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.