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Math Meets Football - stupac2 - 12-05-2014

This new column by Ravens' John Urschel talks about us: http://www.theplayerstribune.com/math-meets-football-one-in-600-billion/

I've noticed the brobdingnagian STS concentration too, I don't really know enough about the major to say what could be going on. Anyone have anything to add?

Re: Math Meets Football - washingtonismoney - 12-05-2014

I knew a few non-athletes in STS so I never thought it was a joke major. I suspect it's probably easier (and depends on your personal ambition), but I don't think outrageously so.

Re: Math Meets Football - Cadet84 - 12-05-2014

As a "mathlete" one would have hoped Mr. Urschel would have been aware of his sample size problem.
Comparing a sample of 64 with 3,420 poses a few problems for comparing proportions. In the football player sample a shift of 1 player across categories would lead to a 3% shift in differences across categories suggesting the statistical "significance" is not particularly meaningful. Further,there's no a-priori reason to believe the sample of football players would be representative of the full student body; as an obvious example,  women probably represent more than half of the student body, yet there are none on the football team. Point being that pulling out any relatively homogeneous group from the whole will yield differences.  You know what they say about statistics and lies...😉

Re: Math Meets Football - CTcard - 12-05-2014

(12-05-2014, 09:08 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:Anyone have anything to add?

The article is basically correct, if not very deep. It doesn't take any kind of statistical analysis to see that STS majors are overly common on the football team, and Management Science and Engineering to a lesser extent.

He might have thought a little bit about whether there is a qualitative difference between 26% if the declared majors of football players at Stanford enrolled in Science, Technology, and Society versus 48% enrolled in Public Administration at Auburn. For example, from his numbers football players make up about 17% of the STS majors at Stanford. Football players make up 55% of the STS majors at Auburn. He also might have thought about what other majors are represented.

He even might have examined the school and football program he knows best - Penn State


I did find it interesting to look at both the Stanford Hunanities and Sciences enrollment numbers he links as well the overall degrees by major list I found on a related site. I also found it odd that Stanford quit releasing this information - or at least quit posting it.
https://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/registrar/everyone/bachelors-09-10

Things I noticed:
Human Biology remains the most popular major at Stanford
Economics remains the #2 major. Didn't there use to be a choice of a BS or BA in Econ? Now it's a BA.
I don't remember seeing numbers as a student, but that was what we all thought the big two were.
Despite Stanford's reputation as an overly engineering oriented school, the engineering numbers are not overly high, at least 4.5 years ago.
In fact, Stanford awarded half again as many BAs as BSs (1042 vs 683)

Re: Math Meets Football - burger - 12-05-2014

(12-05-2014, 09:56 PM)cadet84 link Wrote:As a "mathlete" one would have hoped Mr. Urschel would have been aware of his sample size problem.
Comparing a sample of 64 with 3,420 poses a few problems for comparing proportions. In the football player sample a shift of 1 player across categories would lead to a 3% shift in differences across categories suggesting the statistical "significance" is not particularly meaningful. Further,there's no a-priori reason to believe the sample of football players would be representative of the full student body; as an obvious example,  women probably represent more than half of the student body, yet there are none on the football team. Point being that pulling out any relatively homogeneous group from the whole will yield differences.  You know what they say about statistics and lies...😉

There is absolutely nothing wrong with comparing a small population with a large population.  In fact, if I had to choose the more reliable of two comparisons, one between two small populations and one between a small population and a large population, I would go with the latter hands down.  More data are always better.

...except in one sense: when you have a large sample size (on the order of thousands or tens of thousands), probability values from the statistical tests used in the article need to be taken with a grain of salt because even small differences between groups are likely to appear to be enormously unlikely.  So, the 1 in 600 billion statistic is a joke because a much smaller difference between football players and the rest of the student body in STS majors would probably produce a probability on the order of 1 in millions because of the sample size.

It's obvious that STS majors are more common among football players than among non-football players.  But the probability values the article quotes are overstated.

Re: Math Meets Football - BostonCard - 12-05-2014

(12-05-2014, 10:51 PM)burger link Wrote:[quote author=cadet84 link=topic=11289.msg107612#msg107612 date=1417841772]
As a "mathlete" one would have hoped Mr. Urschel would have been aware of his sample size problem.
Comparing a sample of 64 with 3,420 poses a few problems for comparing proportions. In the football player sample a shift of 1 player across categories would lead to a 3% shift in differences across categories suggesting the statistical "significance" is not particularly meaningful. Further,there's no a-priori reason to believe the sample of football players would be representative of the full student body; as an obvious example,  women probably represent more than half of the student body, yet there are none on the football team. Point being that pulling out any relatively homogeneous group from the whole will yield differences.  You know what they say about statistics and lies...😉

There is absolutely nothing wrong with comparing a small population with a large population.  In fact, if I had to choose the more reliable of two comparisons, one between two small populations and one between a small population and a large population, I would go with the latter hands down.  More data are always better.

