Game Four: New Mexico State 76, UTEP 68

"I should have known better. We win three games, two against good teams and I think this is going to be easy. Coach Ballard finally lets up on us after all those punishment practices, but she tells us that we're playing New Mexico State, the friggin' Aggies. UTEP hates the Aggies. We play two games with them every year, and they're not even in our conference.

All week long, it's 'New Mexico State this' and 'New Mexico State that'. It's in the Prospector, 'come see UTEP against the hated Aggies'. So we come out of the shootaround, and what kind of crowd is it? The same old sorry-ass crowd we always have. When I played in high school, we had bigger crowds that this for some games. If this game is so goddamned important, how come we can't get no love?

We see the Aggies. They don't look like much. Then they come out and they are on fire, they are beating us up like a bowling ball beats up pins. Everyone's trying to find me open, and I can't hit anything. I went, what, 9-for-35 for the game. I got 20 points, but -- hell, I should have had 30. Coach Ballard just lets me have it. Oh, she doesn't say anything in the locker room to me directly, but she's shouting at halftime in the locker room "Why don't you stop looking for #13! (me) She's not hitting anything!"

We're down by 23 going into halftime. The crowd is just quiet. The Aggies know they can win, and the only thing that kept us from losing by 23 was that the Aggies just ran out of gas. That, and that everyone finally stopped looking for me and found #55 (LaToya Lloyd) instead. Toya had 22 points. But it wasn't enough.

Their bigs just crushed us. #33 (Elise Connery) was knocking balls out of the sky. They got thin and matched #3 (Apryl Fieldson) against me and she just lit me up. She scored 11 points on me coming off the bench. I couldn't stop her. I was gassed. If I could have defended her we'd have kept it close. Our bench sucked. We sucked.

I go into that locker room and I'm crying. I've got a towel on my head. Everyone else is just staring into space, and Ballard hits that locker room like a hurricane. She said, 'if you cared as much as #13 does, you'd have won'. Great coach. Thanks for nothing. Make everybody hate me.

It's the march of the dead out of the locker room. No one is saying anything to anybody. Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) and I don't talk much back in our dorm room. She didn't even come off the bench, but she feels just as bad as I do."

--Brenda Dean



Agh. What a stinker of a game. For quite some time, I didn't believe that I got the balance between teams right and that UTEP was destined to win every game this year. Well, I guess that theory has been disproven. Even with 12 Team Index points, UTEP was awful.

I would say that the game fell apart in three directions:

1) Pearlie Kalis and Iorrie Molinero from UTEP both have secondary ratings that are higher than their field goal ratings. To me, this indicates a player who is a lot more comfortable with taking her own shot - shooting right after the action phase - than with waiting for the ADVANCE. UTEP's guards have poor defensive ratings, and that gave Kalis and Molinero all the more reason to light things up.

2) Dean shot very poorly. I don't think I've seen so many numbers in the 60s through 80s in my entire life. It seemed that everytime Dean put something up, it ended in disaster for UTEP.

3) Elise Connery of New Mexico State. Her block rating is "12", which means that any ball coming even close to her is going to get batted out of the sky. She led NMSU in rebounds with 13, assists with 5 and blocks with 9. UTEP doesn't have that kind of blocking power, and only blocked two shots the entire night.

4) Bench points. 29 for NMSU vs. 13 for UTEP. Apryl Fieldson went 5 for 6 against Dean, and the only time she missed was when Dean fouled her during the shot.

During the first half, NMSU shot 58 percent. UTEP shot 32 percent. That was the game right there. The hole was so deep that UTEP couldn't dig its way out of it. All of UTEP's Index Points were spent fending off defensive fouls and forced rests in the hope that Dean could find her way back into the game. But she couldn't. NMSU went up by 25 at one time in the second half, and that's when everyone started heading for the exits.

Up next. The UTEP Invitational. UTEP vs. Robert Morris. Stephen F. Austin vs. Idaho. I won't play the second game, but I will play the first one.

The Lord Taketh Away....

...after the Fresno State game, my initial schedule had Winston-Salem State scheduled as UTEP's next opponent.

How good is Winston-Salem State? Well, they don't even belong to a conference, and the list of independents in women's basketball is a pretty poor one - after Utah Valley and CSU Bakersfield, the quality bottoms out into #258 and below. Winston-Salem State is ranked #334 out of #341. They are 3-22 so far this year. I was looking forward to having UTEP whup up on someone.

