East Carolina Card Set

I wonder if I'm going to be able to keep up this project for much longer, so don't be surprised if it just disappears one day. The problem is that...well, real life is the problem. You know that. If I got paid for doing this, it would be great, but I'm not, so....

The game using these cards has already been played. One of the things I noticed about this card set - how well East Carolina was at shooting, particularly center "April James".

UAB Card Set

UAB means "University of Alabama at Birmingham". Not much to say about the UAB squad.

However, when looking up some information about UAB on Wikipedia, I found out the following:

The UAB Blazers, in effect, started their entire athletics program with the creation of a men's basketball team in 1978. Setting the standards high from the start, UAB hired former UCLA, University of Illinois and Memphis head coach Gene Bartow. Known to many as the "Father of UAB athletics", Bartow led the Blazers to almost instant success.

What I didn't know is that Bartow was the successor to John Wooden at UCLA. It's amazing what you can learn when you're having fun.

Memphis Card Set

I've looked up the roster on the Memphis women's basketball web site, and it looks like a lot of the players represented on this card set (with phony names) are already gone. Some graduated, some just...disappeared. The big news about Memphis this year is Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a devout Muslim player who keeps her body covered. (Some Muslim sites argue about whether her dress meets Islamic standards. Some religious people love to argue about things like that.) Abdul-Qaadir will probably get more questions about her dress and her religion than questions about what she brings to the court in skill.

Anyway, Abdul-Qaadir isn't represented in this card set. Maybe next year.

P. S.: "Lyn Yeats's" free throw numbers are exactly what is represented on the card. She makes Shaq look like Steve Nash.

SMU Card Set

Still working on the season. UTEP faces SMU. This team - with the names changed that is - went to the postseason WNIT, so for a mid-major, they're good.





UTEP plays SMU twice this year. First at home, and then at both their and SMU's final game of the season. UTEP faces the daunting challenge of playing SMU during SMU's Senior Day, and I'm sure the game will be important for determining who goes where in the C-USA tournament.

Tulsa Card Set

Okay, here's the Tulsa card set. I'm trying to catch up with some of my recordkeeping - this little side project isn't dead yet.

Houston Card Set

UTEP invites Houston to El Paso, Texas for a game that will televised (in our little Imaginationland) on ESPN2. All of Brenda Dean's friends back home will get to see her.



Look at Racquel Woelfle's "Block = 13" rating. They also sort of have their Brenda Dean-like play maker in Debora Fehrenbach with a stamina of 24. Unfortunately for UTEP, everyone on the Houston roster is healthy. This ought to be "a good 'un" as UTEP is both teams are 2-0 in C-USA conference play, UTEP is 12-2 and Houston is 10-4.

Rice Card Set

UTEP will play Rice next, and I wanted to post the Rice card set.


A few things to notice:

1) Look at the low field goal ratings. I think only one Rice player shot over .400 all year.
2) Virtually every player is better on "secondary" than they are on "action". My strategy for Rice will be to have the players shoot immediately unless someone like T'wana Gobbi (assist = 52) is holding the ball.
3) The rebounding ratings are also generally row. No shooting + no rebounding = bad team.
4) In particularly, look at the -10 Road Index. Rice didn't win a single game at their opponent's court all year (they were 1-1 on neutral courts).

Tulane Card Set

We're getting ready to enter conference play, and the Tulane cards are ready to post.



As it turns out, for the first time, the "injury rule" actually came up with an injured player. Jennifer Jiles will be injured during the UTEP-Tulane game, which will reduce Tulane's active roster down to ten players.

Idaho State Card Set

Here are the Idaho State cards. Idaho State is UTEP's next opponent, as UTEP lost the first round of the tournament semi-finals to Baylor and New Mexico beat Idaho State:



The adjustment factor for UTEP's cards is 1.0860 - the ratio in conference strength between UTEP's C-USA conference and the Big Sky conference of Idaho State. Here is the resulting UTEP card set:



(* * *)

A few facts about the game and the rosters:

a) Note that Idaho State's roster only has 10 players on it - and in order to give them as much as a 10-player roster, I had to allow a player with Stamina = 1 (which I suggest that no one do, because it violates the spirit of the game).

b) I now have to write a little bit about injury. With both LaToya Lloyd and Letell Hanson suffering one game injuries, they won't be playing for UTEP. Annie and Brianna Neal will be starting as a sister duo at guard. The question becomes, "How do you determine injured players for the other team? After all, if you're allowing your own players to be injured, who's to say that the other team isn't suffering from injury problems?"

