "r-squared" tells us that there is too much noise, meaning that the line is not a great fit for the dots, and even if it were a great fit, the slope is essentially flat.  On defense, there is a better fit but not a great one.  It turns out the confidence level on this one is about 78 percent that there is a trend, and of course that would be in the right direction (down) for defense.  For the overall, it's not quite as strong as defense, but there is about 73 percent confidence that the overall performance is improving.  With this team, the offense may never become a lethal weapon, but as long as it's not a major liability that continues to get worse, it may be able to get by on a smothering defense that's still improving.  And by "get by" I mean win the conference championship!