We are continuing our look at the Olympics here at engineeringdaze.com. 156 is not a number near and dear to engineers, but it is a number that came up in the Olympics recently and one that reminds me how engineers can have fun with the Olympics, and indeed, improve various sports.

Today’s sport to improve is basketball. The USA team scored 156 points against a quite inferior opponent in a recent game. This is in a basketball game where there are 8 less minutes than in an NBA game. The Olympic games are split up into four 10-minute quarters. After the first quarter the American team had 49 points. At that pace they could have scored 196 points, so scoring “only”156 was a sign they eased up in the last three quarters.

Scoring 156 points means the team averaged 39 points a quarter, and 3.9 points every minute. And that is with the other team also possessing the ball and scoring 73 points of their own.

This brings me to an idea I have had for a while about basketball and how the broadcast networks can make the game more intriguing to engineers. We are all about numbers – rates, ratios, interpolation and extrapolation. I propose that every 15 or 20 seconds throughout a game, an alternate scoreboard is kept that will extrapolate out what the score will be if the rate at which the teams are scoring is maintained. At the end of the first quarter of the game mentioned above, the score was 49-25. That translates into a final extrapolated score of 196-100.

People would greatly enjoy not only watching the score of the game, but the extrapolated score as it would be updated three or four times every minute. The announcer could say, “Even though there are only 3 minutes and 20 seconds gone in the game, at this rate the (team ahead) will be scoring 136 points! What a rate!”

Didn’t I say engineers could make this game more fun.