I've noticed that the Z Result - Injury result seems to affect at least one of teams on the average of every other game. That means a 50 percent chance of drawing the card (*) during any game, which means that a team has a 25 percent chance of having an injury affect their roster.

Since the current injury chart I'm using looks like this:

Games Played By Player During Season: Injury Result

5 or less: Current game + 4 games
6-14 : Current game + 3 games
15-19 : Current game + 2 games
20-28 : Current game + 1 game
29-30 : Current game only.

This means that we only have to look at the last four games or so. Any injuries before the last four games would have "healed". Therefore the procedure is

1) Find something that can generate a number between 0 and 100. Each number is associated with a time period associated with the opposing team: "four games ago", "three games ago", "two games ago" and "one game ago".
2) Generate a number four times.
3) If the number falls between 01 and 25, that means that the opposing team had an injury during the assocated time frame.
4) Allocate the injury.

It's #4, "allocate the injury" that I'm going to leave up to you. Frankly, I list all players of the enemy team by stamina, add up total stamina, assign each player a percentage, and then use that 01-100 generator. My random generator is a BA II Plus Texas Instruments calculator, you might decide to use 10-sided dice, or use an Internet random generator.

Once it's determined who had the injury - if any - cross reference the table above to see if the injury is long enough to affect the player during the current scheduled game.

As is turned out, no Idaho State player suffered an injury. What a pity.

c) Index for UTEP at home: 4 - (-3) = 7 points
Index for UTEP away: -1 - (-1) = -1 + 1 = 0 points

We will divide by two and round down on the neutral court. UTEP will receive 7 / 2 = 3.5, rounded to 3 Team Index points.

Neutral Courts

Up next for UTEP - a game against #7 Baylor on a neutral court, this time in New Mexico.

First, Baylor's card set.



As you can see, Baylor's impressive stats look even more impressive when you multiply them by that 1.203 factor which signifies the strength of the Big Twelve vs. Conference USA. My rule of thumb is that anyone who is shooting in the "fives" - whose field goal range on the card starts with 11 and ends up somewhere in the 50s - is a force to be reckoned with. There are two or three good players on Baylor who have that kind of shooting ability. Add to it the fact that that 1.203 factor boosts rebounding as well and Baylor is a team well deserving of its Top Ten ranking.

The only hope for UTEP is that Baylor's shooters do poorly and they get a few forced rests to take them off the courts. Other than that, it might be a long game for UTEP. On the other hand, I said the same thing about Missouri and UTEP had no trouble with Mizzou.

(* * *)

The next thing for me to figure out was "how do you handle a neutral court"?

My first notion was to simply remove Team Index points as a factor. This way, neither team could call on its special and mysterious powers to ignore forced rests and fouls, to grab rebounds, etc.

However, if you look at the Baylor Card set above, Baylor has a Home Court Index of "9" and a Road Index of "7". UTEP has a Home Court Index of "4" and a Road Index of "-1".

The 1993 Statis Pro Basketball Rules introduced the idea of Home and Road indices. One subtracts the smaller of the numbers from the larger and the team putting pu the bigger number gets the index points.

If the game were at Baylor, Baylor would have 9 (Baylor Home Index) - (-1) (UTEP Road Index) for 10 Team Index Points.
If the game were at UTEP, Baylor would have 7 (Baylor Road Index) - 4 (UTEP Home Index) for 3 Team Index Points. Even though UTEP still keeps its home court advantage in setting assignments, Baylor gets 3 points.

Since Baylor is still dynamite against UTEP either at home or on the road, it's unfair for Baylor to be deprived of their Index Points. Hell, they have Index Points even when they play in the hostile environment of UTEP.

The solution: for neutral courts one splits the difference of Index Points. What is between Baylor +3 points and Baylor +10 points? That would be Baylor +6 Team Index points, rounding down (3 + 10)/2. Baylor gets 6 Team Index Points on a theoretically neutral court. If it were the difference between, say, Baylor +10 at home and UTEP +4 at home, Baylor would get (10 - 4)/2 = 3 Team Index points on a neutral court.

