What makes a sporting event exciting? What happens when you are watching sports at 3 am and you care deeply about the result but struggle to keep your eyes open? That is the exact scenario in which I found myself when I realized that excitement in sports increases when there is more pressure on every given moment... and that I already had an algorithm that determined how much pressure was on any moment in a tennis match: Clutch Factor. I drank some caffeine, got to work, and by sunrise, I had the initial framework for Excitement Index.
We actually created three types of Clutch Factors: point to game, point to set, and point to match. Technically, we also created game to set, game to match, and set to match Clutch Factors, but the purpose of these metrics is to get down to the point level. Clutch Factor Over Expected uses point to match Clutch Factor to give each point a score in terms of impact on the full match and use it to create an expectation. In watching a match, however, the quality of the fan’s viewing experience does not consistently rely on the dynamics of the set and the match. You want every point to have as much situational leverage as possible, so that the lulls in the match are less frequent and do not last nearly as long. So, we used point to game Clutch Factor in combination with game to set Clutch Factor for tiebreakers, accumulating the scores over the full match to create our Excitement Index.
Our Excitement Index aggregates the Clutch Factor for every point in the match. So, a high Excitement Index can be created by playing a lot of points or by having a high Clutch Factor on each point, or "Excitement Average". There are multiple different types of “exciting” matches. There are the matches with high Excitement Indexes but lower Excitement Averages, such as the match with the highest Excitement Index - Isner-Mahut at Wimbledon 2010, with an Excitement Index of 162.9 in a record 980 points. Those are MARATHONS. Then, there are the matches with high Excitement Averages and lower Excitement Indexes. Those are TUSSLES. And matches where both are high are especially competitive. Those are called WARS. As of the 2023 US Open, we have developed a system that will send you alerts in real-time to let you know when a TUSSLE, MARATHON, or WAR is in progress and how to watch it, whether you are on the grounds, at home, or on the go. As of the 2024 Australian Open, we are also prepared to add live, interactive Win Probability graphs to the emails. We are working on a text alert system, which we are hoping to complete before Roland Garros 2024.
In addition to quantifying how exciting a match is and doing the same calculation while a match is in progress to fuel our services, Excitement Index can actually draw some interesting insights about a few debates in the world of tennis. For example, there is a debate about whether women should play Best of 5 in Grand Slam matches, just like the men. According to Excitement Index, the answer is that it is probably not necessary. Because the point to game Clutch Factor for most points, and therefore the Excitement Average for the full match, is significantly higher for women then men, women can reach similar excitement levels in 3 sets to the ones that it takes men 5 sets to reach. For example, in the 2023 Australian Open, 3 matches had Excitement Indexes over 104, with none of them reaching 105. 2 of them were played by women (Mladenovic vs Bassols Ribera, QR2 and Fruhvirtova vs Bouzas Maneiro, QR3), and the other was the 5-set epic between Andy Murray and Thanasi Kokkinakis in the second round.
An important lesson that I learned from Excitement Index is that there are good matches for 3 weeks at Grand Slams, not just the 14 or 15 days of the Main Draw. Qualifying gives us nearly half the tournament over 4 days, with a lot of quantifiably exciting tennis. It may be a little bit daunting and the ESPN+ streams only have court names as their labels, but the tennis is verifiably incredible. Our email service gets directs you to all the best matches, no matter the round. Join our mailing list at https://www.dweck-sports.com/.
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