Then, I found out about New Mexico State University. The football battle between the schools is called the "Battle of I-10" and it's so important that unlike most football rivalries, they award two trophies. The schools are only 38 miles from each other.

Even though NMSU and UTEP don't belong to the same basketball conference, they play each other twice a year anyway. I had NMSU down for a visiting game, and I'd have to pencil in a home game for them. Goodbye, Winston-Salem State.

On the other hand, I've learned a little bit more about the new Statis Pro Basketball rules that came out in 1993 or so. The game set that I've been using has a Team Index that's strictly based on home winning percentage. The 1993 rules, on the other hand, have two indices - a Home Team Index and a Visiting Team Index.

Let's take a look at UTEP. UTEP, under the old rules, has six Home Team Index points. No matter who their opponent is - whether it's Connecticut or Winston-Salem State - UTEP always get six points.

However, under the new rules, UTEP gets 4 Home Team Index points and -1 Visiting Team Index points. We look at New Mexico State's numbers - 4 Home Team Index points and -10 (minus 10) Visiting Team points. (As it turns out, New Mexico State hadn't won a game on the road all year until their last game, but I created the card set before NMSU got its first home win.)

We now use the formula:

Home Team's Home Index Points - Visiting Team's Visiting Index Points = Game Team Index Points.

If the Game Team Index Points are positive, they belong to the home team. If the final result is negative, the points belong to the visiting team.

Therefore the Game Team Index Points are equal to: 4 (UTEP) - (-10) (NMSU) = 4 + 10 = 14. All of which, in theory, belong to UTEP.

However, teams can only have a maximum of 12 points. UTEP will therefore have 12 points to play with - six in the first half, and six in the second. But I'd rather have 12 Index Points than six any day of the week. The Lord taketh away, but the Lord giveth.

New Mexico State Card Set

Before I post anything else, we have to get the next set of cards up....and you can't write about UTEP without writing about their rivals down the road, New Mexico State.



The great thing is that New Mexico State is in the WAC conference, and since recent opponent Fresno State is also in the WAC, I can just use the adjusted UTEP cards from the last game.

1981 vs. 1993

Frisco del Rosario, a basketball writer and Statis Pro fan, pointed out that the game doesn't give you the option of ignoring a foul on some players and letting the player take the foul on other players - once you get a drawing of "Defense Foul" against your team, you can't decide, "oh, I'll see who took the foul, and if it's someone good, then I'll burn the Index Point, else not". You either have to spend the point to ignore the foul regardless of who the foul belongs to, or you take the foul.

I didn't see this rule in my copy of the rules or written on the game board. The game board lists how Team Index points can be spent:

two points: call for a steal
two points: ignore a forced rest
one point: rebound to high player on your team
one point: ignore a defensive foul (what we're talking about above)
one point: ignore a charging foul

..but it says nothing about how to ignore a defensive foul.

Then I realized...there are actually two sets of rules for Statis Pro Basketball. One came with the first version of the game, and the second comes with the game versions sold after 1993.

As it turns out, I have both versions of the rules stored as .pdf files. And sure enough, in the 1993 rules, it states that when spending points to burn off defensive fouls, you have to burn the point without finding out which player was fouled.

Frisco also pointed out that the team index points have to be proportionally spent for each half - if you have six total home index points, you need to spend three in the first half and three in the second half. (This is an alteration of the NBA rule which states those points have to be divvied proprotionately per quarter.) As it turns out, this rule isn't in the '81 rules, but it is in the '93 rules.

In the future, I'll be using the 1993 rules for both ignoring defensive fouls and spending team index (home field advantage) points.

I'm wondering if I should be altering UTEP's team index to create a Home Index and a Visitor Index. There was only one index in the 1981 rules; there are two (a Home Index and a Visitor Index) in the 1993 rules. I'll be posting about trying to determine the right amount of Home Index points for college basketball in a future post.

Game Three: UTEP 74, Fresno State 72

"What a game. It's 2 am and I'm high. I'm stoned on basketball. Fresno State came to El Paso, and they were tough. They could shoot, they had a lot of energy, and #22 (Amie Havener) could really rush the basket.

They played us close. It was touch and go the whole first half, and we were up by one, 38-37 at halftime. I was in a zone in that early part of the game, and I was just under 20 points. Everyone was simply looking at me and I knew that if I was open, someone was going to find me. I went wild. I got 36 points against Fresno State. Had nine rebounds. I wanted 10, because a double-double would be cool but I got beaten up enough under the basket. Move me to the #2, coach! Don't make me play forward!