There is one more advantage home teams get in the game: the visiting team is forced to put its player cards on the table first, and then the home team decides how it wants to position its players against the visiting team's players. On neutral courts, each team will swap duties. For the first half of the game, one team gets to choose the most advantageous matchups and during the second half, the other team chooses.

More on the outcome of this game later.

Missouri Card Set

Here is the card set for Missouri:

Since it's a busy week this week, no snappy comments. Gaze at the glory that is Mizzou. The multiplicative factor is 1.204 of Big Twelve vs. Conference USA, so even weak teams in the Big Twelve become potential powerhouses.

Utah Card Set

This is the card set for Utah, which is UTEP's next opponent. UTEP will travel to Salt Lake City to play the Runnin' Utes.

This is also a very worrisome team. We're going to play the next game shorthanded. LaToya Lloyd has been suspended for one game on recommendation of C-USA for a fight during the Jackson State game. Marta Jaworowski is out for one game for an injury. Therefore, both teams have 11 players they can suit up.

The multiplication factor for Utah was 1.04, due to the strength of the Mountain West conference over Conference USA. They have four players with killer stamina and Elnora Bastien's accuracy is just ludicrous. After that, Utah has very weak depth. If Utah gets some forced rests or is forced to resort to the bench, we have a good shot. If not, it's going to be a long game.

Furthermore, Utah has a full 10 Team Index Points - 9 - (-1). If things don't go Utah's way, Utah can just ignore the results. Once again, our chances of winning on the road depend on a lot. If Utah has to burn off points quickly, it could be an even game; if Utah faces no adverse results they can take a lead and keep it.

One thing: Utah will help our RPI. Just by random chance - the Running Utes won 70 percent of their games - I have them as 8-0 going into this game. An 8-0 team vs. a 7-1 team should help build up my imaginary excitement.

Finding Statistics of Opposing Teams

I tried to come up with Alcorn State cards. Honestly, I did. But if you go to their Alcorn State women's basketball website, you will find a link called "statistics", click it and find...nothing. I had nothing to work with.

This left me looking for an opponent similar in strength to Alcorn State. I wanted to find another SWAC opponent, so I chose the next strongest in RPI - Grambling. Unfortunately, Grambling's statistics are a complete mess, with a single player having two or three different lines of stats because the player's name was spelled wrong and wasn't corrected in the databases, leaving two "different" players whose names only differ by a letter.

This is part of the problem with having 340 or so "major league" women's college basketball teams. Some, clearly, are more major than others. Some are "big time" programs like Connecticut and Tennessee, with nationwide fanbases and dedicated websites. Others are at best afterthoughts to comply with Title IX, and are barely recognized on their own small campuses. Most likely, keeping statistics isn't a problem for these schools because no one complained about the stats - no one bothered to look up their stats anyway.

This brought me to the next school, one even lower down than Alcorn State - Jackson State. At least, Jackson State has stats, even though the page has large blue borders on both sides and the black text spills across the page, making it hard to read without highlighting. (I just copied and pasted into notepad.)

There was one problem with Jackson State's stats: there was an Aundrea Woullard and an Aundrea Johnson, who I suspect are actually the same person. Not in my universe, they're not.



Jackson State, however, is a much weaker team than UTEP. Realtimerrpi.com has them ranked at #327 out of #340 teams. The SWAC conference is the weakest conference in women's college basketball, even weaker than the 10 or so remaining women's college basketball independent teams. Therefore, the UTEP stats were adjusted by a factor of 1.1797, their biggest adjustment so far.



This is the first time we can see UTEP's Team Index Points. They get +4 at home and -1 on the road.

I sense that I'm going to win this game. But even if I win it, Jackson State's crappy record (1-6) coming into this game is going to play havoc with my RPI. As it turns out, I made an error in last week's calculation: I lose -0.0024 because my median non-conference rank is in the bottom half of Division I. I misread that as "median conference rank". I stay at #73 on the AP Poll RPI but fall to #89 on the Coaches Poll RPI - the latter gives more weight to the quality of your opponents.

I'll redo the calculations after the next game.

