sixman.guru

In high school boys’ track and field, there is a number that functions less like a time standard and more like a rite of passage. Sub-4:00 in the mile. Sub-1:50 in the 800 meters. These are the marks that separate the very good from the elite, the ones that get mentioned in a sentence alongside college commitments and national rankings. Running under 1:50 means you belong in a different conversation. ...

If you follow this site, you know I love digging into numbers. For this year’s NCAA Division I Indoor Track & Field Championships, I wanted to go further than projections on a spreadsheet — so I built a full web app that actually simulates the meet. You can check it out yourself right here: https://web-production-55f65.up.railway.app/ Note: Variable adjustment is currently password protected — I’m hoping to open that up to everyone next week. ...

Saturday marks the running of the 2021 NCAA D1 Cross Country National Championships in Tallahassee with Northern Arizona on the brink of their fifth team title in six years. It has been a while since I have publically published any new models in any sport, but yesterday on Twitter, Citius Magazine posted something about a video they had done with Isaac Wood at The Wood Report on his prediction. Being relatively new to the world of collegiate track and cross country, I had no idea who Isaac was and immediately went and subscribed to his website to see what he had built. I also like to see how others model sport and Isaac has an interesting website. ...

Things Change. People move on. That is what is happening. I am still working towards selling the website, but for now it goes away. It is really sad that the thing which brought me joy for all of these years has become a burden. But that is the case. It’s time. So so long.

The End This is going to be a long and rambling story. Some of it may be new to many of you, but I just wanted to get it down on paper as I decide to close a chapter in my life. When I started ranking six-man football teams during the 1993 season, I never imagined that 28 seasons later I would still be doing it. I did not come from a six-man town. Heck, the high school I went to was always in the largest UIL classification, save for my senior year. ...

Ed note — the full article (with rankings) is posted here, http://texascollegetennis.com/2016/12/13/a-new-approach-to-ranking-singles-players-in-the-fall/. I will get more technical below. I decided awhile back that the way players are ranked in the fall by the ITA is a bit arbitrary. I am not trying to be critical of the ITA, because trying to rank singles players across the country before they’ve played a single match is not only extremely difficult, not only from a pure mechanical standpoint, but also politically. ...

I was fooling around with some ideas about the season and decided I would put out some rankings for the fall half of the season. Sure I could write something or maybe use UTR, but what do college tennis players like even more than tennis? That’s right, video games. So i honor of this, I decided to use Microsoft’s Trueskill algorithm to rank how the fall season went (based on what has been entered into the ITA database as of this morning–11/11)… ...

I wrote an article that was published over at Nikita’s The Tennis Notebook. It dives into a cluster analysis I did using year-end ATP rankings since 1972. You can find the article here: https://medium.com/the-tennis-notebook/who-are-the-greatest-players-in-the-open-era-e7af7f627cc5#.snynwrfqe

Photo by Horia Varlan [CC 2.0] We talk about it all of the time – who is the greatest player of all-time? Is it the player who won the most Grand Slam titles, the player ranked number one for the most weeks or the person with the best record against the premier players of that era? Is it a combination of these three things or more? What factors are important when it comes to this discussion? ...

We’ve all played that game I beat so-and-so, who beat so-and-so, so by the transitive property, I also beat that player. Yesterday I wrote about the path from Australian Chris Fletcher’s indirect win over the world’s top-ranked player, Novak Djokovic. I was knee-deep into the research on that when I discovered it counted walkovers. I rewrote a little code and today I top that. No walkovers, longer paths. Our journey this time starts in Uzbekistan where 18 year old Saida’lo Saidkarimov defeats Sarvar Ikramov in the second round of the Tashkent Challenger. Saidkarimov is a wild card and only garners one main draw victory this year (at Uzbekistan F4) and sits appropriately ranked 2150. ...