Granat quoted on NFL tragedy

Dr. Jay Granat, founder of StayInTheZone.com, has been quoted in various media sources on the NFL tragedy involving Kansas City Chief linebacker, Jovan Belcher.  Here's a quote from USA Today.  

How the Chiefs cope long term will have a lot to do with the quality and continuity of grief counseling they get from management, Ph. D. psychotherapist Jay Granat told USA TODAY Sports. The team has announced counselors will be made available.

"A lot of the player healing has to do with how Chiefs management handles the tone and the stuff they do around this -- because when there's a workplace tragedy like this, how management responds, is huge,'' said Granat, 60, a New Jersey clinical psychotherapist for more than 25 years.

Belcher and his girlfriend, identified by police as Kasandra Perkins, 22, leave behind an infant daughter.

"If I ran the team, I would say, 'Let's set up a fund for that child,' " Granat said. "I'd do that pretty promptly, so that the players know they're going to take care of her, that 'She's part of our family.' " 

Read more here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2012/12/02/kansas-city-chiefs-jovan-belcher-murder-suicide-counseling/1740637/ 

Quant Facts now 29-19 (12/6/12)

With the SF Giants' victory in the World Series, that brings our Quant Fact predictions to 29-19.  Our quant fact predictions are based on a quantitative analysis of factors related to sports psychology.  Our results show the power of these tools, especially considering that our predictions are not generally related to which team is the favorite or underdog.

Stay tuned for our analysis for the upcoming BCS College Football Championship.

Happy holidays!

2012 World Series: Leadership and Consistency

Here's an excerpt from our analysis of the 2012 World Series.

Pitching Leadership

Leadership on the playing field has proven to be statistically significant in its relationship to winning the big game across all sports we have studied. In baseball, top starting pitchers are a key leadership factor - and are a good indicator of success during baseball's short playoff series. The finalist with the better top of the rotation, measured by total wins by its top two pitchers, has won 67 percent of the World Series over the past 22 World Series (over 23 years because there was no postseason in 1994). This factor goes to the Detroit Tigers, whose top two starting pitchers, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, edge San Francisco's top starters, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner (33 combined wins to 32).

In total, our analysis points to the Detroit Tigers.  

Read more here:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/677712-carlton-chin/1209051-the-2012-world-series-analysis-of-sports-psychology-factors

Sports Psychology: Being a Mentally Tough Pitcher

With the MLB playoffs getting set to start, many analysts focus on the playoff contender's pitching staffs.  Dr. Jay Granat, psychotherapist and founder of StayInTheZone.com -- and co-author of "Who Will Win the Big Game," recently helped with a study on how mental toughness develops in young pitchers.

Working with Anthony Cinelli of Boston University, Granat, interviewed college pitchers and learned that:

Many young baseball players are first introduced to this sport by their fathers. So, their dad is often their first coach. Therefore, fathers often play a crucial role in how an a pitcher develops physically and mentally.

Apparently, the young pitchers started to model some of the behaviors, attitudes and actions that were demonstrated by their fathers in the world of work. In short, they took what they observed their dad's doing in their lives and brought some of these attitudes and behaviors to the baseball field.Some of the pitchers interviewed also attributed the learning of mental toughness was function of watching their fathers behavior in their careers and in their businesses.

Others pitchers stated that fathers taught them valuable lessons about being accountable, taking responsibility and learning to accept good and bad performances.

Read more here:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Sports-Psychology-And-Baseball:-How-To-Be-A-Mentally-Tough-Pitcher&id=7310959



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7310959

Repeatability: Consistency, Athletes & Traders?!?

Here's an excerpt from an article we wrote that makes the analogy between systematic approaches that financial traders apply AND rituals or habits that athletes use (to improve repeatability, and consistency).

Interestingly, psychotherapist and founder of StayInTheZone.com, Dr. Jay Granat notes that athletes use similar systematic techniques. Granat encourages his clients to come up with their own "ritual" to help with focus. This can take the form of tennis players bouncing the tennis ball three times before serving, or baseball batters taking several practice swings before each pitch, for example. 

In some ways, these rituals and habits are designed to improve repeatability -- and are an athlete's method of systematizing his or her approach.  Dr. Granat, who has worked with athletes of all levels, including Olympic gold medalists, has also worked with professional traders. 

