College Football and Basketball Performance and Expenses

While Ohio State spends the most each year on their football program, they perform no better on the field than teams like USC, Texas and Florida who spend up to $10 million less. The team that spends the least per victory? Once again, Boise State leads the way.

In college basketball, the ACC coughs up the most money per year on their programs, but Memphis and Pittsburgh demonstrate the best victory/cost ratio. We investigated both big revenue sports programs and show which teams make the best use of their money, as based on winning percentage.
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NCAA Div I College Football Expenses and Revenue

While football season is behind us, the amount of money generated by the NCAA and its schools remains of interest to us. Thanks to our friend Wesley Turner, we have acquired data on all NCAA Division I schools for total football revenue and expense. Much of the data can be further investigated at USA today’s website, and when available at Equity in athletics .

As would be expected, the big name football factories spend the most money on football related expenses, but the amount of profit that is generated on average per year is staggering. Over the 7 year period of 2003 till 2009, the top 10 schools (Texas, Georgia, Florida, Notre Dame, Michigan, Alabama, Penn State, LSU, Auburn and Ohio State) generated more than $30 million in profit per year. Texas which generates on average almost $50 million a year, has seen incredible sustained growth. In 2003, their profit margin was $34.6 million. In the year 2009? $68.8 million!
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2010 College Football Rankings

At Matlab Geeks we crunched through all 15 weeks of AP voting and tabulated how college football teams were ranked throughout this season. Non-surprisingly, the automatic BCS qualifying conferences had the most number of teams ranked throughout the year, with a great portion of them coming from the Big 10 and SEC. We also looked at our version of “strength of schedule”. We investigated each Division 1 team and looked at their week by week opponent and how many votes that opponent received the week they played and also during the final week of voting. Oregon State ended up having the toughest schedule, while several teams played the entire year without playing a single team that received any votes, much less any ranked teams. Read on for some pretty graphs/charts and some Matlab tips for how to perform the analysis.
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College football 2000-2009: Conference Matchups and AP Voters

While Matlabgeeks previously analyzed team and conference rankings, this analysis of college football is of the out of conference records of all the major teams. Looks like some conferences tend to schedule easier teams in order to boost records, rankings and possible bowl bids and therefore money earned. We also utilize a wonderful toolbox called m_map to discuss AP voters and ability of Matlab to provide great maps for any analysis.
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College football conference over/under ratings

Previously we showed the perception of individual teams in the polls . As promised Matlabgeeks analyzed the conference over/underratings using Matlab, and found similar tendencies in both the AP and Coach’s polls over the last 10 years. A bias towards favoring east coast teams is shown during the preseason, only to have those teams/conferences under perform expectations, while the west coast conferences, including the Pac-10, WAC and MWC have all exceeded expectations by the postseason rankings. Most notable is the lack of respect shown the non-BCS conferences (of course). The bottom three conferences in both polls? ACC, Big 12 and SEC. Let’s take a look at how the analysis was performed:
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Oregon among the most underrated college football teams; Florida State brings up the rear

Over at Matlab Geeks Headquarters, we’ve been busy analyzing the AP and Coaches’ Polls to see how the data look, and interestingly enough, some of my preconceived notions about the Oregon Ducks were confirmed. The final results showed that the top 5 under-rated programs in the country were: Boise State, Utah, TCU, Iowa and Oregon. The top 5 over-rated schools? Florida State, Tennessee, Michigan, Florida and Clemson. Don’t just take my word for it, let’s see how we got these results…

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College Football Rankings and How to use Database Queries in Matlab

This week at Matlabgeeks, seeing as one of us is a huge Oregon Ducks fan, we are going to investigate the AP and Coaches polls for college football. As the BCS only reports in midseason and does not do a ranking following the bowl games, we are throwing it out for this analysis. (Note: the BCS is more appropriately named BS, but as this is not a sports blog, I’ll hold off on the playoffs spiel and how the BCS/6 big conferences are just money grubbing the system :). I just want an opportunity to watch the 2001 Ducks team take out Miami).  Instead we want to utilize this opportunity to demonstrate how powerful Matlab is, and how you can use this program to analyze any data set.

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