Tiered Team Performance

How did we do? I've split up the teams into three "tiers" to help explain our performance.

Tier One

Farticles

The winner, Team Farticles, is in a league of his own. He even would have beat a hypothetical "dream team." A "dream team" is a collection of the best articles that the drafting algorithm predicted. Farticles got 269.5 points against 262 for the "Dream Team."

Here is Farticles:

Jurassic Park: 53.5 points = (16) + (22.5) + (15)
OPEC: 46 points = (16) + (15) + (15)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 67.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (15)
Bank: 60.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (8)
NPR: 11.5 points = (4) + (4.5) + (3)
American Football: -1.5 points = (0) + (-1.5) + (0)
Netflix: 9 points = (8) + (0) + (1) (benched in February)
Silicon Valley: 23 points = (16) + (3) + (4)
Barack Obama: 0 points = (0) + (0) + (0) (benched in January and March)
Assassination of John F. Kennedy: 0 points = (0) + (0) + (0) (benched all 3 months)

The "Dream Team," the best team that the algorithm would have picked, is:

Ebola: 35.5 points = (-2) + (22.5) + (15)
Benedict Cumberbatch: -13.5 points = (-8) + (-1.5) + (-4)
Jurassic Park: 53.5 points = (16) + (22.5) + (15)
OPEC: 46 points = (16) + (15) + (15)
Mitch McConnell: 12.5 points = (-4) + (1.5) + (15)
Taylor Swift: 62.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (10)
Comet: -2 points = (-2) + (0) + (0)
Stephen Hawking: 67.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (15)

You wouldn't expect anyone to do as well as the "Dream Team." The Dream Team's articles were taken early in the draft, since these articles were expected to do well. They shouldn't all end up on a single team, and you wouldn't think anyone could outperform the hypothetical best team. Farticles did.

Another way to understand the scope of the Farticles victory is to compare the team to the best possible team. If, during the draft, you had perfect knowledge of what would happen, and nobody competed against you for the best picks, how would your team do? The "Perfect Team" is below:

Jurassic Park: 53.5 points = (16) + (22.5) + (15)

OPEC: 46 points = (16) + (15) + (15)

Taylor Swift: 62.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (10)

Stephen Hawking: 67.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (15)

Fifty Shades of Grey: 67.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (15)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 67.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (15)

Bank: 60.5 points = (30) + (22.5) + (8)

Michael Keaton: 53.5 points = (16) + (22.5) + (15)

Some of those articles should look familiar. 4 of the 8 articles on the "Perfect Team" were on Team Farticles. The other 4 were split, one per team, to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams.

Tier Two

Hot Chicks & Jesus

The Google, the Veto, and the Mr. Mom

50 Shades of Wiki

The next three teams scored between 163.5 and 204.5 points, well above Tier Three (at most 103.5 points) and well below Tier One (269.5). All three of these teams were pretty well balanced, with 50 points in at least 2 out of 3 categories:

Within the tier, you can see the differences in their performance by their worst category. 50 Shades of Wiki, in 4th, got -4 points from Business, Science, and Technology. Both other Tier Two teams had Geography, Politics, Religion, and History as their worst category, but with 50.5 and 40 points respectively:

Tier Three

Giant Clam

D's Asters

E-Cigs in Space

Wiki Wiki What?!

The remaining teams scored between 33.5 and 103.5 points. with the 5th and 6th place very close to 100 and the bottom two at 57.5 and 33.5.

These teams had at most one strong category. D's Asters is the best example: his team got 83 of his 97.5 points from Geography, Politics, Religion, and History with John Boehner, Pope Francis and Ebola. E-Cigs in Space also relied on this category, with 40 points in March from Israel and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Giant Clam got more than half his 103.5 points from Taylor Swift. 

The last place team didn't have a great category or standout article. His team's best article Tesla Motors, only scored 11 points. This was actually very good for the Business, Science, & Technology category, but not enough to bring him out of 8th place.

So, now that we are at the bottom of the performers, should we make fun of Wiki Wiki What?! Was his team's performance just atrocious?

Actually, no. Overall, all 8 teams did well, and no great articles were left undrafted. The "undrafted" articles will be covered in another blog post, but you can get a sense from the artificial "Dream Team Remaining" here. This is what would have happened if a 9th team had joined the draft at the end, and picked up the best 8 articles according to the algorithm:

War on Terror: 28 points = (6) + (12) + (10)

"Weird Al" Yankovic: 13 points = (4) + (6) + (3)

List of internet phenomena: 3.5 points = (2) + (1.5) + (0)

Goldman Sachs: 0 points = (0) + (0) + (0)

Time: -0.5 points = (0) + (-1.5) + (1)

Portal:Current Events: -2 points = (-2) + (0) + (0)

War on Poverty: -2 points = (0) + (0) + (-2)

Cops (1989 TV Series): -18 points = (-8) + (-6) + (-4)

Alternatively, would Wiki Wiki What?! have beat a team that was deliberately drafted to be mediocre by the algorithm, or would it have a beat a team with the "average" undrafted articles? Compared to these "artificial" teams, the 8th place team does very well:

The 33.5 points for Wiki Wiki What?! looks downright respectable against the 22 points from the "Dream Team Remaining" and the "Medicore Goal Team," to say nothing of the 2.5 team with the most average articles.