One of the red herring arguments that is used to excuse our poor performance in the Director's Cup is that the other schools participate in more sports so they have more opportunities to score. I say that it's not how many sports you participate in; it's how well you do in the sports in which you DO participate. I have given some thought as to how to prove or disprove either theorm.
I have already pointed out that 4 other ACC teams participate in fewer than 20 sports and they are all performing better than we are in the competition. But what about the other 7 ACC teams who do field more than 20 teams? I began to wonder what a comparison would like if those teams were pointed in the Director's Cup based on their
20 worst scores instead of their 20 best? In other words, how do we compare to the worst of the worst? As I looked at the Director's Cup website, I realized that I had all the information needed to make that comparison if I was willing to take the time to manually create a spreadsheet. Last night, I did just that.
Once I had all the points for all the sports input into the spreadsheet, I looked at each individual school. For example, Carolina participates in 25 sports. So I subtracted Carolina's best 5 scores from the calculation. That has the same effect as if those sports got "0" points. Carolina went from having a total score of 1075.33 to having a total score of 629.33. That score would have placed Carolina in the standings at ranking of ~31 instead of 8th. For NCSU who only competes in 21 sports, I subtracted only one (the highest) score. They went from 633.6 to 555.6. And their ranking dropped from 34 to ~38. I used that methodology for all 7 schools.
As expected, comparing Wake's performance to the other ACC schools worst performing teams did not significantly improve Wake's standing among ACC schools. In fact, the only school who dropped below Wake was BC. BC was the outlier dropping 79 spots. The average position drop for all other ACC schools including BC was almost 16 positions. The average position drop for the other ACC teams excluding BC was less than 10.
School | 2013 Director's Cup Ranking | ~2013 Ranking based on 20 Worst |
UNC | 8 | 31 |
FlSt | 11 | 11 |
Duke | 12 | 38 |
Va | 20 | 47 |
NCSU | 34 | 38 |
VaTech | 36 | 38 |
Md | 44 | 57 |
Clem | 52 | 52 |
Mia | 71 | 71 |
GaTech | 74 | 74 |
BC | 76 | 155 |
WFU | 98 | 98 |
Even when we compare to the other school's worst teams, it's still very ugly. Hopefully this puts an end to the argument that we are expected to do poorly in the Director's Cup because other ACC schools participate in more sports.