Return of the Office of Statistical Information

Crunching numbers is fun; at least that's our opinion. One of the reasons why new rounds are fun to us is because we could look back at the previous round and pretend that there are important statistical trends to be found, even though we know there probably aren't any.

In the 1st Round, 10 out of the 19 fictional presidents moved on to the next round. Though it would probably be more interesting if the success rate of our fictional presidents varied wildly in the 2nd Round, that's actually not the case at all. Exactly half of the 10 moved on to the Round of 16.

"Suck it, James Dale and Mays Gilliam!"

In the 1st Round, the elder combatant won 60% of the time, which struck us as odd. One would think the fighter with youth on his side would be in better physical condition and less likely to have some horrible disease.

Like Addison's Disease.
Not that that has anything to do with age.

In eight of the fights, the older fighter beat his younger foe. Eight out of 16, so that's an even 50%, right? No, not quite. Kang gets an asterisk. Since we have no idea how old he is, his fight doesn't count.

That gives the elder fighters 53.3% of the wins. Not very impressive, but still unexpected.

While the older fighter won slightly more times, the oldest fighter, Thomas "Tug" Benson, is knocked out.

In the 1st Round, the taller fighter won 82.1% of the time. That makes sense. Taller people have better reach, which comes in handy with the punching and the kicking. In the 2nd Round? The shorter fighter won 56.25% of the time.

"A 6'4" LBJ would lose to someone nine inches shorter? Totally reasonable."
-- You, the voters

Actually, everything we calculated for the 1st Round turned out with monumentally boring results in the 2nd Round. Earlier presidents had the same 9 to 7 advantage as shorter presidents. Things were pretty much close to 50-50.

Even the party breakdown numbers are underwhelmingly uninteresting. Here we have the breakdown of combatants going into the 2nd Round:

Democrat    13    40.63%

Democrat-Republican    2    6.25%

Republican    8    25.00%

Unaffiliated    1    3.13%

Unknown    7    21.88%

Whig    1    3.13%

Democrat    8    50.00%

Democrat-Republican    0    0.00%

Republican    4    25.00%

Unaffiliated    1    6.25%

Unknown    3    18.75%

Whig    0    0.00%

The Democrats were able to take up space occupied by the vanishing Democrat-Republicans and the single Whig, while the Republicans held on to their quarter of the pie.

But how did we do? Last time, Tony had a pretty strongish advantage of winning over Doug 62.5% of the time. How about in the 2nd Round?

Tony had the upper-hand again, but this time, it was 9 to 7. What is it with the 9 to 7? It's a win, but it's a pretty close win. Actually, Tony really had a 9 to 6 win over Doug.

Doug really can't take full credit for Eisenhower's win over Clinton since Tony's the one who guided Eisenhower to his 1st Round victory.

Wow, who knew analyzing numbers could be so anticlimactic? Maybe because there's an inverse relation between the excitement in the Arena and the excitement of pie charts relating to what's going on in the Arena. Now that we're deep in the Round of 16, strong opponents are facing each other. No one wants charts, they want to presidents beating each other.

Speaking of presidential fisticuffs, you should probably mosey on over here for this week's fight between George Washington and Martin Van Buren.