Thursday, November 29, 2012

Parity Between Boy's and Girl's Basketball

I haven't written much about Girl's basketball up to this point and that is mostly driven from the fact I don't have as much information on it.  I've been following Boy's basketball a lot longer and have 3 full seasons of data as opposed to only one for the Girl's.  But, when I decided to do this blog I wanted to cover both.  Math is math after all, it doesn't care who is playing.  I was also curious if my theories held true.

What I have found so far is that it does hold up, but not in quite the same way.  I'm not going to quote the numbers yet because there really isn't enough to make it significant, but the trend lines do look similar.  There are differences however.  The minimums are much higher.  Where as in the Boy's bottom group the enrollment variance is between 0-31, for the Girl's it jumps all the way up to 200.  That will probably change some as I get more years, but the largest for any individual season I have on the Boy's so far has been 81. 

The winning percentages on the larger enrollment variances aren't as great as the Boy's either.  That might just be a statistical fluke from last year, or it might be that not as many large schools play small schools on the Girl's side (or maybe they play more).  My hunch is that it's neither of those but rather that choosing a Girl's basketball team is a bit more hit or miss than on the Boy's side.  I can't prove that with the limited data, but if you look at the number of teams that had a winning percentage greater than .800 last year, there were 15 on the Girl's side and only 12 on the Boy's.  Correspondingly there were 13 Girl's teams with winning percentages less than .200 as opposed to 12 for the Boy's.  That means 28 Girl's teams were in the extreme top or bottom in winning percentage with 24 in the same company on the Boy's side.  Not a huge gap, but if that trend is continued year to year it could be a significant one. 

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