Mental Toughness

As defined here, Mental Toughness is the relationship of relative performance to quality of the opponent. In other words, if you tend to play better relative to expectation when you play a higher quality opponent you have a positive mental toughness rating. If you tend to play relatively worse against stronger opponents than against weaker opponents you will have a negative mental toughness rating. Kansas currently has the 11th worst mental toughness rating in Div 1. That does not bode well when you are in a league where every team you play will be a stronger opponent. You can see from the graph below that the Jayhawks have overperformed in 6 games and underperformed in 4 games (anything below the solid line is an underperformance). The four underperformance games are Kentucky, Nebraska, Arizona St and Washington. We did perform slightly above projection against Syracuse. Against our 5 toughest opponents we have underperformed by 13.6 points on average and against our 5 weakest opponents we have overperformed by 9.6 points on average. We better turn this around or we are in for a long conference season. A neutral mental toughness rating projects to 14.2 conference wins. With our current mental toughness rating we project to 10.5 conference wins.

Thanks for the confirmation. I was thinking along those lines and this is the data that shows it. I think the key to getting this fixed is actually better execution of the offense and defense. When you play weaker competition and you do not execute well you can count on your ability to outplay them one on one to make plays. When you play a team as talented you need to execute the offense to get the open looks because it is hard for you to get those open shots playing one on one.

Stanford also has a negative mental toughness rating, so we have that going for us in today's game, but the value for Kansas is the worst I've seen. On the other hand, after years of comparing predictions that incorporate the mental toughness correction, I can't say that its inclusion improves the predictions significantly, if at all. Considering how unreliable the early-season ratings can be, I've avoided saying anything about the mental toughness rating so far this season. I'm still debating whether to include it in the conference statistics. Of course, readers can weigh in on the matter. If you'd like to see it, let me know, and that could influence the decision.

I agree that it can be misleading because in the end it is so much about the individual match-ups and a teams ability to exploit it's advantages and hide it's weaknesses in that particular match-up. I am not sure and the math says that overall the "mental toughness" measurement is not too valuable.

I do three different rating systems. I do the raw rating which is based purely on the relative scoring margin. The Jayhawks are still No. 2 overall in that rating. Then I pit every team against every other team based on the consistency ratings (standard deviation and mean scoring margin). Surprisingly, KU stays in third in that rating. I really thought they would fall farther. Then I add to that a mental toughness where I pit every team against every other team and use an adjusted Standard deviation and mean scoring margin using the mental toughness adjustment. KU falls to 10th in that one. I am a little leery of the mental toughness rating but thus far this season over all 351 teams it increases the accuracy of prediction by about 35% so I am leaning toward using it. But the problem is that early season games can be poor predictors of later season games. I will continue to track the predictive accuracy. When I started using the mental toughness I had Asteroid’s voice in the back of my head since he has expressed that opinion before. He is far more knowledgable about these matters than I so I give credence to his thoughts. But my algorithm is a little more robust than the typical mental toughness and I am leaning toward believing it.

I think another variable that comes into play is that the make up of teams changes through out the year. I look at this years team and the additions we will have from the start of the season. I look at other years where we have had injuries. Tracking that for 1 team is hard but tracking that for all teams is a truly daunting task, yet it is something that affects the games.

Corpus, I'm not a stats guy. I much more enjoy the psychology of sport and athletes. When I read your statement that

"if you tend to play better relative to expectation when you play a higher quality opponent you have a positive mental toughness rating. If you tend to play relatively worse against stronger opponents than against weaker opponents you will have a negative mental toughness rating"

From a psychological bent, I believe that a team's performance vs better teams comes down to talent and mental competitiveness - the pure desire to win, or the hatred of losing. Mental "toughness" comes in to play more against worse teams, especially for away games. The players still want to win, but if you're mentally "tough" you step on their necks and take care of business. If you're mentally "weak", you play bored, uninspired and down to your lesser opponent

I don't equate mental toughness with watching us play KY, UNC or West Virginia. I do when we play Iowa State, KState, Nebraska, and god forbid, the Killer B's in the tourney.

Thanks for your analysis. We all appreciate the time you put in on your reports.

Merry Christmas and Rock Chalk to all.