Fun with Numbers: What Exactly is the Worth of a Win?

Over on OurDailyBears I've done some huge agglomerated standings for the Big 12, the point of which was to show the overall strength of the member school's athletics program. Baylor topped that out at (as of the publication date) an astounding .750 win percentage across 6 sports, which was no surprise to those of us who follow the Big 12 and Baylor in particular.

I've been thinking since then, however, about exactly how accurate those standings are. Oh, they're completely accurate from a mathematical point of view, but there are some flaws.

We all know that, especially in Texas, football is king. It gets the most money, it gains the most money, and it rules schedules and pocketbooks from September to January. Yet its 13 game season gets dwarfed in the 30-40 games played by both basketball teams and the 50 or so games played by baseball, not to mention volleyball and softball. Agglomerated standings such as mine tend to reflect a program's success in the "little" sports more than football, simply because they comprise the largest part of the whole.

How does one go about rectifying this? How can you make football appear as large in the standings as it appears in the national consciousness? How can you truly calculate the "worth" of each win?



Before I go further, remember that I have no formal training in statistics, sports statistics and everything I know I taught myself. The ideas presented here may (keyword: may) have been presented elsewhere, but as of right now I am not aware of it.

Other than wins, universities measure themselves in funds. What is a better way to define the worth of a win, then, than by tying it to the revenue it brings in?

As of this writing, I'm still fumbling my way along towards the perfect formula for determining this (hence this post rather than something large on ODB), but I'm currently thinking a mixing of the straight win percentage and the revenue percentage. Basically: Football is a greater revenue generator than women's basketball, so every football win would be worth more than every women's basketball win. How to determine exactly how much every win would be worth (the "true win value") is still in process, but I'll be sure to update and ask for feedback here.