CBS earned a 2.8 overnight rating for yesterday's U.S. Open men's final, which saw Rafael Nadal defeat Novak Djokovic in four sets for his 13th Grand Slam title. The 2.8 overnight is up 22% from last year's final, in which Andy Murray defeated Djokovic in five sets. This year's rating also is up from a 2.6 in '11 and a 2.2 in '10 -- both of which featured Nadal-Djokovic and aired on a Monday. West Palm Beach led all U.S. markets for yesterday's match with a 5.6 local rating, followed by Ft. Myers-Naples (5.1), Richmond (5.0), N.Y. (4.6) and K.C. (4.5) (Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor).
LET'S BUILD A SMARTER TOURNAMENT: The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Carl Bialik wrote tennis has "a stats problem," as the sport often "botches even its basic match data, with missing or incorrect numbers for past matches and no archived stats online for individual matches on the women’s tour." IBM, a tech partner for all four Grand Slams events, has been "collecting millions of data points on matches, including stats such as winners and unforced errors that aren’t logged at many tour stops." IBM’s touting of its keys to each match "is the latest evolution of the company’s longstanding relationship with tennis." The sport has "in the past showcased IBM’s hardware and software." The company "calls the keys 'predictive analytics,'" but they "haven’t been particularly predictive." One possible reason is that IBM has "tested so many different possible keys ... that it has overfit its model." It is "hard to know exactly what went wrong, because IBM doesn’t share the details of its model, and how it arrived at it." Nor does IBM "publish most of the raw data." So instead of "lots of statisticians tackling the big data set, and coming up with other keys and other insights ... there is only IBM." The USTA "owns the data IBM used for 'Keys to the Match' and has no plans to share it with other analysts" (WSJ.com, 9/7).
