The only thing that matters is money, said no blogger ever. Just ask the WAB guy.
WAB, you may or may not know, refers to Wins Above Bubble, a metric used by the NCAA to help decide which “bubble teams” participate in its end-of-the-season college basketball tournament and which stay home.
This was the brainchild of one Seth Burn, a self-professed math geek who likes to gamble on sports and blog about them.
On February 1, 2015, he first posted about WAB, the statistic he made up.
The point was that in a sport where teams play disparate schedules, sometimes the only way to measure relative performance is with numbers.
Make that good numbers.
WAB measures a team’s number of wins compared to how many wins the average bubble team would have been expected to have against the same schedule.
More specifically, and without getting into the heavy math I won’t pretend to understand, each game a team plays is assigned a win probability equal to a theoretical bubble team’s chance of winning that game. This number accounts for the opponent’s strength and the game’s location. If the win probability is 95 percent (0.95), such a win amounts to a WAB of 1 minus 0.95, or 0.05. A loss would equal 0 minus 0.95, or a WAB of -0.95. Alternatively, if the win probability is 0.15, the WAB for a victory would be 1 minus 0.15, or a more meaningful 0.85. A loss in this case would translate into a WAB of -0.15.
In other words, the more positive the WAB, the better. Obviously, a negative WAB is bad.
Fast forward 11 years, and what started as an obscure blog post now contains a number that is highly correlated with not only team selection but also team seeding.
But let’s pause for a moment.
This feel-good blogger story, even with its wildly successful outcome, is at best fringe.
In a world with war, disease, and natural disasters, obsessing about the fate of 18-year-old kids who play a game that a few people in one country care about is esoteric.
Even worse is when such pursuits consume one’s day, generating little to no revenue.
There’s an expression for that: waste of time.
I’m assuming that Seth Burn has a real job, the kind that pays the bills.
But as far as I can tell, he also continues to prioritize wasting his time.
And thanks to people like him, I’m inclined to keep wasting mine.
Acknowledgement: Belmont University student Sohan Shrikhande contributed to this article. He claims he was in class at the time.
