NFL.com's Football Freakanomics

EDIT: All of this content appears to have been removed from NFL.com. If anyone has any luck finding it, please email me at hartnett004@gannon.edu

The NFL and the statistics folks over at Freakonomics got together and made some...learning modules? Let's call them learning modules. They are interactive websites that teach users about very specific questions related to football (like home field advantage, instances when football player statistics don't tell the whole story about a player/team, whether or not firing a head coach improves a failing team, the effects of player injury on team success, etc.) and then answer these questions via statistics.

Most of the modules include interactive tables, data, and videos (featuring the authors of Freakanomics) in order to delve into the issue at hand.

For example:

The Home Field Advantage: This module features a video, as well as a interesting interactive map that illustrates data about the exact sleep lost experienced by teams that travel from one coast to another and the teams that have to travel the most during seasons. This module uses data to demonstrate that home field advantage does exist, but it also describes all of the factors that may cause home-field advantage (player sleep quality/stadium noise/etc.). This opens up a discussion of multivariate statistics and co-variates.

How to use in your class: Engaging examples of real life questions that can be answered via data collection and analysis.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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