Rating Blockers: The Final Exam

When you isolate a drummer from a full band, their skill gets mixed with the bassist, guitarist, and singer's contributions—you hear the interaction, not the individual. In this final episode of the sports analytics series, Joey examines beach volleyball blocking through the same problem: can you really measure a blocker's individual skill through an adjusted kill-block rate, or is it just a number that looks real? Built from Rice and Wisconsin university course assignments, the episode constructs the rating and then puts it on trial—because sometimes the hardest question isn't how to build a stat, it's whether the number actually means anything. 00:00:00 - The Problem: When Individual Skill Hides in the Mix 00:01:33 - The Method: Unmixing Blocker Performance 00:06:25 - The Rating: Kill-Block Rate Adjusted for Context 00:11:13 - The Trial: Does Your Number Actually Mean Anything? --- Sources & further reading: • Rice SMGT 430 (Scott Powers), assignments: (checked 2026-11-12): https://saberpowers.com/teaching/smgt430/ • Wisconsin STAT 479 (Sameer Deshpande), Project 1 • (checked 2026-11-12): https://skdeshpande91.github.io/stat479_fall2025/project1.html • Project files: game-senser-fable/docs/lsa/ hw4, hw5, LONG-RUNS.md, IDEAS.md, branch lsa-homework • (read 2026-11-12) This podcast episode was fully generated by AI — research, script, voices, and production. Built with Claude, Piper TTS, and automated pipeline tooling.