Please read more here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/879811-improving-investment-decisions-with-quantitative-analysis

Congrats to Andy Murray on winning the tennis US Open

Hearty congratulations go to Andy Murray on winning his first Grand Slam -- and to his coach, tennis great Ivan Lendl, who helped Murray on his path to a Grand Slam Championship.  In some ways, both Murray's and Lendl's stories -- are about how different people find their ways to championships in different ways.
Some champions have an easier route to success, but we're sure Andy Murray's U.S. Open win is very sweet to Murray and his camp.

In our blog, we often talk about championship characteristics such as "mental toughness" and confidence.  Murray followed his Olympic Gold Medal with this Grand Slam -- and this added confidence will only make Murray a tougher opponent for the current tennis triumvirate of Federer, Nadal & Djokovic.  Tennis fans are in for a treat because every major tournament now has at least four legitimate contenders.  Back in June, the NY Times had a good article on Murray and Lendl -- that was both prescient about the potential for success -- but was also questioning:

Tennis’s new odd couple flew back to Florida and put in two hard weeks in Delray Beach, and in his next semifinal encounter with Djokovic in the Dubai Duty Free tournament, Murray beat him soundly. The next day in the finals, however, he was smoked by Federer. The following week, still deflated, he lost his first match at Indian Wells in California, and by the time I caught up with Murray and Lendl at the next tournament, the Sony Ericsson in Key Biscayne, the sudden improvement was looking like the spike medical researchers find when the control group is given a placebo.

“Whenever there’s a new relationship,” says Todd Martin, who worked with Djokovic for eight months in 2009 and 2010, “hope springs eternal. This is the girl for me. This is the coach for me. I’ve picked the right college. But eventually reality sets in.” 

On Andy Murray's style:

In the era of power tennis, tactical niceties can seem obsolete. A player bangs his serve, runs around his backhand and whales away with his forehand until his opponent submits — and the prototype for this brute style was Lendl himself, who bludgeoned rivals with his one-off Adidas racket as if he were clubbing baby seals.

Murray, an avid boxing fan and admirer of the great counterpuncher Floyd Mayweather Jr., disdains haymakers. Instead of going toe to toe — or as Murray says, “flat, flat, flat” — he subjects his opponent to an unsettling mix of topspin and slice, hard and soft, low and high, angle and depth. As his mother puts it pithily, “Andy messes them about.”

In today's game of professional tennis, Lendl says:

“Tennis,” he told me later, “is basically a game where you try to create an opportunity for yourself to finish the point, because you can’t wait for the opponent to miss anymore. Well, if you create an opportunity and don’t take advantage of it, you let the opponent back to even, then you are just starting the point over, so you have to take advantage of them.”

On how Lendl could help him, Murray said:

“He was at the top of the game for a while before he broke through,” Murray says. “He knows about all that stuff. That was the other thing — he understands and is very sympathetic, whereas a lot of people aren’t.”

The NY Times article can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/can-ivan-lendl-lead-andy-murray-to-tennis-greatness.html?pagewanted=all

Championship Factors: Olympic Athletes

NBC uses a lot of air time to bring these close up looks of the athletes to the viewing public. And the network did a good job of communicating the nature of the time, money and energy sacrifices that the athletes and their families need to make to make it to this elite level of sports.

...

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to counsel a number Olympic athletes including four gold medal winners. These athletes were from a variety of sports including gymnastics, weight lifting, boxing, skiing and rowing.

This year, two clients of mine brought home gold medals. Because of client confidentiality regulations, I can not share very much about them. However, it was quite thrilling to see people who sat in my office on the gold medal platform. I have also interviewed three or four previous gold medal winners for my weekly column.

Not surprisingly, these athletes have great discipline, focus and resiliency. They also have great passion for their sport and their teammates. They also have strong feelings about representing their country.

Like the rest of us, they also have fear, anxiety and interpersonal conflicts with people in their lives.

What is really striking to me, however, is the fact that to a person, all of these remarkable athletes are quite humble, soft spoken and very respectful.

None of them were arrogant or grandiose. Rather, they were all quite genuine and down to earth.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7228225 

Olympic Medal Count - Factors

As the Olympics wind down, many sports fans are looking at the number of medals won by each country.  Historically, the medals compiled by participating countries has been related to several key factors, including:

• population
• financial and/or economic resources, and
• home field advantage.  

This year, the current leaders include the U.S., China, Great Britain, and Russia.  The always interesting Bleacher Report writes:

It should stand to reason that a country among the global leaders in available financial and human resources would be far more successful in athletic events that require elite athleticism, expensive training and state-of-the-art facilities.  

