Skip to main content

Turner College Economist's Co-Author Earns Television Fame via the Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Syracuse University economist Shane Sanders, an occasional collaborator on research with Turner College economist Frank Mixon, earned late-night television fame earlier this week when his study on shot selection in the NBA was profiled, and parodied, by Stephen Colbert in a new segment for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The first entry of Colbert's self-described "highly profitable, hastily assembled segment" called Talkin' Sportz, covered results of Sanders' new research indicating that "NBA teams are taking too many 3-point shots." Colbert jokingly stated that the study was published in the "prestigious New England Journal of Can You Even Dunk, Bro?"  Colbert then explained to his audience that the study indicates that players score more points by attempting 2-pointers rather than 3-pointers, after which he pointed out that the title of the study is "Estimating NBA Team Shot Selection Efficiency from Aggregations of True, Continuous Shot Charts." Colbert concluded by roasting the study via an edited video clip of an actual game wherein NBA legend Tracy McGrady takes a game-winning shot that is described by the television announcer excitedly as "McGrady for the win and it is . . . [as ball is flying through the air] . . . an aggregation of efficient shot selections!" Of course, the last part of the announcement occurs as the game-winning attempt falls through the net.
     Mixon describes Sanders (shown at right) as "a really good economist" whose research interests include sports economics, public choice, defense and peace economics, and behavioral economics. Four months ago, Sanders launched a sports analytics blog via Substack called SportQuant that covers the quantitative side of sports and society. Sanders' sports economics research covers home court advantage, competitive balance, revenue sharing, alliance formation, team chemistry, ticket pricing, collective bargaining, and mortality risk. Sanders and Mixon have each worked separately on social choice violations in NCAA cross country's rank sum scoring. With regard to collaboration between the two, Mixon and Sanders, along with Andrew Luccasen, a behavioral economist at the Mississippi University for Women, are currently preparing a study on how the economics of civil liability, as it relates to law and economics, is depicted in various episodes and scenes from the iconic television sitcom Seinfeld. Stay connected to Turner Business for more on that paper in a future blog.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Four Turner College Faculty Recognized for Outstanding Teaching

CSU Head Women's Soccer Coach Jay Entlich recently released a list of CSU faculty who have been chosen by a player as a member of the CSU faculty who has impacted the player in a positive way along their journey at CSU. Four Turner College faculty were included on the list, along with the player who nominated each. Management professor Phil Bryant was named by Sophia Leal , a freshman midfielder from Oxford, Georgia. Sophia attended Eastside High School and was a two-time all-region selection during her high school career. Through the first 10 games of 2024, she has scored one goal and recorded three assists.         Next, management professor John Finley was named by Lizz Forshaw , a graduate student forward from Stockton, England. Lizz, who attended IMG Academy in south Florida, has scored four goals and recorded four assists this season. During her senior year in 2023, she scored three goals and recorded two assists. As a junior in 2022, Lizz scored three goals ...

Seven Turner College Management and Marketing Faculty Have Combined to Produce Eight A-Level Journal Publications Between 2021 and the Present

A number of faculty in the Turner College's Department of Management and Marketing, which includes faculty in management information systems, have produced A-level journal publications in the last few years. This report covers that activity, starting with John Finley , the chairperson of the department. Professor Finley published a paper in the Journal of Computer Information Systems in 2022.      Finley is joined by Kirk Heriot , the Crowley Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship. Heriot, who earned a PhD in management from Clemson University, published in a 2021 issue of Small Business Economics . One of the study's co-authors, Andres Jauregui of Fresno State University, was previously a member of the Turner College's economics faculty.      Next is Johnny Ho , a professor of management, who has a 2022 publication in the Journal of Computer Information Systems . Ho has won CSU's Excellence in Research Award on multiple occasions, while he has compiled 2...

TSYS School, Jianhua Yang, Lixin Wang Each among Top Five in the World

New research by computer scientists in the School of Information Technology at Universiti Utara Malaysia that ranks institutions and individuals on the basis of scholarship in the area of stepping-stone attacks heaps praise on the Turner College’s TSYS School of Computer Science and two of its faculty – Jianhua Yang and Lixin Wang .   The article, published in the April 2023 issue of the International Journal of Research in Engineering and Science , provides a bibliometric analysis of both publication and citation data from 2000 to September of 2022 related to research on stepping-stone intrusion.   Among several results, it reports that Columbus State University ranks second worldwide, trailing only the University of Houston, using total publications on the subject as the basis of comparison.   A number of other U.S. institutions appear in the top 10, including third-ranked North Carolina State University, fourth-ranked University of Illinois, sixth-ranked Iowa State U...