Sunday, December 26, 2010

How many points for a win?

It's known among sabermetricians that if your baseball team can add 10 extra runs over a season you'll win another game (on average of course). This is useful because it's relatively easy to show that a player can add or remove runs from a team.
In basketball the corresponding number is 30 points (according to John Hollinger), which isn't quite as useful, but it's still not too hard to estimate the number of points a player adds.
I haven't found the number for football, so I decided to figure it out myself. Using linear regression on excel to relate point differential to wins I got the following data:
2009- 40 points
2008- 35.7 points
2007- 38.5 points

About 40 points in one season is a win? Sounds good to me. We'll show how useful this is later in the week.

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