Alright, let’s talk about this “olympic rugby scores” thing I messed around with today. It wasn’t some grand plan, just a spur-of-the-moment kinda deal.
It all started when I was catching some Olympic rugby sevens highlights. You know, the fast-paced, crazy action stuff. I got to wondering how hard it would be to, like, keep track of the scores myself, maybe even predict who’d win. Not in a serious, betting-the-house kind of way, just for fun.
So, first thing I did was scour the web for any easily accessible data. I figured there had to be some site with match results, team stats, something. After digging around for a bit, I found a couple of sites that had tables with scores and team names. Score! (Pun intended, I guess.)
Next up, copy-pasting. Yep, good ol’ fashioned copy and paste. I dumped the data into a spreadsheet. It was messy, like really messy. Team names were inconsistent, dates were all over the place, and there was extra junk I didn’t need. Ugh.
Then came the cleaning. This was the boring part, but crucial. I went through each row and column, fixing typos, standardizing team names (like “Great Britain” vs. “GBR”), and getting the dates into a consistent format. I even had to split some columns because they had combined the score and the date in one cell. It took longer than I thought, a good hour or two of just pure data janitorial work.
With the data somewhat cleaned, I started playing around with some simple calculations. Stuff like average points scored per game, win percentages, head-to-head records. Nothing fancy, just basic spreadsheet formulas. I even tried to make a little chart showing the trend of scores over time for a few teams, but it looked kinda wonky. Needs more work, clearly.
I was thinking of trying to predict future scores. I know, ambitious, right? I thought about looking at things like past performance, maybe even factor in stuff like team rankings. But honestly, I ran out of steam. Plus, I realized I’d need a lot more data to even begin to make a semi-educated guess.
So, what did I learn? Well, Olympic rugby sevens is fun to watch. And cleaning data is a pain. Also, trying to predict sports scores is way harder than it looks! Maybe I’ll revisit this later with a bit more planning and maybe some proper programming instead of just spreadsheets. But for now, it was a fun little diversion.
