The final seconds ticked down on our basketball broadcast Saturday as the Washington Huskies suffered a setback at Iowa. It was a disappointing loss for many reasons, but one of the more head-scratching reasons was because we shot over 50 percent from the field for the second straight game and lost both.
“When do you think was the last time we lost back-to-back games where we shot above 50 percent in both?” I asked my analyst Jason Hamilton, only somewhat rhetorically.
“I dunno,” he said in frustration. “Look it up.”
So, I did. I pulled out a giant Excel file that has every Washington Huskies men’s basketball team stat on it from 2009 to yesterday, I ran conditional formatting for every game where we shot above 50% from the field so it’d show up in green, and whenever there were clusters of green together, I looked just to the left to see if two ‘L’s were in the corresponding rows.
During our two minute commercial break, I had my answer. February 2015: ten years ago. That gave me an extremely unique context to provide for the loss, and I was able to provide that context as soon as we got back from commercial break.
Reminder: what you’re going to see in this video might seem overwhelming if you have not watched the previous videos. But if you have been following along, what I’m about to show you will allow you to create an archive so detailed that it would take months to manually look up and type all the information that you can store in a spreadsheet over a couple of hours. And if it’s your job to follow a team as a beat writer, play-by-play announcer or reporter, this will absolutely come in handy and make you an elite source for information.