...except in one sense: when you have a large sample size (on the order of thousands or tens of thousands), probability values from the statistical tests used in the article need to be taken with a grain of salt because even small differences between groups are likely to appear to be enormously unlikely.  So, the 1 in 600 billion statistic is a joke because a much smaller difference between football players and the rest of the student body in STS majors would probably produce a probability on the order of 1 in millions because of the sample size.

It's obvious that STS majors are more common among football players than among non-football players.  But the probability values the article quotes are overstated.
[/quote]

Although I didn't run the numbers, I think the math is fundamentally solid, even if the interpretation was obviously not conveyed very well.  What Mr. Urschel was giving us was a p-value, which represents the probability that the numbers are due to random variation (that is, the probability that the observed distribution was due to chance alone).  If you started with the student body with declared majors at Stanford, and randomly selected 64 students, what is the probability that 17 (or more) of them are majoring in STS.  Because STS is a relatively uncommon major (3% of students), such a discrepancy is exceedingly unlikely to be due just to chance, although it is conceivably possible that you just happened to pick a lot of STS majors.  Whether it's 1 in 1000, 1 in a million, or 1 in a billion doesn't matter all that much, we can safely say that football players majors are significantly (in a statistical sense) different than the student body as a whole.  You don't need to do the chi-squared test to see that, and Urschel's focus on this detracts from the broader picture.

Note, I don't think it is all that surprising.  I bet if you looked at the distribution of majors among, for example, a capella singers, or Daily staffers, or RA's, it would probably significantly differ from the student body as a whole (though probably not showing an excess of STS majors).

There are two important things with regards to the discrepancy. First, are football students going into STS because it is not rigorous.  Having considered the major, I can say that is probably not the case.  I think a lot of football players go into it because the major is flexible:

https://sts.stanford.edu/major-sts/core-requirements

The major has very few absolute class requirements; I think only the intro course is required.  Beyond that, STS majors must complete 2 courses (out of choice of 8) in each of three "perspectives", complete a capstone course or thesis, and then 50 units from at least 12 classes in a concentration (for BA majors, 8 courses from the humanities and social sciences for BA majors, 4 from science and engineering; for BS, flip the two).  But if you look through the courses, they are all real courses.

The second question is whether the major prepares them for life.  Here's what the STS page has to say about what people do afterwords: "Graduates of STS have entered top-ranked Ph.D. and MBA programs and have forged successful careers in a variety of fields, including business, engineering, law, public service, medicine and academia. In a world where graduates are called on to have technical, analytical and collaborative skills, the STS major well prepares Stanford students for a wide range of career paths. For more detailed information on our alums, please visit our Alumni page."

BC

Re: Math Meets Football - needle - 12-06-2014

I'm pretty sure the former department head of the STS program is a frequent poster on another Stanford fan board (maybe this one too, for all I know).

The concept described in the article is commonly referred to as "clustering."

Here's a quick read on how common it is/was at other schools:

Quote: About a third of all football, men's and women's basketball, baseball and softball teams at the 142 colleges examined had at least 25 percent of their juniors and seniors in the same major field of study, and on more than half of those teams -- 125 of 235 -- at least 40 percent of the upperclassmen were in the same major.
A few examples: Twenty-two, or 58 percent, of the junior and senior football players at the University of Southern California in 2007 majored in sociology, representing one-fifth of all junior and senior sociology majors at USC. Sixteen of 25 junior and senior football players at Vanderbilt University majored in human and organizational development, and 31 of 41 football players at the University of Michigan majored in general studies.   

EDIT (had wrong link earlier): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/20/cluster

There *might* be some data or discussion on this topic in Stanford's NCAA self-study from I guess five years ago, but I don't think the university has published that document online.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/april22/ncaa-recertifies-stanford-division-I-042209.html




Re: Math Meets Football - Stymie - 12-06-2014

When was the last time that a high-level Stanford student athlete was selected as a Rhodes scholar?  In my graduating year we had a guy (Del Martin) who was a decent quarter-miler and whom I knew as we were in many of the same Honors English classes.  Have we ever had a football stud/studette who was smart enough to even apply?

I wondered, as I read that Yale just beat UConn at Storrs with a Rhodesie (Townsend) in their starting lineup, ou est les Martins's d'antan?

Re: Math Meets Football - Spiny_Norman - 12-06-2014

(12-06-2014, 10:47 AM)Stymie link Wrote:Have we ever had a football stud/studette who was smart enough to even apply?

I can think of a Stanford football player who won a Rhodes scholarship.  He is now a US Senator.

Re: Math Meets Football - Stymie - 12-06-2014

True about Booker--great politician, but over his career at LSJU he caught 20 passes for 199 yards.  Hardly football HOF material.....

Re: Math Meets Football - BobK - 12-06-2014

How about last year or was it 2 long years ago?  XC and distance runner and Tremendous Daily writer Miles U.    Never could spell his last name

Re: Math Meets Football - fullmetal - 12-06-2014

Unterreiner, I think...impressive guy.

