whew lots of info here...ok the top is a box whisker chart which shows the distribution of offensive and defensive stats (conference games only) for the conference. This is more info than just the median off and def for each year. So the first set of box and whiskers (green and red) give an idea for the variation of the offensive efficiencies (green) and defensive efficiencies (red) for Big 12 teams in 2006. The white bar is the mean. The red and green dots represent where KSU falls in that distribution. The open circles are outliers for the data set corresponding to that year.
The lower plot gives a feeling of how above or below average the team was for each year. The vertical value is a difference between the off efficiency and def efficiency (normalized to the average). So you want a higher %. It interesting to clearly see the good and bad years for KSU (the NIT year of 2009 for example).
What brought to this kind of figure is I was thinking about a statement I previously made about how this KSU defense was the worst in the past 8 years. Well "worse" compared to what? I knew that while the "raw" numbers said this, the "raw" numbers are also somewhat meaningless without knowing what the "background" noise might be. In reality, I would say that when compared to the average defenses/offenses across the conference (and throwing out ooc games which wildly vary in strength from year to year) this was not as bad defensively as the "raw" numbers state. While clearly not as good as previous years when our defense was ~ std dev below the mean, it was not worse than average, and in fact 2009 was likely a lot worse (which was a clear outlier in terms of Frank's defenses).
for comparison's sake here is KU (the dominant team in the Big 12):
they were realllly good in 2007 and 2008.
If anyone has interest in other Big 12 teams let me know and I will make a similar figure.