And, we have seen patriotism at the Olympic Games lead to some historic triumphs, such as the 1980 Miracle on Ice.   NPR reports more on the home field advantage, academic papers on the "Olympic Medal Analyses" -- and even an additional factor: communism!  Right around the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, two academic papers on medal counts came out, by Bernard of Dartmouth, and Johnson of Colorado College.  Here is a link to Bernard's paper.

Check these nice graphics out by the Huffington Post -- which shows totals medals, as well as medals divided by population or GDP.   Numbers -- and pictures -- can tell interesting stories!

Olympics: Revisiting a Popular Article

With the 2012 Olympics set to start in London (and today being July 4th), we thought we would revisit one of our more popular articles -- on the 1980 Miracle on Ice.  In that article, we looked at concepts of sports psychology and did an interesting and fun analysis (including Monte Carlo simulations) to study the odds of the U.S. ice hockey team winning the gold medal.

Herb Brooks was a true master of sports psychology, graduating from college with a degree in psychology.  Brooks knew he had a chance to make some noise at the Olympics - especially with the US hosting the Winter Olympics.  Brooks worked at gathering players who could lift their games to special levels -- and could also play as part of a team where the sum of the parts were greater than the individual pieces.  

On goaltender Jim Craig and other players, Brooks said, "I don't want the best players, I want the right players."  Brooks knew what he was doing when he put his 1980 team together, piece by piece.  He also knew how to "push the players' buttons" and was tough on many members of that Miracle on Ice -- but eventually created one of the most beloved U.S. sports stories of the twentieth century.

Based on key hockey statistics and expectations, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation to study the odds of the United States hockey team winning the gold medal. Monte Carlo methods use a random process to solve complicated problems...

In a similar manner, hockey games can be modeled based on certain random variables and key statistics, including shots on goal, save percentage and shot efficiency. If we model the United States team as a seventh seed, the probability of the United States winning the gold medal approaches odds as high as 1 in 1,000. 

But the United States turned out to be a stronger team than expected. Entering the medal round of the Olympics, the United States and Soviet teams were undefeated. The United States was 4-0-1, outscoring their opponents by 25-10, while the Russians were 5-0, outscoring their opponents by 51-11. The Soviet goaltenders, Vladislav Tretiak and Vladimir Myshkin, averaged a solid 88.2 save percentage, and the American goalie Jim Craig had a 91.7 save percentage.

If we base our simulations on the team’s performance in the tournament, the odds could have been as low as 17-to-1 for the United States win the gold medal.

The entire article was originally published in the NY Times in 2010, on the 30th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice.  Read more here:
http://vancouver2010.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/how-miraculous-was-the-miracle/?scp=1&sq=miraculous%20miracle&st=cse

Quant Facts 29-18 (6/22/12)

Quant Facts & Sport Psychology Predict the NBA Champion

Congratulations to both the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder on great NBA seasons.  We look forward to years of exciting action from these teams and players.  The 2011-12 strike-shortened season had many exciting moments -- and super performances from many teams in addition to the finalists, including the Bulls, Celtics, and Spurs.

With the Miami Heat taking the 2012 NBA Championship, our "Who Will Win" blog's "quant fact" record improves to 29-18 (61.7%).  It is noteworthy that the Oklahoma City Thunder was a favorite to defeat Miami in the NBA Finals.  This is a testament to the power of "the concepts of sports psychology": championship traits (related to sport psychology) sometimes go against conventional wisdom -- but have been correct more than 60% of the time, between two fairly evenly-matched champions.

In particular, our work has shown that "big game experience" is one of the most important factors (even at the highest level!) -- and the relationship between experience and confidence can yield that elusive mental edge.  Experience, confidence, and mental toughness can have a material impact on results.

We had no official quant fact prediction in the NHL -- although some readers pointed out that if we went purely by the numbers, the quant facts would have been correct!



Carlton Chin, CFA, an MIT-trained "quant" and portfolio strategist and Dr. Jay Granat, a psychotherapist and sports psychologist, wrote "Who Will Win the Big Game? A Psychological & Mathematical Approach."  Chin is a specialist in risk management and asset allocation -- and Granat is founder of StayInTheZone.com. 

Greatest Runs in the NBA Playoffs

The Miami-Oklahoma series has had some great games so far.  With the 2012 NBA finals going on, ESPN published a nice article about some of the greatest runs during the NBA playoffs.  We like to rate and rank all-time great teams and players -- and with today's playoffs being so long (several rounds of seven-game series), the teams mentioned in the article rank up there with some of the greatest teams in history.