STS isn't chopped liver, but it isn't chemE.  I'm still betting that our players' majors won't matter a whole lot when looking for jobs after college if they have the right internships--they certainly will have the right connections.

Re: Math Meets Football - yvonne - 12-06-2014

Yes, Miles wasn't selected in 2013, the year he flew between the NCAA XC meet and his Rhodes interview, but he received the scholarship this year.

http://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/rhodes-scholars-elect-class-of-2014/miles-w-unterreiner

Re: Math Meets Football - BostonCard - 12-06-2014

From the perspective of flexibility, chemE is the exact opposite of STS.  ChemE majors have to take the engineering fundamentals core, close to 2/3 of the required classes for chemistry majors, plus their own required ChemE courses.  It's hard to imagine how one would be able to make football practices around that degree.

BC

Re: Math Meets Football - 82lsju - 12-06-2014

(12-06-2014, 03:13 PM)Boston Card link Wrote:From the perspective of flexibility, chemE is the exact opposite of STS.  ChemE majors have to take the engineering fundamentals core, close to 2/3 of the required classes for chemistry majors, plus their own required ChemE courses.  It's hard to imagine how one would be able to make football practices around that degree.

BC

and to make scheduling more challenging when I was a student each of the undergrad ChE classes was offered once a year and all them were in your junior and senior years, typically 2 but sometimes 3 in a quarter.  In one of the interesting quirks of the major back then the 3rd quarter of the physical chemistry sequence was required, but not the first two classes. 

Huh? - Redrum - 12-06-2014

Quote: True about Booker--great politician, but over his career at LSJU he caught 20 passes for 199 yards.  Hardly football HOF material.....

The issue isn't whether they are Voldemort candidates or practice fodder.  The issue is-- if on the squad and meeting all the demands of being on the squad-- do they have the time/scheduling constraints that all football players have taking the more structured, demanding majors?  I have no idea whether it was harder or easier back when Booker played.

Oh, Boston Card, I think you meant to refer to Auburn's  Public Administration  program, not STS.

As far as the "clustering" phenomenon goes,  look no further than Kal.  The Bare football team has been (ahem) cluster something for years.

Re: Huh? - CTcard - 12-06-2014

(12-06-2014, 10:17 PM)Redrum link Wrote:
Quote: True about Booker--great politician, but over his career at LSJU he caught 20 passes for 199 yards.  Hardly football HOF material.....

The issue isn't whether they are Voldemort candidates or practice fodder.  The issue is-- if on the squad and meeting all the demands of being on the squad-- do they have the time/scheduling constraints that all football players have taking the more structured, demanding majors?  I have no idea whether it was harder or easier back when Booker played.

The issue also isn't whether there is an individual who has been on the team and done excellent academic work. Most teams have at least one of those somewhere to point to - the individual writing the blog cited in the OP for example.

It also takes no particular statistical evaluation to note that at all Division 1 football programs football players get into the schools with academic profiles lower than the average student body. It also doesn't take much to see there is some clustering of majors on most every football team. There's likely some herd-effect here, and I have no doubt some of the underlying motivation is looking for an easier major - in logistics and content.


What I would worry about is whether broadly speaking the money sport athletes are in real majors or those that exist primarily to keep them eligible.

There's no simple way to know for sure from the outside, but some combination of the following might be warning signs. 
1. Is the clustering of majors so extreme that it crowds out a reasonable variety of majors on the team?
2. Are more than half the folks in that major from the money-sports?
3. Does the major seem to have a coherent core or mostly have advisor-approved electives?
4. Do folks graduate in that major and go on to something productive?

As far as I can tell, Stanford and STS seem okay on those criteria.
Not so sure about Public Administration at Auburn.
Even less so about General Studies at all sorts of places.



Re: Math Meets Football - CowboyIndian - 12-07-2014

I have a digitized video of the 1972 Rose Bowl someplace. I say "someplace" because I watched it recently and can't for the life of me find it now. In the pre-game runup, the players had a pre-produced one-shot in street clothes, where they introduced themselves and included their majors. Stanford was a little Poli Sci heavy in those days but Michigan's droning of "General Studies" was ludicrous and amusing. Bo knew Michigan academics....as did Jim Harbaugh.

Re: Math Meets Football - fullmetal - 12-07-2014

General studies, Interdisciplinary studies, Pre-[professional] studies to some degree....and the most popular: "Undeclared." :)  Stanford does have some of those in the underclassman population.

Re: Math Meets Football - BostonCard - 12-07-2014

(12-07-2014, 12:53 PM)fullmetal link Wrote:General studies, Interdisciplinary studies, Pre-[professional] studies to some degree....and the most popular: "Undeclared." :)  Stanford does have some of those in the underclassman population.

Stanford doesn't require students to declare a major until their junior year, so lots of underclassmen are undeclared (some because they truly haven't made up their mind, others because they haven't filed the necessary paperwork).  That applies to both athletes and the overall population.

BC