Computing Athletics

Continued from page 1

By Erika Jonietz

November 2002

In 1985 Sagarin got his really big break: USA Today started carrying his computerized standings. Until then, Sagarin had never owned a PC. When he started out, he had run his programs on a mainframe at MIT. And when he moved to Bloomington in 1977 after visiting an old MIT friend, Wayne Winston '71, a professor at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, Sagarin made arrangements to use a university mainframe. But when USA Today demanded that he send in his weekly rankings via modem instead of overnight mail, Sagarin broke down and learned to use a PC and a modem. Even today, however, he favors DOS over Windows, still programs in Fortran, and has never used a word processor or spreadsheet, preferring to work in the old DOS text editor Edlin. He just doesn't see any reason to exchange what works well for newer, expanded technology that often ends up limiting what he can do.

Sagarin's newest venture, which he has undertaken with fellow Bexley Hall alum Winston, has the potential to transform the National Basketball Association (NBA). In 2000 Winston was at a Pacers-Mavericks game in Dallas when he spotted one of his former Indiana students, the Mav's new owner, Mark Cuban. Cuban offhandedly asked his erstwhile professor whether he would be able to find a way to help his team. Winston subsequently phoned Sagarin with an idea, and the two set out to create a program that would evaluate the contribution of every NBA player to his team's performance. Instead of looking at individual stats, Sagarin evaluates how well a team performs when a player is present versus when he isn't. "It's tricky," he says. "You're trying to solve for the individual effect of 481 different guys based on how the team as a whole is doing."

So far the Mavericks have bought the system and several other teams are considering it. Winston sees the program as a sort of insurance for teams that are considering trades or other multimillion-dollar decisions. "Sports is in the dark ages on trying to use information the way the rest of the world uses it," he says. "We feel like we're almost on the verge of revolutionizing the way people who run basketball teams do things."

For Sagarin, that would be the ultimate success. "He has a lot of the traditional qualities of an MIT student," says Winston, describing Sagarin as quirky, individualistic, and intense. But Sagarin's attitude toward life reflects both his MIT background and his passionate love of sports: "Show respect for your job. You have to know inside your own heart that you're giving it the absolute best effort you can."