Idaho Card Set

This will be the card set for Idaho when I play my next game. Since Fresno State, New Mexico State and Idaho are all in the same conference - the WAC - I'll just use the UTEP cards I created for Fresno State and used for New Mexico State.

I have some misgivings about this game. For one thing, there are only nine players on the Idaho squad with significant minutes. That means that there's not a lot of depth. A few forced rests, a few people running out of stamina and Idaho's in trouble.

I could have created a few other Idaho players that had minutes in the single digits...but I eschew creating those players. It's too much work to create a player with a Stamina of "1". I generally won't create a player at all unless their Stamina is two or greater.

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.

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.

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.

Houston Bobcats Cards

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

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.

Card Sets: The Player Cards and Brenda Dean

As you can see, the cards look pretty good. Brenda Dean/Pete Maravich has been added, and is surrounded by her teammates at last.

If you've never played the game, I'll point out what makes Dean so special.

The first fact is her field goal rating of 43. In a base-eight system (11-18, then 21-28, up to 81-88), her 11-43 rating makes her the one of the best field goal shooters on the team. There are only a few players that have a better rating than she does, and each of those players is handicapped in a particular way.

The second fact is that her line in "secondary" is blank. "Secondary" was created in the game to account for the fact that there are some basketball players who have great field goal accuracy (look at Immaculata Suarez's amazing 62 field goal rating), but don't take a lot of shots in real life.

In the game, there is an "ACTION" phase and (up to) two "ADVANCE" phases. The "ACTION" phase puts the ball in someone's hands. The "ADVANCE" phase moves the ball - up to twice, after which whoever is holding the ball must shoot it. Players can shoot any time they want, they just flip over the next number and see if it falls in the field goal range.

However, if the player decides to shoot directly off the ACTION phase - the player gets the ball and immediately decides to shoot - the "secondary" rating must be used and not the "field goal" rating. This provides a disincentive for most players to shoot immediately vs. handing off the ball to someone else. When getting the ball through an "ADVANCE", a player can shoot.

Result? Immaculata Suarez is dynamite only if someone sets up a shot for her. But Brenda Dean, since she has no "secondary" rating scores just as well off the "ACTION" phase as she does off the "ADVANCE" phase.

(Perversely, LaToya Lloyd scores much better when she creates her own shot than when someone else creates it for her. I wonder what's up with that?)

Now, note the 31 in parenthesis. This is Dean's 3-point rating. If she decides to shoot from behind the arc, her range is cut down to 11-31. Other players have better 3-point ratings than Dean does, but it's the (+) that's important.

Dean can shoot five 3-pointers a game (actually, she can shoot 13 if she wants to - the cardmaking machine doesn't account for Maravich-like superproduction). Other players have "iii" or "**" or nothing next to their number in parenthesis - they can only attempt one, two, three or four 3-point shots per game.

Dean's rebound rate of 25 is exceeded by only two other players. When determining who gets a rebound, the card might read "High at F1". Whichever player has the higher rebound rating at the Forward (#1) position gets the rebound. So Dean has a good chance of getting rebounds.

Stamina: This is the monster advantage. Dean's stamina is a ludicrous 53 (the next highest is Moss's 18). What keeps a player from just keeping his starters in the game perpetually? Stamina. Players that run out of stamina only shoot with the secondary rating and their defense rating goes to "+5" - they add five points to the shooting accuracy of their defenders.

Stamina gets used up with each field goal attempt, each rebound and each foul. Dean's superhuman 53 in stamina means that she could stay in for the entire game without rest under optimal conditions.

Also of note: Dean's foul drawing rating of 43. Once again, ridiculously high. There is a high chance than anyone defending Dean will be tempted into fouling her to stop her. And when starters are in foul trouble, the scrubs have to come off the bench - and scrubs generally have high defense ratings.

Dean's defense rating is +1: she's not a great defender. No one ever recruited/drafted Maravich for his defensive skills, and the same goes for Dean. "Zero" is average, and the range goes from -5 (an All-Star defender) to +5 (all offense). These imaginary UTEP miners aren't much of a defensive team - the starters have the highest stamina, and most of their ratings are positive numbers.

So what does that final card mean? The one with the nice UTEP Miners picture on it? More later.