In addition, based on the level of competition -- and the stars in today's game, Miami and Oklahoma City are no slouches (in the all-time great teams lists)!  Miami had to overcome Boston & Indiana, while OKC had to defeat the Spurs and Lakers -- just to reach this year's finals.   


http://espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2012/story/_/page/greatestruns-1-5/nba-playoffs-ranking-greatest-runs

2012 NBA Finals (NY Times)

Our "Who Will Win" analysis was published in the NY Times.  Here's an excerpt:

Big Game Experience: Over the past 22 years, the team with more finals appearances over the previous three years has won 11 of 14 finals series (78.6 percent) in which one team had more experience than the other. This factor favors the Miami Heat, who are in their second straight N.B.A. finals.

Error Control: In baseball, fielding percentage during the regular season is correlated to winning the World Series. Similarly, in professional basketball, the team with fewer turnovers during the regular season has won 72.7 percent of the N.B.A. finals (16-6) over the past 22 years. This factor favors Miami (1,002 turnovers) over Oklahoma City (1,079 turnovers).

Over all: The championship factors favor the Heat, 3-2. Indeed, several of the strongest factors, like big-game experience and error control, predict that James will come away with his first championship with Miami. 

Miami is our "book blog's" official "quant fact" prediction.

Read more here:
http://offthedribble.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/keeping-score-reading-statistics-like-tea-leaves/ 

The 2012 Stanley Cup Finals (NY Times)

 New Jersey goalie Martin Brodeur will be going for his fourth Stanley Cup Championship versus the Los Angeles Kings. 


Our analysis was picked up by the New York Times.  Here's an excerpt:

Over the past 32 years, the team with a better goals-against average has won 18 Stanley Cups (56.3 percent). But since the high-scoring period of the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s ended – the team with the better goals-against average has been even more dominant: 4-1 over the last five years, 7-3 over the last 10, and 12-6 over the last 18 years.

....




Read more here:


http://slapshot.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/keeping-score-looking-at-history-to-predict-a-champion/

Note: For purposes of this blog, there is no definitive "quant fact" prediction for this year's Stanley Cup Finals.

Quant Facts: 28-18

Kentucky's win in the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Game brings our quant fact predictions to 28-18 for a winning percentage of 60.9% in published predictions on our book's blog.  We have done particularly well during the Final Four over the past three years, with our focus on factors related to:

• Leadership both on the court (All-Americans) and behind the bench (coaching),
• Experience - which leads to confidence
• Consistency - factors that relate to a consistently high level of play.  

March Madness 2012: Championship Game (NY Times)

Excerpt from our article in the New York Times.

Consistency: Research has shown that consistency and error measures are also important to winning championships. Historical data was not as readily available for some of the statistics (data goes back 13 seasons), but the team with the higher 3-point shooting percentage has won 10 of the last 13 title games. Teams with the higher free throw percentage have gone 9-4 over the past 13 championship games.

In the table below, we list the performance of Kentucky and Kansas in the categories related to consistency like 3-point shooting and free-throw percentage. We also included turnovers and a defensive measure because these are also championship traits. Kentucky holds the advantage in most of these statistical measures.

Read more here:

http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/keeping-score-comparing-kentucky-and-kansas-on-the-stat-sheet/

Carlton J. Chin, a portfolio strategist, and Jay P. Granat, psychotherapist, are authors of “Who Will Win the Big Game? A Psychological & Mathematical Method.” They have previously written about the World Series, the N.B.A. finals, and the Super Bowl.

Time-Lapse: Final Four Court Setup

This is a fun time-lapse video of the court set-up for this year's Final Four in New Orleans.  It took five weeks to set things up -- but you can watch it in two minutes!

March Madness 2012: The NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four

With an eye towards key concepts of sport psychology, we looked at factors such as big game experience, leadership behind the bench, leadership on the court, error control, and consistency.  So important are these concepts to winning championships that they have proven to be common themes across all sports we have studied.

Experience: Over the past 27 tournaments, 15 of 27 champions have had Final Four experience from the previous three years.  Teams with more Final Four appearances in the past three years have gone 11-5 (68.8%) in championship games.  Of this year’s Final Four contestants, only Kentucky has reached the Final Four over the past three years – and with this year’s appearance, Kentucky has reached the Final Four two years in a row.
...
Consistency: Research has shown that consistency and error measures are also important to winning championships.  Historical data was not as readily available for some of the statistics (data goes back 13 seasons), but the team with the higher 3-point shooting percentage has won 10 of the last 13 title games.  Free throw shooting percentage is also a measure of consistency, and teams with the higher free throw percentage have gone 9-4 over the past 13 championship games.
...
So who will win the big game?  The championship factors predict that Kentucky and Ohio State will advance to the championship game.  Once the finalists are determined, this ranking, based on the factors in the table, may be used to predict the champion: (1) Kentucky, (2) Ohio State, (3) Kansas, and (4) Louisville – to win the championship.


