Analysis Preview: The Home Team Challenge
Like most of us, I go to home team games put on by the local roller derby league. Unlike most of you, Iâm fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a banked track roller derby league, and to go to home team games put on by that league.
That league is, of course, the L.A. Derby Dolls.
When L.A. moved into their new home, the Dolleseum, they jumped right into a 12-game home season over the course of just six months. It was the first time they played in a double round-robin format for as long as Iâve been around, not to mention that many games in such a short period of time.
It was also an extremely competitive season. Of all of those games played, I could only recall one truly âbadâ game, and maybe one or two mediocre ones. But every single game past that, including a stretch of five or six in a row, was extremely close through the first half at least. Many more games went deep into the fourth quarter, and a decent number of them went all the way to the last jam, including the championship game.
Out of curiosity, I went back through all of the games played in the 2015 LADD home season, just to see what this level of parity in competition looked like statistically.
Banked track data tracking isnât as rich as it is in the WFTDA, so thereâs no realistic way to calculate PPJ or MJDÂ without manually tracking it at every game. But we do have the final scores, and the average score gap of all games played throughout the season.
I was a little surprised at how many games werenât as close on the final scoreboard as they felt watching them live, and that this average wasnât lower than I thought it was in my head.
It was here that I realized something: Just what is a good home season supposed to look like, anyway?
Every year, I track the scores and stats at the WFTDA Championships to check up on the progress of interleague competition among the top WFTDA teams. More close games and fewer blowouts is ultimately what everyone wants to see, and a lot us use this as a gauge to measure progress in the competitive aspect of the sport.
However, the level of parity in high-level interleague competition means very little to leagues that rely heavily on having a popular home team season to get fans to come out and spend money on tickets, concessions, merch, etc. Especially in the places where home teams are more popular than all-star travel teams, which is quite a few places.
In reality, the home seasons are where we should be focusing on to determine whether or not roller derby is getting more competitive in general. Every league has full control over their teams. Through various means, they can balance competition within their league, like allowing the weakest team the first pick of graduating juniors or top fresh meat skaters every season.
Ideally, a well-managed home league should more-or-less have balanced rosters leading to consistently putting on good-to-great games for their fans a majority of the time. Certainly, a low amount of bad games or blowouts. There will always be unbalanced teams here and there due to injuries or league transfers, but among several leagues over several years we should expect that these bumps will be smoothed out due to the law of averages.
This has inspired me to undertake an absolutely massive analysis project, which I am calling the Home Team Challenge. I will be collecting and organizing the home team scores of a significant number of WFTDA leagues, and any non-WFTDA leagues (RDCL, MADE) big enough to support a full home season, to see what there is to see.
And not just current or recent home team seasons, either. I'm going to try and go back as far and as deep as I can, for as many leagues as I can. Iâm talking as many as 40 or 50 leagues, at least as far back as 2009 or 2008. (This seems to be the limit as far as statistical robustness goes in some of the league websites and Facebook pages Iâve dug through already.) With all of this data we can start asking, and getting answers to, some very intriguing questions:
⢠Was the massive drop-off of fan attendance from the peak levels in 2009 and 2010 in any way attributable to less competitive home league seasons throughout the country?
⢠How did WFTDA rule changes over the years affect competition within the isolated and more consistent environment of a home league season?
⢠Provided enough data exists for them to make a comparison, do leagues playing non-WFTDA rule sets have intraleague seasons that areâat least according to the final scoreâmore competitive, less competitive, or about the same?
⢠Which leagues consistently have the most competitive or uncompetitive home league seasons, and why? Can this knowledge help other leagues put on more competitive home seasons as well?
⢠Do league championship games always pit the two best teams against one another? That is, are they always among the closest games of the year?
⢠Do higher-ranked WFTDA teams produce more competitive home team seasons? Does an all-star teamsâ ranking have anything to do with how well that leagueâs home team season (if it has one) is doing?
Thatâs just the tip of the iceberg as far as how useful this data may be once I finish collecting it all in one easy-to-analyze place. Something of this magnitude is going to take a lot of time, probably the rest of this year, to collect the data and make up some whiz-bang visualizations from it. For that reason, this will be a side project that Iâll try to work on here and there, hopefully having it ready to go during the 2017 pre-season.
Having just gotten started, Iâve got data from as far back as 2008 for three leagues: Gotham, Rose City, and Bay Area. To pique your interest in this analysis project, let me show you the numbers from the 2015 home seasons of Gotham and Rose City.
First, Gotham, which has four home teams play in a simple six-game season with a single Championship game at the end, and has stuck to this format since pretty much the beginning.
As it turns out, last year Gotham had its most competitive home league season in its recorded history, which since 2008âthatâs over eight years and 56 gamesâhad an average score difference of 45 points. Not too shabby!
How about Rose City, then? Recently, the Rollers switched to a huge 14-game home season with their four teams, including a championship double-header.
Holy shit.
The chart speaks for itself. But to just add to it, in 2014 the league average score difference in Portland was 75 points, so things up there are getting worse in a hurry. When half-games results are adjusted to full-game score differences, Rose Cityâs home teams since 2009 have averaged a final score gap of 65 pointsâor 20 points less competitive than Gotham.
Fascinating, ainât it?
As I collect data throughout the year, including from the current 2016 home seasons, Iâll try to drop in here on Scratchpad with any interesting home league nuggets I come across. Iâm not sure if anything will be quite this dramatic, especially from a strong and stable league like Rose City. But with the size and depth of what I hope to collectâŚwho knows?