Patty Clark got suspended for fighting in the game, and Martie (Marta Jaworski) was playing center. She wasn't hitting anything, but she kept getting those rebounds for us - she ended up with 13. We kept trying to fight Fresno State off, and we led by ten at one point in the second half, but they caught up with us and put that press on us. Forced a couple of turnovers, and I was to blame for one of them. #44 (Iesa Blumenfield) hit a shot with six seconds left to tie the game at 72-72 and Coach Ballard is drawing up this play which is as confusing as hell. I'm just nodding my head, trying to pretend that I know what was going on. I just don't want to go into overtime, because I'm out of gas, chucking up bricks near the end.

So we have the last possession and Josie (Josina Costa) takes the inbound and passes the ball to Marta. Marta is looking for Josie again under the basket but can't find her. So Marta, who hasn't hit a shot all night, fires a mid-range jumper with like half-a-second left and she just plants it! Everyone jumps right off the bench. The pep band starts playing "Shadows on the Mountain" and Fresno State's coach is challenging the shot, saying that time expired when Marty hit it.

The band keeps playing "Shadows" while the refs look at the video. Marty took the shot with 0.7 seconds left. The basket is good and the band breaks into "Miners Fight". It was great to have such a great game, but I don't think I was the star. When Marty hit that last second shot, she was the star."

--Brenda Dean



My wife asked me what I got out of playing a card game when video games existed. The above is what I get out of a card game.

I've played very few Statis Pro Basketball games like this one, where the game is very tight all the way through and you feel as if you're slogging you're way through the game. With UTEP up by 10 late in the half, Fresno State began to come back.

There is an option called "PRESS" in the Fast Action Deck. The defense can state they are pressing, and for that offensive possession, the offense must read under the "PRESS" option. Two out of three times, UTEP lost the ball and Fresno State began to turn it on. With just a few cards left, Iesa Blumenfield took a shot off the secondary and hit it, tying the game with just two cards left.

The first card was "Pass to Center" under the ACTION phase, so Marta Jaworski had to shoot off the SECONDARY phase. And with the last card of the game...the shot result is "22". Two points. Game over.

I needed all of my six Home Field Advantage points. I decided this time that I would use those points to keep Brenda Dean from fouling, if a foul ever indicated that Dean got the foul. Dean was hot in the first part of the game, scoring like twelve of the first thirteen points. Down at the end, with two Home Field points yet, Williamette Moss got a forced rest. I could either ignore the forced rest or lose my points or sit her down.

I sat her down. Smart decision.

I had started the game and played it early in the morning during the week before work. By the time Frisco Del Rosario commented on Amie Havener's ability to shoot the three and get the offensive rebound, I was in mid game and I started back up with an offensive possession. I gave her a 3-point attempt, and she missed the shot, I flip over the card, and under rebound, it said, "Offense F1" - Havener. Is that weird or what?

If you look over the box score, you'll notice that both sides took a lot of field goals. I was really trying to give everyone as many 3-point shots as possible, something I've been a little weak on in past games.

Furthermore, Dean got very close to a 40-point game. You don't see 36-point games much in women's basketball. However, playing as the UTEP coach, the great part of the game wasn't Dean's 36 points - it was Jaworski hitting that shot with the final card. That was just sweet.

Fresno State vs. UTEP Card Sets

I'm going to post the card sets for the next game, a home game against Fresno State.

Fresno State's cards are based on their current stats in the WAC conference. All player names have been changed.



As for the UTEP cards, all the "good stats" (except free throws) are altered by a factor of 1.104, as Conference USA is about 10.4 percent better than that WAC based on RPI conference strength.



This should be a good game. Fresno State comes from a weaker conference, but they're the best team in that weaker conference. Furthermore, they shoot better than UTEP does but they are only 10 players deep. A lot of factors - team defense, shooting accuracy, forced rests - should come into play. I'm hoping this is a good game.

Game Two: UTEP 82, CS-Northridge 56

"We were just glad to have everyone back on the team. We were waiting for a team from California, and it took us a little while to get warmed up. They were up like 7-6 before we started to pull away. We were up ten, then twenty. It felt kind of good, like we were back in high school again and playing one of those schools that didn't care much about basketball.

My problem was that I was cold getting started - but I got warmed up. I dumped 15 on them, and I could have hit them for more if I didn't have foul trouble. Me and Martie, we fouled out. The only bad thing about the game was that Patty (Patricia) Clark got in a fight and got thrown out of the game. Why do they always want to pick on us? I don't get it.

