#statsnerd

There are good years, there are Pro Bowl years, and then there are those seasons where one player turns the whole league into background noise. That is what this SportsOrca story digs into. The MVP runs where every Sunday felt like a new way to say this is not normal.

You get the quarterbacks who owned every snap, checking into the right call, ripping throws on third and long, and stacking four touchdown afternoons like they were routine. You get the backs and do it all weapons who dragged the ball on every drive, ate clock, scored anyway, and still looked fresh in the fourth quarter. It is about volume and impact at the same time. Numbers that broke records and plays that flipped seasons.

If you remember certain years as the one where everybody else was just trying to keep up with one player, this piece will feel like a highlight reel in story form.

This article is an interesting look at how movie reviews work, with a focus on Rotten Tomatoes in particular:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/31/16107948/rotten-tomatoes-explainer-critics-movies-aggregation

I find this "review vs. business" look at the movie industry fascinating...but this also reinforces my strong preference for using Metacritic over Rotten Tomatoes. Because the Rotten Tomatoes score is calculated by first stratifying each review into good or bad ("fresh" or "rotten") and then aggregating those binary values, I really believe it washes out a lot of the nuanced opinions you can get from reviews.

Metacritic instead converts every review to a score out of 100, and then calculates a weighted average of those scores...and this is why the pre-stratified Rotten Tomatoes score will often be either much higher or much lower than the Metacritic score (e.g. Wonder Woman’s 92% vs. 76% or Spider-man: Homecoming’s 92% vs. 73%).  To my mind, Metacritic is providing a more useful aggregation of critical opinions, whereas Rotten Tomatoes is trying to give you a yes/no answer to "should I see the movie?".

There's been talk lately about which state had been most successful recently & I decided it was time for some number crunching :)  I chose to focus on the past decade (2004-2013) .

What I've done is (a) count the number of placements by each state and (b) then given a weighted ranking "score" based on the following points system... for Miss, 15 points for a win, 10 points for a runner-up (any no.), 7 points for top 8/10 and 5 for top 15/6.  In Teen I decided to throw top 10 & 15 placements together because they were only separated until 2007.  The points system was thus 15 points for a win, 10 points for any runner-up & 5 points for a semi-finalist (T10/15/16).

You can check out my full spreadsheets here:

MISS >> http://www.pageantupdate.info/misc/missusastats04-13.xlsx TEEN >> http://www.pageantupdate.info/misc/missteenusastats04-13.xlsx 

(Click charts to view full size)

MISS RESULTS

In Miss Texas is in the lead on number of placements with 9, followed by California, South Carolina and Tennessee on 8.

With the weighted score, Texas is still tops but only barely, a mere one point ahead of California (Cali catches up based on their sheer number of runners-up).  Both these states have a clear lead ahead of Tennessee, and then there's a further drop to South & North Carolina.  This is where the weighting becomes interesting - SC has had a large number of placements but not as many runners-up etc. 

TEEN RESULTS

One thing I always love about Teen is just how varied the results can be.  A few years ago would you have predicted Maryland and West Virginia being right up there?

On number of placements there is a three-way tie for first between Georgia, Maryland and South Carolina, each with 7 with California and Kansas on 6 (fun fact, KS's 6 have come in two blocks of three years in a row)

On weighted value, California takes the lead with their recent win and 4 runner-up placements putting them clear ahead.  Second is Maryland and tied for third are Georgia and South Carolina and drum roll for West Virginia which comes in 5th!  (given WV did not place between 1988-2005 this is quite a feat!)

CONCLUSION