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[I]”I’ll Have Another” wins the Kentucky Derby earlier this month. Image credit: KYNGPAO. [URL=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”]Some rights reserved.[/URL][/I]
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A friend sent me a text this morning saying she was going to pull for Derby champion “I’ll Have Another” in this afternoon’s Preakness Stakes because she believes it would be a good omen for an NCAA Championship. She then went into a lot of metaphysics which completely lost me. (I mean, it was 5am…) But it got me wondering…is there any correlation between Kentucky national championships and the Triple Crown? Could my friend’s mystical intuition be correct?
So, I went back and looked at the stats. Kentucky won the National title in 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958, 1978, 1996, 1998, and 2012. In the years preceding a Kentucky national title, did the Kentucky Derby winner go on to win the Preakness and/or Belmont? Well, there were Triple Crown winners in two out of eight years preceding NCAA national championships: In 1948, Citation won the Triple Crown and the next year UK won the title. In 1977, Seattle Slew won the Triple Crown, and the next year, UK got another title. So 25% of the time that Kentucky won the national championship, there was a Triple Crown winner in the preceding year. Unfortunately, a statistical analysis of the data reveals no significant correlation between the Triple Crown and an eventual NCAA trophy. But there have only been eleven Triple Crown winners in all, so we’re looking at a very small data set.
So let’s back up and look at the winners of the the Derby and the Preakness. We find that only three times (including the two Triple Crowns) has the horse that won the Derby also won the Preakness in the year preceding a Kentucky NCAA Championship. However, it must be noted that the same horse has won the Derby and the Preakness only 32 times in a history going back to the late 19th Century. A statistical analysis shows that it is slightly more likely for Kentucky to win the national championship in a year that the same horse wins the Derby and the Preakness, but the relationship is not significant.
Of course, even if the math were more promising, it would be difficult to provide a realistic conjecture about why these events would be related in the first place. So, we’ll just have to hope my friend’s hunch is right.
We also have to wonder whether I have to re-evaluate my life for spending an hour doing statistical analysis of this on a beautiful Saturday morning, too. 🙂
