Trifecta Competition: Conference

Well folks, it's that time of the season again, time for an update on the Trifecta competition!  For those interested in a little background, please visit my Non Conference update from January.  For a quick recap, 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.  So what are we waiting for?  In the words of the legendary Brian Fellow: Let's get going!

Quick Stats (Conference season only):

I'll save you the time of looking at the scoring distribution, as it's basically identical to last time.  One interesting trend in the overall numbers is that the game has garnered fewer entries as the conference season progressed.  (Perhaps the season-ending three-game skid is actually the fault of all of us slacker community members who don't participate in the trifecta competition?)  Below is a three-game average graph of the number of entries for conference games:

Awards:

We're condensing some of the old awards, and breaking out some new awards this time:

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 award for best guesser goes to: Transmogrified Tiger, with an average score of 3.875 in eight entries

The second award is the "Don't Go To Vegas" award, for the lowest point average.  This award goes to Icknae for recording an average score of 1.55 in eleven entries.

The third 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.  We're extending this one to the entire season. Congratulations to repeat winners:

MUPete, Monkeypox, and StopSpe, who all had 31 entries!

The fourth award is the NEW "Lucky Charm" award, given to the person who's participation correlates most closely with the Tiger's winning.  Congratulations to Brad W and elpjuly4 who each had four entries in Missouri wins, to only one entry in Missouri losses!

The fifth award is the "Friday the 13th" award, and is the opposite of the Luck Charm award.  This one goes to Zou want a piece? who has submitted four entries and the Tigers were winless in those four games.

Analysis:

In addition to there being fewer participates as the season drew to an end, there was also a greater level of success.   Bill C. has mentioned how there are really only three players (Denmon, Bowers, Dixon) that could really be relied upon to play well, especially toward the end of the season.  It appears that the RockMNation community heeded his words, as we got better and better at predicting the correct trifecta participants.  Below is a three-game average of the "Match" score (where a player gets 1 point for each correct name, regardless of position).

In my last post, I showed how our expectations of players had changed as the season progressed.  I've included the same information for the entire season.  The graph below is a three-game average score (for smoothing) of each players expected score. 

Denmon had a mid-conference-season lull, and we adjusted our expectations accordingly.  For English, apparently many people thought he would suddenly revert to Sophomore form on the road @ Kansas (this one game spike in his actual score affected the three game average for ..uh  three games.), then we realized "oh, maybe he's just not as good this year".  Bowers has been on a tear, placing first or second in the last five games, and you can see that we quickly became believers again.

The Expected Trifecta:

I calculated the average trifecta from conference games only.  Now the Denmon-Bowers-Ratliffe hasn't happened yet, but it seems like it should be the default going forward.

And as a bonus for other stat-nerds like me, I've made the raw data excel file available for your enjoyment. Simply click here!