Coach is pissed off again. We get into too many fights. She's going to make us suffer. I'm already exhausted."

-Brenda Dean



This is the second time I've had players ejected for fighting. These kind of results are just...ridiculous. I'm simply going to ignore the Z result that says, "Fighting between F1s - each ejected." From now on, I'm going to read this result as "F1s are forced to rest for the rest of the game. If next card is 81-88, players are ejected for fighting."

How many fights can you remember in women's basketball? The answer is not many. Clark will be suspended for the next game against Fresno State. Hopefully, these kind of results won't cause problems.

'Forced Rest' is a card result that forces the indicated players to rest for the rest of the quarter. (In the college games's case, for the rest of the half.) The result is supposed to mimic those cases where a coach is dissatisfied with the player's performance, and forces them to sit on the bench.

UTEP shot 43 percent, and CS Northridge shot 35 percent. However, the real edge came in rebounding firepower. UTEP could just get the ball whenever it wanted to. The game stats at least looked like college stats, and that counts for a lot.

Or did they? My bookkeeping was okay, but I wonder if I used all of the cards I needed to. The problem is that a standard Fast Action Deck has 180 cards, but a college half needs 300 cards. Which means that after you go through the 180 cards one time, you need to reshuffle that deck and deal out 120 cards to finish the half. This should leave a mini-deck of 60 unused cards - and when you have multiple decks running around (discard deck, drawing deck, and cards-not-to-be-used deck), confusion is easy.

I really need to purchase Phil Graham's 300 card neck. No. I really, really need to purchase Phil Graham's 300 card deck. But until some money can float by, I'll avoid spending it on minor hobbies.

Adjusting Teams Down...and Up

I began to prepare cards for the next game on my schedule, when my imaginary UTEP team took on the Matadors of Cal State Northridge. Here are the Cal State Northridge cards:



The other set of cards is my UTEP set, which has been adjusted up by a factor of 1.104.





Why did I adjust UTEP's set up by a factor of 1.104? I looked at the relative strengths of the the Big West Conference - the conference to which CS-Northridge belongs - and the strength of Conference USA. Take the average RPI of Conference USA and divide it by the average RPI of the Big West. At the time I created the cards, the result was 1.104.

Therefore, all of the good stats of UTEP get adjusted up by 1.104 - field goals made, 3-point goals made, rebounds, offensive rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks. Personal fouls are adjusted down, but it doesn't matter all that much as the foul ratings for any team - who has the highest foul drawing scores, what is the foul range, etc. - depends only on the team in question. The only stat that I don't adjust upward is that of free throw shooting.

Why do I adjust UTEP's scores up and not adjust CS-Northridge's scores down? If there's a blowout, the score is more likely to be 90-50 than 50-10. Making UTEP the standard and dividing anything CS-Northridge does by 1.104 makes it very hard for the Matadors to score.

Next up: The results of the second game, comments about UTEP's schedule, etc.

I have a goal of putting all of this wonderful information into one spreadsheet that creates both sets of cards. That, however, is a long term project.

Game One: UTEP 74, Iowa State 62

"Our coach got a one-game suspension from Conference USA for letting all that fighting go on in our last game. So she said that if she was being punished, we were going to be punished even more. I don't want to tell you what we did before the Iowa State game, but she worked us so hard we almost puked. She wasn't even going to come to the Iowa State game, saying that she had to work with Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) and Martie (Marta Jaworoski) - they got a double dose of suffering.

So Coach Goldsmith was going to be our coach for the Iowa State game. What Coach Ballard did to us during the week must have toughened us up, because we jumped out to a 14-2 lead to start the game. And those girls were big girls! Their center got hurt early on, so she came out of the game and we could keep up with them on the boards. They caught up with us a couple of times and even went up by one point in the second half. However, the other players decided to play like individuals instead of a team. I could hear their coach yelling at them from our bench.

In the second half, we pulled out again, they got into foul trouble, and it was all over. We're still playing in an empty arena, but the people who showed up screamed their hearts out. We upset the mighty Iowa State! I got seventeen points. Good times, babee!"

- Brenda Dean



This was the first game I played where I thought I had it all right. I was recording assists, steals and blocks even though it looks like there were few assists on the Iowa State side - did I miss something? I managed to keep track of who was substituting for whom, which is pretty difficult in the Statis Pro Game. I knew how to deal with players forced to play that had run out of stamina points. (There will be another image later.)

