Ultimate Frisbee Drafting

My favorite thing that we have done it statistics this year is the ultimate frisbee project.  I liked how we played it first ourselves and then watched Moneyball so we understood what drafting was like.  Playing it ourselves also helped us understand what to look for in a player.  Jake, Brady and I looked through the list of players and picked out a few that looked promising.  Next we went through and rated them numerically based on skill.

In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt picked his players by their on-base percentage.  For the most part we picked players that had good percentages for short throws and catches. We did this because when we played frisbee as a class we realized that it was a lot easier to score with multiple short throws, instead of few long throws.  It was obvious that short throws were more beneficial just from looking at the statistics of the short throws compared to the long throws. We also looked at people who had won a lot of games.  So our team had some balance, we also made sure to have at least two people that could catch long throws and make them.

 During the actually draft about half of the players we wanted were already taken so we had to make a couple last second decisions.  For this we had the same decision making process, although we were rushed and did not put as much thought into it.  In the end we had a good draft pick and we completely dominated the other teams and got the extra credit points.  I liked this project because it helped me learn how to look at a large amount of data and how to interpret it.   It was kind of fun to go through and pick different players with different strengths to make a solid team.