if a team is 30 and 15

[RumRiverRat]

How many games above .500 are they?

Anyone that says 15 is wrong and bad at math.

[greebs]

Ok I will bite. If they are 30 -15 they would need to lose 15 in a row to be a .500 team again right? That sounds like 15 above .500. Plz proceed with the punch line.

[DonBo]

Quote:

if a team is 30 and 15...

...they are most definitely NOT from Minnesota.

[Fishalittle]

7.5

The point it what?

[Big Bobber]

Someone was having a tough time sleeping at night.

[rundrave]

I think its just been generally accepted to paraphrase and say it off of record but it is indeed wrong. Not sure why it got brought up?

Lets use even numbers instead of odd and go with 40 wins and 20 losses, the team is not 20 games over .500.

The team has played 60 total games and to have won 50 percent, they'd have 30 wins. But they have 40, so they're 10 games over .500

[thatoneguy]

If you're using the number of games a team has played to that point and dividing it in half, then yeah, it would be incorrect to say that a 30-15 team is 15 games over .500.

But we all know that's not how the term is used in the sports world; it's used as a function of how many games a team would have to win (or lose) to rise (or fall) to a mark where they've won and lost the same amount of games.

It's less a question of math and more a question of semiotics.

[greebs]

agree. if we are talking how you got to 30-15 then yes a 7.5 (if that was possible) swing of losses instead of wins gets a team to .500 but once you have 15 more wins than losses it will take 15 straight losses to get you back to .500.