I regret the fact that there's no way to record turnovers. Turnovers, along with shooting percentage, rebounds (I don't distinguish between offensive and defensive boards) and field goal percentage are the real keys to the game.

So what happened to Iowa State? Three things:

1) They lost their center. Iowa State's starters are rather dominant over their bench,
2) They had a player get a "forced rest" result on a Z result in the ACTION phase, and
3) They just didn't shoot very well - UTEP shot 43 percent to Iowa State's 35 percent.
4) Foul trouble - three Cyclone players would foul out in a foul-laden game.

Add the six Home Factor points, and we were able to steal a win. In general, you want to use Home Factor points to avoid forced rests when they concern your best players. I ignored two first rests in the first half. At the end, they lost players due to fouls and they had more than one player playing with no stamina. A player who has no stamina (at least in my game) cannot shoot, and therefore Iowa State had to move the ball around more.

The next game is against Cal State-Northridge. As it turns out, CS-Northridge comes from a weaker conference than Conference USA, so UTEP will adjust its stats upward for the next game. More on that later.

Deck Randomization and Ejections

All right. Let's go to the boxscore, and the most interesting part of the writeup.

Fights. In the ACTION phase, you occasionally get a result which is like "Consult Z on Next Card". There is a Z Category that deals with not only forced rests ("Home Team G1 Must Rest") but with technical fouls and occasionally, fights. Z is the "weirdness category". Statis Pro Baseball also has a "Z" table to deal with rare events as well; for some reason Avalon Hill loved the letter "Z".

Early on in the game, I got a result that read "both players at F1 ejected for fighting". This removed Dean and her counterpart at F1 from the game. You can't use Home Factor points to ignore the fighting result the way you could ignore an early defensive foul or a forced rest. Whenever your player gets ejected for fighting, there's nothing you can do about it.

Unfortunately for this game, I drew the same combination three other times: "Consult Z on Next Card/Both Players at F1 Ejected For Fighting". I thought I had been cursed until I realized after the game - I wasn't shuffling the cards enough. This is why the same result kept cropping up.

SHUFFLE THE DECK WELL! I can't emphasize that enough.

Mind you, Statis Pro Basketball cards are small, thick little things that don't want to be shuffled. You really have to break down the deck into about 15 or 16 mini-decks and shuffle those decks thoroughly to get good gameplay. My further advice is that if you get a bad result from "Z" - a fighting result or a technical foul result which the coach of the Bobcats suffered twice in the game - you should take the offending card and shove it somewhere in the middle of the discard pile, moving it out of sequence and "unpair" it with the offending Z card to minimize the chances of it showing up again.

If it shows up again, there's nothing wrong with that - as long as you know the cards have been randomized enough. If not, you have no one to blame for yourself.

(* * *)

This is also the first time I've tried to calculate assists. I think I might have simply missed a few of them. The overall number of assists doesn't seem quite right; I'll have to look at more college box scores.

(* * *)

And now, a mini essay about fighting in the women's game.

The "both players ejected for fighting card" always seemed a little fishy. I had once played a full season with the old NBA cards - I think I played the 1987-88 Golden State Warriors, with Ralph Sampson as center - and occasionally I'd draw that fighting card.

But how often does fighting occur in the NBA? How often do fights really happen? Did the guys building the game at Avalon Hill do any statistical studies? Or did they think that fighting would be a cool result to have pop up every now and then.

Furthermore, I rarely - if ever - hear of fighting in the women's game. It's usually something very serious when it happens, and at the college level, it results in suspensions.

So my next question was "do I suspend everyone involved in the fight? and if so, for how long?" I decided to let the projections of player usage at the top of the cards guide me. Brenda Dean and Brianna Neal have an effective injury rating of "0", so they will not be suspended. Marta Jaworski and Immaculata Suarez have non-zero injury ratings - they missed games - and I decided to suspend them for the opening regular season game against Iowa State.

This might be a self-serving decision - it means that I get to use Brenda Dean in the next game instead of benching her - but I think the above justifies it, or at least gives me a plausible excuse.

Exhibition Game - UTEP 81, Houston Bobcats 73

I can't believe that last game. We were playing the Houston Bobcats - a bunch of big girls who had graduated from college. Most of them had graduated from Houston. They were a traveling exhibition team, and coach told us not to underestimate them.

So I'm under the basket playing the two with this big Houston girl and I'm trying to work my way under the basket. She keeps bumping me off and then she just sticks her hand out and like mauls me in the face! She just puts her fingers right in my face, so I grab her hand so that she doesn't poke my eyes out.

