Trifecta Competition: Non Conference

[Bumped to the front page because, well, of course it's going to be bumped to the front page...]

So we are already almost half way through the 2010-2011 Men's Basketball season here at RMN, and while Bill C. and the regular contributors keep churning out awesome, meaningful content, we are left without answers to some of the most meaningless questions related to Mizzou Men's Basketball at RMN.  Specifically questions like: Who's the king of all posters when it comes to trifectas?  What players do we expect to do well?  How do our expectations change as the season goes on?  Who needs to get a life and stop spending so much time on RMN?

Well rejoice my RMN brethren (and sistern?), those answers are now here!  For the uninitiated, this whole production began way back in November after the Arkansas - Pine Bluff game, where I suggested the following method of scoring the theretofore (see what I did there?) unwinnable game.  The basic idea is that you get credit for guessing correct participants of the trifecta (one point for each player that you guess that makes the trifecta at any rank), and bonus points for guessing the correct rank.  So a perfect score (a "winner" by Bill C.'s definition) would score 9 points.  

Statistical Analysis:

First we can look at how frequently each score happens.  We've had a total of 707 entries, 12 perfect score winners, and an average score of 2.60.  Out of fifteen games, five have had perfect score winners.

Awards:

The first award is the "Best Guesser" award, for the highest point average.  In order to qualify for this award, you had to participate in over half of the contests.  The top three for "Best Guesser" are:

1. MULuke with an average score of 3.77

2. Mac6uffin with an average score of 3.36

3. Wooderson with an average score of 3.25.

The second award is the "Don't Go To Vegas" award, for the lowest point average.  The bottom three (again, who participated in over half of the games) are:

1. soccerfreak with an average score of 1.30 (perhaps you should start using capital letters?)

2. jack.nowland with an average score of 1.70

3. tigers and chiefs fan with an average score of 1.72

The next award is the "Get A Life" award, given to the community members who had nothing better to do than play trifecta.  To earn this award, you must not miss a single trifecta contest.  Congratulations to:

MUPete, Monkeypox, threadkiller, and StopSpe, who all had fifteen entries.

The "Fish Or Cut Bait" award is given to the community members who only played the game a single time, yet still recorded a competitive score.  Congratulations to the following two members who played only once, yet scored an impressive 6 points in their lone entry:

mizzousundevil, Wald

The final award is the "Schizo" award, given to the contestant with the greatest point difference between their best and worst entry.  This one was tough, since there were six contestants who scored both 9 and 0.  The tie breaker gave the award to the only perfect winner who also recorded TWO bagels.  Congratulations to:

Ausgiano

Since Blaineys are no longer a tradeable currency, all winners will be compensated in Franklins (readers of VEB will be very excited to hear this).

Player analysis:

I thought it would be interesting to see how our fan perception of some of the players change over the season, so I took the average expected score (3 points for first place in the trifecta, 2 for second, 1 for third, 0 if not guessed) for each player by game.  Below is a chart of the three most interesting players:

As the season has progressed, we've expected less out Kimmie and Bowers, while our expectations for Denmon grew to the point where half of all entries for the Northen Illinois game picked Denmon to lead the trifecta (for the record, they were right).

The Expected Trifecta:

Below is a table of the average trifecta score (again, 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third) for each of the players through fifteen games

The combo of Demon-Bowers-Dixon has only happened once (Illinois), but you could do worse than to guess that every time.