Rec’ing on…The Ranking Project (4.1)

Just a quick update…

In the course of massaging my data, I discovered a few minor conversion errors from the original pdf->txt translation that were my fault. Since this would have some impact on everything I was trying to do, I opted to start from the beginning.

This restart has been a time-consuming but useful exercise. First, the NCAA data has been updated since the start of the project, and now includes all games through to the championship; the first set I used stopped before all of the conference tourneys were in the books. Second, I stumbled across a site that has a wealth of results data. Though I tried using that as input, the lack of distinction of games not involving div-1 schools (as well as some erroneous scores I noticed off-the-bat), I opted to stay with the snarky NCAA conversion. That new data source did provide something very helpful: information on overtime games…including how many OT sessions were played. Now my formulae would be seen in their full glory. Woo-hoo!

The next change was opting not to convert to a flat text file. Honestly, working with that was becoming a hassle. Nope, this time I was going to do it right and SQL-ize it. I have to tell ya, this was a fantastic decision on my part (after I got the bugs out of the software). The data are soooo much easier to deal with than before. A preliminary round of implementing the rankings (through the first round of wq figures) has been very successful and much easier than before.

So, now that I have my tables all set up, and I’m reasonably confident in the accuracy of the data, I’m all set to finish up this ranking project.

Stay tuned…