In the most time honored of traditions, Nick, Hawk and myself had a nice discussion the league. Specifically, about tweaks to the scoring system for next season. There’s been discussions with others around ways to improve the scoring system. A quick note before getting into the suggestions…

The formula behind the Quota system was set up so that most players would hit or surpass their Quota. Key word there is MOST: We wanted the MOST of the matches to be a question of who did better against their quota instead of who did less worse against their quota. Using 2013 numbers, we changed the “starting point” from 39 to 34. Here’s what various “starting points” would yield, on average, per week:

34: 24 players hitting or surpassing their quota (2/3 of the league)

35 and 36: 17 players hitting or surpassing their quota (1/2 of the league)

37 and 38: 12 players hitting or surpassing their quota (1/3 of the leage)

39: 8 players hitting or surpassing their quota (~1/4 of the league)

 

With the history lesson over, here’s a few of the ideas:

1. Institute a Quota “Floor” – We had a similar rule in the previous scoring system where a player could only have a max HDCP of 12. This would be that a player has a minimum Quota. According to the latest numbers, that floor would be around a 5, but is subject to change.
2. Institute Negative Points – In the old scoring system, there was a disincentive to scoring high (the 2 points for total match score). Now, if you are at double bogey, there is no incentive to keep scores low after missing out on the bogey point other than pride/ego. Here’s a few of the ideas around this:
   1. (-1) point for Triple Bogey or worse – That would be a 6 on par 3’s, 7 on par 4’s, 8 on par 5’s
   2. (-1) point for Double Par – That would be a 6 on par 3’s, 8 on par 4’s, 10 on par 10’s

Hawk and Nick really wanted to see, by Flight, what the Net results are for each player/Flight (Net = Pts scored – Quota). The below is to a picture of that graph. The horizontal axis shows Net results, while the vertical axis is the count of players at that Net result. Blue is Flight 1, red is Flight 2, green is Flight 3. The lightly shaded shapes are the distribution curves for each flight (blue = F1, red = F2, green = F3). The Purple line is the distribution curve for the entire league. The Black line is an ‘Ideal’ bell curve (or at least my attempt at it).

Actual Numbers:

Flight 1 – Average +3, Standard Deviation 6

Flight 2 – Average -2, Standard Deviation 8

Flight 3 – Average +5.3, Standard Deviation 10

League – Average +2, Standard Deviation 8.5

For those who slept through Statistics class, here’s some conclusions you can draw from this:

1. Current Quota System clearly favors Flight 3: 6 of the top 10 in terms of Net results are from Flight 3, with 5 of them being in the top 7! That being said, they have the widest variations in their scores (34 points between top (+24) and bottom (-10))
2. Flight 2 is not performing well in this scoring system: The average below Quota isn’t even the start. 8 of its 12 (75%) players are Net negative. According to the graph, about 80% of Flight 2 would lose to the AVERAGE Flight 3 golfer.
3. Flight 1 is performing right where it was expected: Despite having one low extreme and one high extreme, 83% of Flight 1 is within 7 net points of each other (.5pts per week)

 

For those not familiar with statistical distributions and how it would apply for our system, we want the average to be as close to our goal as possible and the variances to be as small as possible. What the goal should be is certainly up for interpretation – 50/50 Quota hitting (0 average) vs. 75/25 Quota’s being met (above 0 average). What will be an offseason task for the IT Nerd is to determine what changes should be made to the scoring system to achieve those goals. Use the data from 2014 Season to go forward into the 2015 Season.

PS – Here’s all the players Net Results…

Player Performance		Performance
Flight 1	Nick Wight	6
	Pat Donahue	6
	Brian Thompson	-12
	Mike Carroll	1
	Dick Donegan	5
	TJ Donegan	6
	Jack Donegan	5
	Steve Donegan	5
	Craig Hawkinson	2
	Tom Phillips	-1
	Devin Carrigan	13
	Dale Russell	0
Flight 2	DJ Mahar	7
	Vinny Procopio	7
	Gary Thompson	-9
	Rick Fanto	-9
	Denny Welch	-8
	Connor Brown	13
	Gary Antos	-6
	Matt Lochner	-13
	Drew Prucha	-3
	Jon Carroll	3
	Sean Mott	-4
	Chris Donegan	-2
Flight 3	Bob Moran	24
	Bob Zaleski	12
	Bill Kirkby	18
	Art Brillanti	7
	Bill John	8
	Tony Massa	9
	Tom Donegan	4
	Jim Morgan	-10
	Pat Cregg	-2
	Dan Mahar	1
	Joe Donegan	-7
	Marty Donegan	0