The objective of this project is to examine how competitive balance policy could affect attendance in the Big 10 football conference.
Sponsored By: Steve Ross – PSU Center for Sports in Society
Team Members
Kyle Bradley | JaeHyuk Choi | Drew Eddy | Han Shao | Morgan Sterling | Daniel Tsai | | | | | |
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Project Summary
Overview
Competitive balance is an issue that is at the center of many discussions surrounding college sports. The PSU Center for Sports and Society tasked our team with investigating the potential effects of implementing policies that would enforce competitive balance in the Big 10 Conference specifically. The driving question of our project was as follows: Would the marginal gain of implementing competitive balance policy for underperforming teams outweigh the marginal cost to top-level teams?
Objectives
– Begin to understand and define competitive balance in the Big 10
– Compile historical team schedule data (wins, losses, opponent, ranking, attendance. etc.) for our specific project and future similar projects
– Construct a model to predict attendance given various information about a given game such as home team, opponent, rankings, winning percentage, etc
– Conclude how a competitively balanced scenario affects overall Big 10 attendance
Approach
– Created a script to scrape important game-related data from Wikipedia.
– Cleaned data into a more workable format, removing errors from the scraping process.
– Subsetted data to include only home games, and added additional useful features to the dataset.
– Created a model to predict attendance based upon these features.
– Simulated 3 seasons worth of games under an ideal competitive balance scenario.
– Compared predicted and actual attendance numbers to estimate the potential effects that competitive balance policy could have on the league.
Outcomes
– Based on our results we do not suggest implementing policy to enforce “perfect” competitive balance in the BIG 10 Conference.
– We found that in this scenario stadium-filling teams’ loss of fans outweighed the gain of fans by underperforming teams.
– The framework of our project allows for future research feeding in new scenarios or improving upon the dataset.
– Further research could explore the effectiveness of competitive policy that lands in a middle ground between our scenario and the current level of competitive balance.