The Great Database

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Wing

I don't know about you, but I've always heard that OPR and CCWM aren't the best of statistics, and it makes sense since these are calculated by solving 6 simultaneous equations.

Not to shock you, but OPR requires finding the least-squares solution to N simultaneous equations, where N is the number of teams in the data set being analyzed. N can vary from approx 50 if analyzing only one event, all the way up to over a thousand if doing end-of-season combined analysis for all events.

This type of data processing is widely used in many fields to process raw data to gain insight. It's not the solving of simultaneous equations that affects the usefulness of the resulting statistics. It's the assumptions that go into building the model. In the case of OPR for FIRST, the scoring method can have a strong effect on the usefulness of OPR.