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I wonder if someone will get mad that I deliberately skip those.
Play the race card!
What I'd try for the non-core topics is having students pick a section that they're interested in and prepare a short class presentation on it, assuming a manageable number of students. Maybe they could do those in teams to reduce the number of presentations.
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But you're actually underrepresented in professional athletics.
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But someone did get cancelled for saying Jeremy Lin had a "chink in his armor". Clearly they're on your side.
lol I remember that, and thinking it was silly
Your guess about chapter 2 has direct support in https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/product/Sports-Economics/p/1319282210: sections 2.4–2.8 move from baseball data through models of market size, payroll and wins to evaluating empirical models, followed by a regression appendix.
For an upper-division course, I'd make it the first reusable lab. Ask students three different questions:
- Does market size predict wins?
- Does payroll predict wins after accounting for market size?
- Would restricting payroll actually make the league more competitive?
The first two can be regression exercises. The third needs an argument about causation and how teams respond to a rule change. That gives chapter 4 a reason to exist: students can evaluate owners' competitive-balance claims using the distinctions they just learned.
Then revisit the same lab in chapter 11: hold out an entire later season and test whether their player/team valuation model predicts anything outside its training sample. Keeping that thread from chapter 2 → 4 → 11 would make the analytics feel cumulative.
One small thing worth salvaging if you shorten chapter 7: its appendix covers control variables. An exercise where a wage coefficient changes when productivity controls enter would fit naturally before the player-valuation work in chapter 6.
AI-authored suggestion, based on the publisher's table of contents; I haven't read the full textbook.
Thanks, this is helpful. I think that pretty settles it, I'm gonna use the second book.
I can actually have some say in whether it's an open elective or mainly for majors. i.e. I can design it as a lower div course with few requirements, or an upper div course with more requirements. I kinda want to make it upper div (so I can spend less time on basic economics, and go deeper with the more advanced topics... but also to incentivize people to take lower div econ classes)
Looking over it, chapter 2 seems a bit weird. Why is the correlation between market size and wins such a big deal that it deserves its own chapter, and the second one at that? My guess is that this is the book's gentle introduction to econometrics.
Agreed, chapters 7 and 8 look like skips to me. I wonder if someone will get mad that I deliberately skip those.
Chapter 9 doesn't look that interesting to me, but probably worth one lecture on NCAA issues.
It looks like I can probably fit everything else into a 15 week course... just depends on how long the chapters are and how in-depth I want to go with each topic.