IndianaMudflap

Alright Ladies and Gentleman,

It's time for the Mudflap's favorite post of the year.  Back in the old Merrillville Semi-State days we used to experience lots of overcrowding issues.  We had dirty Region mill workers sitting right on top of toothless Logansport Regional farmers in their overalls.  It was chaos.  Our old friend HOWDOG offered up the most genius solution to the overcrowding issue.  If the Logansport Regional teams would leave the bus running so they could quickly vacate the premises after their rude welcoming to Region wrestling, we could clear the place out and have more spacious accommodations for the Region Rat crowd to enjoy the rest of the day.  Thus, "Who Should Keep the Bus Running?" was born.  While the accommodations at East Chicago Central are more spacious, the question is still valid.  Who should keep the bus running?  What is the best record that is going home without a ticket?  Will Hall of Famer Tommy Miller punch a ticket and look to improve upon his 2-13 coaching record on Friday night in 32 seasons or will he be a spectator from the Good 'Ole Boys table at Bankers Life?  So many unanswered questions.

I will set the OVER/UNDER for Logansport Regional State Qualifiers at 5.5 and take the UNDER.  3 Raiders, 1 Frontiers-men, and 1 BC Bison punch tickets.  Tacos appear to be on the menu for OnTheRise219.

For those who don't want to take the time to read all those words..

It sounds to me like your strategy to get kids more interested in wrestling and more opportunities to wrestle in college is to wrestle LESS.  Eliminate opportunities and this will somehow make more kids want to try the sport and more college coaches want to give opportunities to Indiana kids?

Also, based on Fort Wayne Semi-State only winning 20 matches on Friday night, why not have categories for the semi-states?  Evansville, New Castle, and East Chicago took Fort Wayne's lunch money and I'm sure there were state qualifiers at Fort Wayne who had no business even making the ticket round at the other three sites.

Mudflap...you can see again here that there is no summing or averaging in any way of Genius ratings.  These are the total expected semi-state qualifiers from teams of these quality levels if they wrestled in an average regional.

Should have said, "only sum the expected SSQ of the teams who actually got a guy to semi state".  The teams who don't get a SSQ are irrelevant to the regional's strength.

Maligned,

So are you agreeing with me about only summing the scores of the teams who got a SSQ?

Maligned,

The same question that I have still holds.  What difference does it make whether the 9th best guy in a Regional is the worst wrestler in the state or an above average wrestler?  In either scenario, he's not even at the Regional to add to its difficulty.

Path difficulty, I will argue, should be calculated by how tough are the teams who are getting the lions share of the SSQ?  If your argument is that "they're in the regional and we have the data so why exclude the bottom teams?", then my retort to that would be "only sum the genius scores of the teams who actually got a guy to semi-state".  Those are ones making the path difficult.   

Almost all. Exactly. But every site is different so there's no fair way to just not consider some teams. Again, we have all the historical info...why are we wrong in using it and remaining as accurate as we've been?

The problem is that by doing a simple average, you're weighting the bottom 10 teams equally with the top 6. Find out what % of SSQ the top 6 teams get and weight their scores to that percentages. The bottom teams make no difference whether they're the worst team in the state or an average team, the quality of the top 6 absolutely matter.

If we look at all teams we know, for example, that a given regional has 50 or 55 regional-level kids. If we only look at a certain number of teams or only the best couple from each weight class, we're making our guess far more erratic since there are 15 other teams competing that all have at least a minimal impact on that site's crowdedness. As Coach Pendoski said, they've got a whole run down of good teams--not just 2or 4. We can't knowingly leave some information out just because it might make us use the calculator a few less clicks.

I don't think we are leaving any valuable data out is my point. It's possible that we could have "addition by subtraction" in terms of less data being more predictive in this case.. I'm arguing that the data you are valuing, namely the bottom 10 teams in a regional is irrelevant. The difficulty of the path to semi state is a function of how good the top 4 or 6 teams are, since they are getting almost all of the SSQ.

Every team has the possibility of scoring so you cant discount them.  Some of the sectionals  have 8 or 9 teams with  relatively high Genius ratings.  They should  get credit for that.

I disagree. Whether a kid is 5th best or 9th best, doesn't really matter. He doesn't qualify for the next level in either example. I'd argue it's harder for an individual to advance in a regional with 4 top 5 teams in it than one with 9 above average teams in it but no top 25 teams.

That's not how Categories are calculated. Look at the example I gave back about 30 comments on this thread to see how we're only using genius to predict how many qualifiers each team would get in an average difficulty tournament.

That's fine but the same logic holds.. why average ALL of the regional teams "predicted qualifiers in an average tournament"? Why not only take into account the top 4 or top 6 teams since they get the majority of the SSQ?

Maligned,

Here's at least something to consider... if we are looking at how difficult it is for the 5th best kid to get out of sectional or regional, why are we averaging the genius scores from EVERY team in the sectional or regional? Play along for a minute... let's say the Calumet Regional had Brownsburg, Portage, EMD, and Merrillville. It also had 12 Hammond Bishop Noll and Whiting lookalikes. The average would be dragged way down, but the overall quality of this regional's advancing wrestlers would be off the charts and it would be extremely difficult to crack the top 4 for any of the lower level team's wrestlers. Therefore, wouldn't it be better to average the top 4 teams genius scores to determine how difficult a regional is, since those are the teams getting the lions share of the semi state qualifiers? Would like to hear your thoughts on this from a mathematical perspective. I may rock a mullet, but I'm smarter than I look.

Al Morgan coached at Franklin Central and Warren Central. Won the state at Warren in 1980 and I believe was runner-up couple times at FC. Part of those years they only had 4 qualifiers per weight, so you made it, you medaled.

That explains why his placer to qualifier ratio is so ridiculous.

Can anybody tell me about Al Morgan and Norm Willey?

Their stats are ridiculous, but I've never heard of either.  Any old-timers have any stories about these two?  Who did they coach for?

Royce Deckard was a great coach.  I wouldn't have wanted anyone else!

Only have very limited data for Royce.  Do you have his full career data in the above format?

When was Balash's last season and how many champions?

Ramos 2x

Galka 2x

Cosgrove 1x

Porras 2x

Anyone else?

Added Bill Kelly and Tony Abbott

Anyone have stats on the late, great Coach Nicholson from Elkhart? I knew he was quite successful in his day. 

He's been added.

How about the Hobart guys?  Steve Balash has to be in the mix

Goebel and Schaefer are updated

Where is hook and half with the Mike Goebel data?

Mark Kerrn-Jimtown

I've added his stats.

Don't have the full set of data but Sean McGinley- Cathedral is 48-9 (.842 win pct.) since 2007 with 5 state champs.

Going back to 1999.  Tonte is 65-28 on Friday night.  34-8 in last six years.

How many champs since 1999?

Great topic..I just loosely went over Pecks his is 41-45..with 1 state champion,4 runner ups and 25 top 5 finishers..

How many seasons? I'll add him to the list

Anyone have complete data sets for Sean McGinley, Jim Tonte, or Mike Goebel?  IndianaMat only has incomplete data for these 3, but they have very impressive Friday night marks in the incomplete data available.