The Misery Index

I have made a football misery index. Well, in principle it could be a happiness index, but right now it's not. It's definitely a misery index. So as most of you people reading this blog know, my happiness in the fall hinges largely on the success of the Washington Redskins and Michigan Wolverines. If my teams do well, I'm happy; if not, I'm crabby. Yes, this probably makes me a shallow and limited individual, but it is what it is.

This year has been rough for Michigan. Abysmally bad. No-bowl bad. Most-losses-ever bad. They've lost 5 in a row to Ohio State, and they've lost the last four games I've gone to. So naturally I've been cranky.

So I sat down to devise a way to measure my misery. Being a scientist and a numbers geek, this is what passes as an interesting diversion to me.

I started by simply averaging the winning percentages of the two teams. That's about as basic as you can get. But that doesn't quite capture things -- most importantly it doesn't quite capture expectation -- if a team has been consistently good, then a fall to 0.500 is bad; conversely, if a team has repeatedly stunk, winning half your games suddenly looks like a success.

So I revised it as follows: for each year, I calculate a running 10 year average and standard deviation of each team's record. Then I calculate the team's normalized deviation from the average, ie:

normdev = (win pct - average win pct)/stddev

For example, +1 is a one sigma good year, while -2 is a two sigma bad year (yes, yes, calculating a stddev from 10 data points which are almost certainly not distributed normally is a statistical no-no. Sue me. This isn't one of my scientific papers, this is a self-pity party.).

And then I average the two team's normalized deviation to get my net misery index.

So here it is, tabulated from 1987 (the year I got to Michigan) to today (click the image for a bigger view):

(if you think this is bad, you should see the other stupid charts that sit on my laptop...)

So what do we see?

1) THIS YEAR HAS BEEN MISERABLE! Yes, the misery index is at its lowest value in 21 years. I'm cranky. Michigan is off the charts (literally) bad, having a 6 sigma bad season.

2) The only time that things were close to this bad was in the early 90s, when the Redskins were suffering through back-to-back 3 and 4 win seasons. Ugh. That was awful, and got us the Heath Shuler era in Washington. The football gods truly hated the Redskins at that point.

3) I got out of that early 90s misery not by the Redskins becoming good again, but by them being consistently mediocre. "Consistently" being the key word here. After a while, you get used to being mediocre and the misery index isn't so bad. I would like that not to be Michigan's solution to the present misery issue.

4) There are good times there, too. In 1991, the Redskins won the Super Bowl and Michigan went to the Rose Bowl (and lost, of course. It was the next year that they won it). In 1997, Michigan had their undefeated season and won a share of the national championship.

5) Interestingly enough, the past few seasons Michigan and the Redskins have been see-sawing, keeping the misery index kind of flat. In 2005, Michigan had the (now superceded) "Year of Infinite Pain", but the Redskins returned to the playoffs for the first time in a while. The next year the Redskins collapsed again, while Michigan had a good season (with a lousy ending, but hey, it's Michigan). The year after that (i.e., last year), Michigan went through the Horror, and stumbled its way through through another down year, but the Redskins returned (briefly) to the playoffs.

6) Now, however, even though the Redskins are competing for a playoff spot, nothing can overcome Michigan's abysmal year. Sigh.

I hate football.

Thalia Reads

OK, this picture was just too darned cute to resist putting up. Thalia is reading, very carefully sounding out the words (wish I had an audio file to attach -- maybe next time) to her book "A Glob of Glue", while Wacko looks on.


Look at her little pink feet!

"Who's Bam-Bam?"

So today Brenna made the comment that Thalia was as strong as Bam-Bam. Thalia responded "Who's Bam-Bam?"

Upon hearing that, I immediately logged into the library's website and placed a reserve on a DVD of the first season of The Flintstones. The girls will watch every minute of that DVD.

Cultural illiteracy like that will not stand in my household.

Laundry

The concept of laundry sure has changed for me over the past two years.

As a bachelor, laundry was one of the things where you dumped clothes down the laundry chute, and then went down to the basement to do one load of laundry each week. Pretty simple stuff -- add laundry detergent, run washer, throw in dryer, fold, put away. Done for the week.

Now, oh my gosh. The whole weekend is spent on laundry -- Saturday and Sunday, full day job. And evidently there's this concept of sorting loads that needs to be done (to her credit, Brenna does not ask me to do this; however, I notice that the dirty laundry magically shows up in separate piles in the basement). There's pretreatment to be done on the I-really-don't-want-to-know-where-this-came-from-and-what-it-is stains on the girls' shirts. Some things have to be washed in hot, some in cold (this is actually important, as the hot water kills dust mites that give Thalia allergy issues). Dryer sheets have also suddenly become part of the process.

It's all very confusing to me. I think I need one of these things in the basement:


But what really has thrown me off stride is the folding and sorting. First of all, everytime I fold the underwear, and try to figure out whose is whose, I nervously look over my shoulder, sure that I'm about to be busted by the cops for pedophilia or lewd behavior or something like that for staring at little girls' underwear. (The first time I did this, it was in front of the living room picture window -- never again.) And then, well, I can't tell the difference half the time between Abra's clothes and Thalia's clothes, particularly since many of Thalia's clothes used to be Abra's clothes. So I'm constantly hearing "Daddy, why is Thalia's shirt in my drawer?" I solved this problem, though: now I just stack all their clean laundry folded but unsorted on their beds and say "Put it away, girls!"

Now if only I could get them to turn their tights right-side-out before throwing them down the laundry chute, I'd be in business....

Explaining the Electoral College

So on election night, I was trying to explain to Abra how the election results worked. At first she thought we would turn on the TV and they would announce immediately who had won. So I tried to explain to her that you win states, and that you get points for each state you win, and that the score would be changing throughout the night until somebody won.

She said to me "Oh you mean it's like a football game? Except not as important?"

That's my girl.