Ultimate Frisbee Draft -- Colin

My favorite project in stats class was definitely drafting ultimate frisbee teams.  We got to do a lot of preparation for the final/ big part of the project.  First we actually played ultimate frisbee and were told to keep track of stats that we thought were important to having a good team.  Then Mr. Pethan had us watch Money Ball.  Money Ball is about how statistics started to have a role in baseball.  Baseball scouts before used their gut feeling to draft guys, now teams use all kinds of crazy statistics to get the best players.  

 After we got a better understanding on statistics in sports we had to get into groups with our classmates and figure out a draft process for an up coming ultimate frisbee league.  My group mates were Shane and Alec.  All of us were football players which helped us immensely because football is like ultimate frisbee in the grand scheme of things. All of us watch football a lot; we had the understanding that defense wins championships, just like the Seattle Seahawks. So our number one priority was getting a good defense. We broke down pass breakup percentage for long and short throws.  After we go our top defenders we picked up the best short catch receivers.  This is similar to the “ground and pound” offense in football, which is breaking down the defense with short plays that are very safe plays. We drafted going from the top down on our own specific power rankings.  Obviously we were right on our draft selection because we won the championship.

I learned a lot about how important statisticians are to sports.  Their methods save money for whatever organization they are working for.  I also learned how important it is to have the same ideal player for the kind of team you want.  Team work and communication are very important.  This was such a fun and eye opening project.  It was good to work with a team and get different views on things.  Sadly, I was gone for a day, so I missed the nuts and bolts of the project which is when you get the graphs from the Excel documents in order.  I wish I could of had a chance to see how Shane did all of that.  Overall this was a fun, social, competitive, physical, and learning project.