It has been a lot of fun bringing KPI Sports to an internet audience for a full year. There are many new and exciting things in store for year two, starting with a new logo, branding and color scheme, and complete redesign of KPISports.net. Entering the first year, I was working to identify whether the KPI was something or nothing. Thank you for helping me realize that though raw, people were interested in what the KPI had to offer.
KPI Sports has been featured and/or referenced in several publications including CBSSports.com, ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, and the Wall Street Journal over the last year. A list of those links along with radio and podcast interviews can be found on the In News page.
Moving forward, the KPI Sports Blog will continue to feature my own writing and ideas on topical data throughout the fall and winter. With the data mining process far more efficient, more of this text can focus on the interpretation of the numbers rather than just the numbers themselves. There may even be room for some guest bloggers along the way.
The KPI Sports Podcast is still a work in progress. I’m working through several formats and deciding where this will go, but may be in the market for a co-host and a few guests every now and then. Nobody really wants to listen to only me talk about math no matter how bored they may be!
Rather than post data in PDFs and on blogs like was done last year, I wanted to enhance the interactive experience of the site. Sortable and customizable charts are scattered throughout KPI Sports, with much more to come. The charts are easy to use and provide additional data points to better the ability to access data and rankings quickly. Plus, the charts are a fun toy with which to play!
The Rankings page will feature KPI rankings for all sports being tracked (and yes, the algorithm works for more sports than I’m able to post!). Data from last season for college football and college basketball is now posted. Once games begin, additional charts will be provided on the Data page that allow the user to access a full game-by-game resume of each team ranked from best to worst performance of the season. Conference rankings will also be available.
A few slight adjustments have been made to the KPI formula after much additional study and data testing. The home/away/neutral adjustment has been tweaked to add a percentile based factor into the adjustment. This allows the quality of the opponent and location of the game to be measured simultaneously. Also, a slight tweak was made in the percentile based scoring margin adjustments (based on percentage of total points scored in a game) in order to account for shutouts. Data for games against Non-Division I teams has been made more exact.
The On TV page features a fully functional, sortable chart with television schedules. Sort and filter the schedule based on week, network, conference, quality of game and much more. The search function can also be used to find key words. There are a few bugs yet to work out, but the interactivity of the schedule is massive. The G-Score will allow the user to sort the games by quality each day and week.
Several new algorithms will be tracked on the site. Explanations of DIFFs, EXPs and G-Score can be found on the Algorithms page.
KPI Sports is now on Facebook and will continue its presence at @KPISports on Twitter. There is a mobile site that automatically loads when accessing the site from a mobile device (though some of the charts still need some work as to how their size converts). Read more about KPI Sports and its background at the About page.
I’m so excited to launch KPI 2.0. I’m hopeful that you find the information both useful and thought-provoking. Comments are always welcome on Twitter, Facebook or by e-mail to kpauga@gmail.com.