Read more at CNN.com here:
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-769182


Carlton Chin, a portfolio strategist and MIT graduate, and Jay Granat, psychotherapist, are authors of “Who Will Win the Big Game? A Psychological & Mathematical Method.”  They have previously written about the Super Bowl, World Series, and last year’s NCAA Tournament.

Extra Motivation, Recent Performance Overvalued - Or Both?

We sometimes write (and give statistics) to show that recent performance is often overvalued by sports fans.  Here's an article that backs up this hypothesis -- and might also suggest that teams losing their conference championships might be extra-motivated to perform well in the big NCAA Men's Tournament.  From the Wall St. Journal:

For the three No. 1 seeds in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that didn’t win their conference tournaments, there’s good news: History suggests they have as good a chance as No. 1-seeded conference champs of winning it all. Or, more precisely, a better chance. Especially North Carolina and Kentucky.

Getty Images

Ten years ago, Maryland shook off an ACC tournament semifinal loss to win six straight and the NCAA title.

As Ben Cohen noted in the Wall Street Journal today, NCAA champs generally have won their conference tournament. But a lot of those champs weren’t No. 1 seeds. Among top seeds since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, a greater proportion of those No. 1 seeds that have lost in their conference tournaments have gone on to win it all than have those that cut the nets after their conferences’ championship games: six of 26 non-champs vs. eight of 64 champs, nearly twice the percentage (excluding No. 1 seeds that played in conferences without tournaments). Since just one team can win it all each year, average tournament wins also are worth watching. And the non-conference champs rule among top seeds there, too, with an average of 3.69 wins to 3.36 for the conference champs...

Read more here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2012/03/14/ncaa-tournament-top-seeds-enter-more-important-tourney/ 

Final Four Probabilities (2012 NCAA Tournament)

We were fiddling around with some statistics and came up with these probabilities of advancing to the Final Four.  The numbers may be useful when filling out your brackets.  

                                           Probability of Winning Region 

Seed	Team	Region	Final Four Prob
1	Kentucky	S	42.4%
2	Ohio State	E	41.4%
1	UNC	MW	36.2%
2	Kansas	MW	26.9%
1	Mich. State	W	22.1%
2	Missouri	W	17.7%
1	Syracuse	E	15.7%
4	Wisconsin	E	14.8%
8	Memphis	W	10.4%
5	Wich. State	S	9.6%
2	Duke	S	8.2%

March Madness -- Round 1 Results by Seed

Today is Selection Sunday for the NCAA College Basketball's Men's Tournament.  With the hugely popular office bracket pools, we thought we would summarize the results for the seeds in Round 1 of the tournament (since the NCAA Tournament went to the 64-team bracket in 1985).  With the addition of a few teams over the 64 team field over the years, we tabulated the results by the actual seeds numbering 1 to 16 (or the replacement).

Seed	Wins	Losses	Win %
1	108	0	100.0%
2	104	4	96.3%
3	92	16	85.2%
4	86	22	79.6%
5	72	36	66.7%
6	72	36	66.7%
7	65	43	60.2%
8	51	57	47.2%
9	57	51	52.8%
10	43	65	39.8%
11	36	72	33.3%
12	36	72	33.3%
13	22	86	20.4%
14	16	92	14.8%
15	4	104	3.7%
16	0	108	0%

Enjoy the Madness!

The Power of a Positive Mental Attitude

In our articles and blog, we often talk about "championship characteristics" such as confidence, leadership, focus, playing at a high level (while minimizing errors), and experience.  Interestingly, many of these championship traits can be linked to having a "positive mental attitude."    

Cognitive psychologists suggest that an individual athlete's "explanatory style" is a significant factor in influencing sports performance.  Individuals with an optimistic explanatory style consistently outperform those with a pessimistic explanatory style. [Seligman, (1990);  Hanrahan & Grove (1990)].  Their work is based on 'attribution theory' - ie. on how people explain 'good' and 'bad' events that happen in their lives.  An individual's explanatory style can be used to determine their level of optimism or pessimism - and as a consequence, their performance potential in sport.

