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Basketball study refutes science methods

From Yale Daily News
By Clarissa Marzan
Download source here: ' Basketball study refutes science methods ' by Clarissa Marzan

"... It may not surprise many people that college basketball statistics have very little to do with life and death in the wild. ..."

"... Research conducted by Robert Warren, postdoctoral associate for the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, has found that the theoretical models of species survival used widely among ecologists are useless.

Warren and his team of researchers used college basketball statistics to argue that any large-scale set of statistics will produce an ecological pattern that does not apply to real-life communities. ..."

"... The team looked at the win-loss records of 327 NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams from 2004-2008, a total of 20,000 games. Each team was treated as a species that is part of a college basketball community, similar to a jungle or river system.

A team’s win or loss would be analogous to an individual’s survival or death. Warren said the basketball analogy was a very good fit for their experiment because it supported existing assumptions about ecological communities. ..."

"... But the paper’s findings revealed that the exact same win-loss pattern appeared whether or not a basketball team’s outcomes were driven by random selection or by competitive exchange.

The results supported the team’s hypothesis that scientists can’t infer anything from model-based theoretical patterns, Warren said. ..."

"... Warren — a self-proclaimed “college basketball nut” — said he decided to use college basketball outcomes because of the way competition drives wins and losses in sports.

He explained that a few good teams dominate the basketball community while many more bad teams struggle to improve, an occurrence that is seen in nature among competing species. ..."

"... But Yosefa Greenfield, captain of the Yale women’s basketball team, said she believes it is reasonable to link basketball and ecological diversity because dominant teams possess more successful traits, as dominant species do in the wild. ..."

"... “The better teams usually have better coaches, better players, better facilities …” she said. “We have to adapt to who we are playing [and] use different strategies to play different teams in order to win.” ..."

Read more articles in Yale Daily News.

To read today's 'Press Clippings' in Spanish,
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' Comportamientos que influyen en el rendimiento deportivo de
jugadores de baloncesto desde el punto de vista de los entrenadores '
by Juan Tomás Escudero López, Gloria Balagué Gea y Alexandre García-Mas.

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