Referee blows his whistle. Ejects her. Ejects me. Coach tells me to sit my ass down again. I was embarrassed. I didn't want my Mom or Dad to see this.

It kept getting worse. Then there was another fight under the basket. Then another. Then another. There were eight players ejected, four of theirs and four of ours and the Houston Bobcats coach is just riding the referee so hard that he should have put a saddle on her. He gets a T. Then he gets another T.

It was a joke at the end. They kept fouling us and we kept going to the line. They were big and tough but we got the win 81-73.

Conference USA is supposed to look at this game and decide what they want to do with us. Coach was absolutely friggin furious. It's going to be a really hard week. I wonder if I'm ever going to have a breakout game. And we have Iowa State after this! God help us.

-Brenda Dean





I'll write more about this game and what I learned about Statis Pro gameplay later. I just wanted to get the boxscore up.

Houston Bobcats Cards

Here are the Houston Bobcats cards. Next post: how the game went.

Moving Along the Exhibition Schedule

The next task was to play the second exhibition game. I figured that playing it would help me to knock off my rust in actually playing the game itself. And this next time, I would remember - 300 Fast Action Cards per each college half.

The next team I decided to create was one called the "Houston Bobcats", which would be related to the real life exhibition squad known as the Houston Jaguars. The Jaguars are a team of ex-college basketball players who play exhibitions against current college teams.

If you go to the roster page, you find nothing but pictures. (Clicking the pictures just gives you...larger pictures). So my next task was trying to find something approaching an active roster for this squad. The advantage was that if I couldn't find stats for some of the players on the roster, I could just mine old team statistics and pick other players from the older teams.

I ended up with a list of players from all over the place. Most of them were old University of Houston players. One was a former NC State player, the other was an ex Texas A&M player. One was from Houston Baptist. Another was from Linsdey Wilson college in Kentucky, of all places!

I had the stats for each player, but how much weight should I put on each player's stats? I simply used the weighting system I mentioned in the previous posts. A player's stats were weighted by the strength of the conference from which she came from. For conferences off the scale like the NAIA Lindsey Wilson player, I can't remember what I did exactly, but her stats were devalued appropriately.

The next task was typing the data into the Cardmaker Excel sheet, making the multiplications, determining home game winning percentages and points for and points against in an NBA-type season, entering the data into the Cardmaker Excel spreadsheet, and coming up with the result.

I'll post the fictional Bobcats next.

Exhibition Game - UTEP 42, Central Oklahoma 40

I can remember that very first time I put on the uniform in college and played in a real game. God, that was a slog fest. I started, but it had been a long time since I had played in high school, and I guess I was a little tenative. I looked way ugly out there, and finally coach screams at me to sit my ass down.

She kept me there the who first half. That was the slowest damn game. The score was like 16-15, which had to set some kind of a record. Finally, coach puts me out there again. I looked a lot better and scored 10 points. Coach said that Central Oklahoma would run the fastbreak. I didn't see it though. That's the kind of game I'd be embarrassed to talk up, but we won it and I'll take it. It's a shame it doesn't count.

- Brenda Dean

(* * *)

One of the most important questions that has to be answered is "what would be the right number of cards to use in a college game?"

The pace of an NBA game goes through 180 cards in the Fast Action Deck - per quarter. So here's what the answer should be....

***180 cards per 12 minute quarter equals 300 cards per 20 minute half.***

The difference between a 24 minute shot clock and a 30 minute shot clock should be ignored - we'll assume that college players simply use the extra six seconds setting up the offense.

For some reason, however, I came up with 192 cards per half. I'm trying to retrace the way I came to that number and I can't figure out how I came with 192. But I went with it, and you can see the results - a very low-scoring game.

Furthermore, I bumped into some record keeping issues. There is a result on the ADVANCE card that says "Use Passer Assist Rating for Shot". Here's the big question: do you count assists only when they come off the 'use passer assist' result, or is an assist given to the person who had the ball before the last shooter took the shot?

Since I couldn't land one way or the other, I didn't count assists for this game. I counted everything else, though. You can take a peek at the boxscore:



As it turned out, the "300 cards = one half" figure was confirmed by another source. Have you heard of Phil Graham? Phil Graham is a creator of Statis Pro Basketball cards and card sets and his website is right here. On his catalog page, he happens to mention that he has a special deck of 300 Fast Action Cards to be used - the advantage is that the 180 cards that come with the game don't need to be reshuffled.

