October 12, 2005

Do more white benchwarmers more wins in the NFL?

I hypothesized, following J.B. Cash's suggestions, that perhaps having lots of white nonstarters on an NFL team makes for a more successful team, perhaps because white utility players are more likely to master the playbooks for multiple positions (as suggested by their higher average IQ scores on the Wonderlic test mandated by the NFL) or because they are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining and poisoning the atmosphere.

The social scientist who has been crunching the numbers has complete data on white starters and nonstarters only for 2003. He finds a positive correlation between the number of white nonstarters on a team and its winning percentage of r = 0.38.

It's definitely worth looking at multiple years to see if that stands up over time, because that's getting to be a pretty high number. In the social sciences, the convention is that 0.2 = low correlation, 0.4 = medium, and 0.6 = high. So, 0.38 is just under "medium." That says that 14% (038 times 0.38) of the variation in winning percentage in the 2003 season is associated with the number of white benchwarmers, which is a quite large percentage in something as overwhelmingly complicated as winning in the NFL.

Can anybody collect starter & nonstarter statistics by race by team for other years?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

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