Gramps Braggin Rights Boys Basketball Pre-season Prognostications - GAC North Conference 9/25/2021

 Many of you have had a chance to read some of my conference prognostications by now.   I have not gotten feedback as to whether they make any sense or are just a bunch of BS.  The winning percentage mathematical model is a novel approach to predicting future success but many may think dubiously of it.

What did Mark Twain say (or it might have been Disraeli, who Samuel Clemmons stole it from)? 

"Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics"

I have used statistics my entire life to model different processes in the food industry.  You take the important factors, control and adjust them in a specific range or array, and you can develop a quadratic or logarithmic equation that describes the process to a certain degree.  The more complex the system, the less likely you will describe it in exact terms.  

I once had a scientist on my staff who designed a low-fat kettle potato chip in a mini-fryer and with a hot air gun.  He undercooked the chips in the Fry Daddy and then blasted the rest of the moisture out with the hot air gun.  Somehow, those samples ended up on the CEO's desk and he called my boss and said he wanted them on the market in six weeks.  Of course, once you have a product and design the packaging, it takes a minimum of twelve weeks to get materials.  An impossible task, right?

My boss told me to gather as many people as necessary and go to the snack plant and get a commercial product ready in those six weeks.  I took a statistician, my scientist, and a bunch of engineers to the plant, where we hooked up a big 80,000 BTU heater to the potato chip centrifuge that spun the oil off the kettle fried chips and began experimenting.  Chip thickness, fry time, fry temperature, centrifuge time, and temperature, potato type, etc, etc. and we ran experiments where we altered these factors.  We modeled a process and the resulting equations told us how each factor was important.  Within a few weeks, we had the commercial process designed and had a plant-produced product on the jerry-rigged equipment.  Of course, the CEO loved them until the marketing department told him they needed twelve weeks to get packaging materials.  The product is still on the market as Cape Cod Low Fat Kettle potato chips.   I smile when I see those packages on the grocery shelf, 20 years later, and it reminds me that any system can be mathematically modeled to some extent.

My point is this:  You can predict any process with some accuracy with enough data to analyze and massage.  Whether I can predict something as complex as a basketball team over an entire season is another thing.  Time will tell.  A statistics consultant once told me in an advanced statistics training class, "In God we trust, all others bring data"!    So as long as I get good data on teams, I feel reasonably comfortable projecting their success.  When the data is not there, I am left to opinions and you and I both know everyone has an opinion, just like we all have A$$holes.  Both can leave you feeling crappy.

So the next conference I am predicting is the GAC North.  There are some great teams and programs in all three GAC conferences.  I will get to South and Central later.

All the conference ratings are found on this link HERE.