I made a note of that. The next game, I would use 300 cards per half.

As for Brenda Dean's performance, it was not bad despite that I picked up a "Z Result" on the ACTION phase of the game. "Z Results" are all the out-of-the ordinary occurences in the game. The game forced her to rest "for one quarter" - I read "quarter" as "half" - and Dean would sit for the remainder of the first half. The best shooter on the team, she got the ball a lot during the second half and led the team.

Okay. Lessons learned. Next up for UTEP: a team I'll call the "Houston Bobcats" which is an all-star team of former players.

The Finishing Touches: Home Court Factors

We're all set to begin a game between UTEP and Central Oklahoma using the new cards.

If you're curious, you might note that there is a special card with the name of the team, something called a "Home Court Factor" which is equal to nine, a "Fast Break Offense" equal to "A" and a "Fast Break Defense" equal to "A".

First, we have to determine the Home Court Factor. The Home Court Factor is designed to influence any games played on a home court in favor of the home team. The factors range from "1" to "10", so "9" is very high. Central Oklahoma did very well on its home court and the high number reflects that.

At the beginning of the game, Central Oklahoma will be alloted nine Home Court Points to influence the game in various ways. They can:

* ignore fouls when they come up
* call for steals when they need them
* ask for their high rebounder to get the ball automatically

...and so forth. These points are "spent" by the home team as needed. A crafty home team could save some points for the end of the game and use them in critical situtations, turning the tide for comebacks in front of a riotous crowd.

So how do we determine the correct number? We have to adjust the college teams wins and losses to 82 games, since the Cardmaker spreadsheet is designed for creating NBA cards. Next, we determine the percentage of home wins and multiply that by 41 to get a home won-loss record:

11-30 or worse at home: 1 point
between 12 and 14 home wins: 2 points
between 15 and 17 home wins: 3 points
between 18 and 20 home wins: 4 points
between 21 and 23 home wins: 5 points
between 24 and 26 home wins: 6 points
between 27 and 29 home wins: 7 points
between 30 and 32 home wins: 8 points
between 33 and 35 home wins: 9 points
36-5 or better at home: 10 points

Central Oklahoma has nine Home Court points, which is excellent. However, they are playing on the road, so they can use none of those points. UTEP has all of the Home Factor points, and they use six points for their Home Factor.

The next part of the "team card" deals with Fast Break Offense and Defense. Each team has a "Fast Break Offense" ranging from A to D and a "Fast Break Defense" ranging from A to D. A special chart on the playing board is consulted to determine which Fast Break chart to use when one of the forwards gets their hands on a rebound. A team that has a great fast break offense which is playing a team with a poor fast break defense might decide to use the board's Fast Break chart if the numbers favor a basket with the fast break as opposed to moving the ball down the court.

The Fast Break values are determined by the spreadsheet - but the spreadsheet needs two values: points scored per game, and points allowed per game.

If we know a college team's points scored per game - which is easy to look up - we just multiply by 48/40, or 6/5 or 1.2. (An NBA team plays 48 minute games; a college team plays 40 minute games). We do the same with points allowed and enter them on the proper place in the spreadsheet.

That's it. We've determined the teams. We've created the cards. Now it's time to actually play a game....

Cardmaker

The important links for any Statis Pro Fan are at tabletop-sports.com.

The most important of these important links is CardMarker by Bob Standage (Warning: Download). This is the Excel spreadsheet that I use (with slight modifications) to create the card sets.

Central Oklahoma Cards

Here are the final Central Oklahoma Cards.



The next post will be about Home Court Factors, and then I'll post about the first game.

Adjusting College Stats to Statis Pro Basketball

Suppose we have two teams in Statis Pro Basketball - Team A and Team B. We have two different sets of stats, but we know that Team A is stronger than Team B. How should Team A's stats be adjusted?

First, we need to know the answer, "how strong"? The site I prefer to use is Real Time RPI.com to determine the relative strengths of conferences.

Note that I said conferences, not teams. Teams play within a conference, and their stats already reflect relative strength within a conference - a team can play up to 1/2 of its total games as conference matchups. If Team A and Team B are within the same conference, use the unadjusted stats.

If Team A and Team B are within different conferences, we will look at Team A and Team B's relative RPI. Let's assume that Team A is a Big East Team (like Rutgers) and Team B is a Colonial Athletic Team (like James Madison).