Read more here:
http://www.sportsmind.com.au/Article-Sports-Optimism.php

Here is a less academic look at sports psychology and how Jack Nicklaus used mental imagery -- for every shot!  Jack Nicklaus wrote:

"I never hit a shot even in practice without having a sharp in-focus picture of it in my head. It's like a colour movie. First, I "see" the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I "see" the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there's a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality and only at the end of this short private Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball."

Read more here:

http://www.brianmac.co.uk/mental.htm

And from a NASA blog -- on positive mental attitude:

Some years ago I took a survival course; the instructor asked us all to guess what might be the most valuable tool to have in a survival situation.  Matches, compass, cell phone, water -- all good guesses, but the right answer:  a positive mental attitude.

Read more here:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/waynehalesblog/posts/post_1222290522818.html

There is also growing evidence of the power of positive thinking and healing.  Medical practitioners and doctors cite "good results" -- for serious cases and older patients -- especially for people with positive attitudes.  

From Bernie Siegel, MD:

To induce self-healing, love your life and body... 

Do what you love and what makes you happy. Eliminate the “shoulds” from your life. Prioritize humor in your life—see if you can laugh out loud a few times each day. Think about things that have made you laugh before. Sometimes just bringing those times back to mind is enough to enjoy another good laugh. I have been saying that laughter really is great medicine for a long time now, but recently more studies have shown that the immune system really does benefit greatly from humor...

Surround yourself with positive people...  Be good to yourself and nourish your life with positive, supportive, loving thoughts...

http://berniesiegelmd.com/2012/02/q-a-with-bernie-february-27-2012/


We thought we would end this article on some approaches that champions use to gain an optimistic and positive mental attitude.  

CHAMPION FEELINGS
What do champions feel? How do they use their emotional states to generate excellence in themselves? What champion feelings do they choose? I've listed some below that I've identified in peak performers. Perhaps you can think of others. Why not choose, right now, to experience one of the following champion feelings :

• Joy - a feeling of intense happiness
• Enthusiasm - a feeling of being fully alive and energised
• Purpose - a feeling of certainty and direction in your life
• Determination - a feeling of being fully committed to a task or goal
• Courage - a feeling of strength in the face of adversity or risk
• Focus - a feeling of pinpoint concentration
• Love - a feeling of caring, and giving of yourself
• Adventure - a feeling of excitement and challenge
• Momentum - a feeling of moving to a destination
• Belonging - a feeling of connection to others
• Timing - a feeling of being in perfect sync with outside forces

Read more here:
http://www.sportsmind.com.au/Article-Champion-Thoughts-Champion-Feelings.php

Baseball + Numbers (Math & Ratings for Young Fans)

Please check out this book from one of the co-authors of "Who Will Win?" and this blog.

FanGraphs: Baseball & WAR (Wins Above Replacement)

Here's a nice "calculator" put out by the folks over at FanGraphs. You can fiddle around and adjust the time period or position. Great stuff!

http://www.fangraphs.com/graphswd.aspx?teamid=0&pos=All&season=2011&season1=1871&grid=25

Congrats to Giants; Quant Facts

Congratulations to both the New England Patriots and the New York Giants for a great season. Big games, and indeed, championships -- often come down to just a few key plays. Athletes and teams that focus on:

• fundamentals,
• minimizing errors (while still performing at a high level)

and also have:

• confidence, which is often related to
• experience, and
• leadership --

often "win the big game."

Eli Manning's Giants came away with Super Bowl XLVI because they executed just a touch better than the Patriots. This drops our "quant fact" predictions to 26-17 in published predictions for our book's blog.

Super Bowl Info & Stats (2012)

Our "Who Will Win" analysis -- and our official "quant fact" predictions -- point to the Patriots. Here's a link to our analysis published by the New York Times:
http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/keeping-score-championship-factors-for-giants-and-patriots/

We put together some stats two years ago -- and these numbers are still interesting. Please check it out.
http://whowillwinthebiggame.blogspot.com/2010/02/super-bowl-quant-facts.html

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Carlton Chin, CFA, is an MIT-trained quant who enjoys applying numbers to everything from sports analytics to the financial markets. He is a portfolio manager specializing in Computer Aided Research & Advanced Technology (CARAT), strategic asset allocation, and quant trading systems. Has been featured in the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, SeekingAlpha & Financial Trader.

Dr. Jay Granat, psychotherapist, named one of America's Top 10 Mental Gurus by Golf Digest, has worked with Olympic athletes & sports organizations. A former university professor, he has authored several books on sport psychology -- and has appeared on ESPN, CBS & Good Morning America.