Pats thrive in Moneyball

That's why having an economics major as your head coach is so helpful.

this is basically a meaningless statistic because the cost-per-win ranking is mainly driven by wins, and not by cost.

if you rank wins, committed cash, and cost-per-win (e.g., for wins, patriots and colts each get a "1", steelers get a "3", raiders get "32") and then rank correlate wins/cost-per-win and committed cash/cost-per-win, you get (sorry for the bad formatting):

Team Wins Committed Cash Cost Per Win
1.) Patriots 1 11 1
2.) Colts 1 4 2
3.) Chargers 4 25 3
4.) Steelers 3 8 4
5.) Broncos 5 26 5
6.) Giants 5 19 6
7.) Jaguars 9 28 7
8. ) Eagles 7 20 8
9.) Bears 9 21 9
10.) Packers 14 30 10
11.) Panthers 9 9 11
12.) Ravens 13 12 12
13.) Titans 17 29 13
14.) Bucs 18 32 14
15.) Seahawks 9 2 16
16.) Falcons 14 22 15
17.) Cowboys 7 1 17
18.) Vikings 14 5 18
19.) Bengals 18 23 19
20.) Jets 21 16 20
21.) Bills 23 27 21
22.) Chiefs 25 31 22
23.) Saints 22 7 24
24.) Redskins 18 3 24
25.) Cardinals 24 14 25
26.) Dolphins 26 18 26
27.) Texans 26 6 27
28.) Browns 28 13 28
29.) Rams 29 17 29
30.) 49ers 30 24 30
31.) Lions 31 15 31
32.) Raiders 32 10 32

correlation:
wins/cost-per-win 0.95
committed cash/cost-per-win -0.14

(1 is perfectly correlated, -1 is perfectly negatively correlated, 0 is no correlation)

in other words, if you rank wins and compare that to the cost-per-wins rank, you get pretty close to the same ranking list.

a better statistic would be to correlate the wins ranking directly with the committed cash ranking, which gives you:

wins/committed cash 0.10

this shows that the amount of money spent only has a weak correlation to the number of wins.

The correlation between money spent and wins is also not statistically significant, which means that there is no relationship between those two factors (see NY Yankees, Florida Marlins). Put another way, it must be something other than money spent that is equating to wins, like, oh I don't know, coaching, ownership, front office, scouting, player development, talent, etc., etc., etc. All the things the Patriots have and the Raiders don't.

#2 is a really good post. That's why I'm interested in teams that get the most money for the least number of wins. Basically, teams that don't need a lot of wins and still make tons of money selling tickets and jerseys.
That says a lot about the fan base.

"The correlation between money spent and wins is also not statistically significant, which means that there is no relationship between those two factors"

It's sort of tragic this comes right after a tremendous comment. First off, not significant doesn't mean no relationship. Second of all, try putting together an NFL team on a $0.00 budget and see if the number of wins correlates at all. While I agree dollars spent doesn't perfectly correlate with wins, it makes a heck of a difference. The difference, as suggested by #2, is dampened in a league with a salary cap.

actually, i don't take any umbrage at all to what jim l. said. he's right in that the correlation is not statistically significant. i don't think the number of dollars spent makes much of a difference--not only is there a salary cap, there's also a salary floor, so teams are forced to spend roughly the same amount of money on their players.

it's *how* the dollars are spent. or as jim wrote, spending it on the right coaching, scouts, players, etc.

Thanks for your post bbobbo. I was trying to decide whether or not to respond but you made my point perfectly. And here is a statistics lesson for the day. First of all, you shouldn't convert a ratio level variable (wins or $ spent) to an ordinal variable (rank) before doing the correlation. You reduce the power of the statistical analysis dramatically. If you leave the numbers as is, you get a correlation of .149 between cash spent and wins. Even if .149 was statistically significant (which it isn't) it wouldn't be practically significant. If you square the correlation coefficient, you get .022. Multiply that by 100 and you get the percent of variation in wins that can be attributed to $ spent which, in this case is 2.2%. That means that 97.8% must be do to factors other than $ spent, like some of the ones listed. Again MLB is a perfect example. Some teams spend money like drunken sailors and get little in return while others are very frugal (e.g Tampla Bay) and get the the World Series.

This is only the amount spent on players. I'd be curious if there was a stronger correlation between wins and money spent on other things - scouting, coaching, and training facilities for example.