Go to the Conference RPI page of Real Time RPI. Let's look at how strong the Big East is to the Colonial Athletic

Big East: 0.6000
Colonial Athletic: 0.5194

Adjustment: 0.6/0.5194 = 1.1552

The 1.1552 becomes the factor we will use. In general, the Big East is 15 percent better than the CAA.

For Team B, we use the regular stats
For Team A, we use adjusted stats.

Multiply field goals made by the factor.
Multiply 3PG made by the factor.
Multiply FT made by the factor.
Multiply all rebounds by the factor.
Divide personal fouls by the factor.
Multiply assists by the factor.
Divide turnovers by the factor.
Multiply blocks by the factor.
Multiply steals by the factor.

If you need to know the new adjusted points per game, determine how many points the player would have scored for the season with the adjusted numbers and divide by games played. In general, the rule is that we want to reward the player by making good things better and making bad things not as bad.

At least, I know how to adjust Central Oklahoma's stats. Problem: Central Oklahoma does not play in a Division I conference. What should the conference multiplier be?

There are all sorts of ways to answer this question. My way was to determine what conference the #202 team was in and consider that as Central Oklahoma's conference.

Central Oklahoma's proxy conference/Conference USA (the one UTEP belongs to)

= .5051/.4952 = approximately 1.02

Note that these numbers have changed since then. But the conclusion has been decided. Central Oklahoma is 2 percent better than their statistics indicate. We adjust the stats of the Central Oklahoma Bronchos by 2 percent, and go from there.

Why do we adjust Central Oklahoma's stats up? Why not adjust UTEP's stats down?

My reasoning has to do with how the first round of the NCAA tournament concludes, with very strong team playing very weak teams. The score is usually something like 90-50, and not 50-10. I would expect something like 50-10 if the weaker team were rounded down and the stronger one unchanged. Changing the stronger team should create a score something like the typical first-round blowouts of the NCAA tourney.

Next: we'll take a peak at Central Oklahoma's card set.

How Strong is a Division II Team?

In 2007-08, the UTEP Miner's womens basketball team started off their season with a game against St. Mary's (Texas), a high-ranked Division II school. I decided to have my fictional UTEP Miners play the Central Oklahoma Broncos, a real life Division II team ranked #16 among Division II teams at the time.

If both of these teams were pro teams, card creation would be easy: load in the statistics, print out the cards, and play the game. However, one would expect that the two teams wouldn't be on an equal basis. So how do you alter the cards? And which set of cards do you alter?

I figured that at least for now, I would let the UTEP cards alone and make alterations to UTEP's prospective opponents. We would look at Central Oklahoma's statistics, but we also know that Central Oklahoma's statistics are derived from playing other teams in Division II. How do we change the cards to reflect the difference?

The first question was: How strong is Division II compared to Division I? We really don't have an answer for this question in basketball. Division I teams don't play Division II teams that often, and when they do, the sample of Division II teams probably isn't a representative sample. This might be an insurmountable problem.

However, there is a division that is similar to Division II - the football division that was formerly called "I-AA" before they changed it to some convoluted name. I-AA teams play BCS teams all the time, usually at the beginning of the season. Was there a way to rank the I-AA teams compared to their BCS counterparts?

As it turns out, this has already been done. There are sites on the internet that rank Division I and Division I-AA teams together in the same table - after all, if you're making bets, you want to know exactly how strong that unknown Division I-AA team is. I managed to locate such a table and found that the strongest Division I-AA team was ranked about #50 overall.

There are about 120 BCS-type football teams. I came up with the calculation: 50/120 = 5/12. The strongest Division II basketball teams should be 5/12 of the way down the table of Division I basketball teams.. This puts that team at about #142 on the total ranking of 340 or so Division I women's basketball teams.

However, the I-AA teams, when they appear, did not appear in close order. There was an average gap of about four places between appearances among I-AA teams in the BCS/I-AA table. I came up with a new rule:

The #1 Division II women's basketball team would be ranked about #142 overall in Division I women's basketball,
The #2 Division II team would be ranked about 142 + 4 = #146 overall in Division I,

and so on.

Central Oklahoma at the time was ranked about #16. This put Central Oklahoma equivalent to about #202 on the scale of Division I women's basketball teams.

Meaning that Central Oklahoma is, believe it or not, better than UTEP. I don't find that too implausible. Central Oklahoma was nationally ranked at the time, and UTEP was sitting around .500.

The next question: Now that we know the team's relative positions to each other, how do we adjust the stats? More on my next post.