If Only We Had the DWTS Data…

Many of you might not realize this, but the Amazing Marianya (I think I just figured out her new nickname) has this incredibly spreadsheet she’s created for all the seasons of Dancing with the Stars. It has scores, music, type of star, etc etc etc. Yes, she’s a stats nerd and proud of it (at least she seems to be). That’s how she can answer anyone’s question about music and do all those posts looking back at previous uses of the music and previous scores to predict future scores.

The problem is that Marianya doesn’t have all of the data that we really need to be able to analyze Dancing with the Stars completely. If she could just get her hands on more data Courtney could do an even better job with her Dancing with the Stars Power Rankings (although she’s done pretty dang well with what she has). Princess Heidi could even point to these stats whenever they want to argue about the virtues of Derek Hough.

However, what is probably most important is that I could more easily predict the winner of Dancing with the Stars. To get us started here’s some theories about why people will win. If any of you have the data to support these theories, please let me know so we can add it to Marianya’s spreadsheet:

Times in Restroom – If we could just know how many times the stars and pros had to go to the restroom before they performed, I think we’d have a leg up on being able to predict their dancing ability. Cause of course, the nerves bring the best out of people.

Heartrate – Imagine if we could just have a heart monitor connected to each person. At regular intervals it could just post this data to their Twitter account and we could take the data from there. I think heart rate would be a really interesting indicator of a dancer’s success. They do it on the Tour de France. Why not on Dancing with the Stars?

Length of Hair – I’m pretty sure that if we ran a correlation on length of hair and rank on DWTS there would be a high correlation. Of course we’d need this data over time. For example, was Derek Hough more successful with the longer or the shorter hair? Karina Smirnoff would be interesting since she loves to do funky things with her hair.

Times on Entertainment Shows – We hear lots of complaining about certain stars getting more air time on TV (Donny was one of the best at this I think). Imagine if we had the data about how much TV time each star got on these Entertainment Shows. Marianya wouldn’t know what to do with that much data.

Leg length – Ok, maybe this one doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. You can’t tell me that Ana’s Rhumba is as nice as Edyta’s. Sorry, she just doesn’t have the legs that are needed to do it right. (No offense to Ana. I’ve actually grown to really like her this season).

I’m sure there’s other important pieces of data that would keep Marianya up at night as she analyzes the data. Feel free to leave anything I missed in the comments. Check out this poll if you’re looking for a less scientific method of predicting the Dancing with the Stars season 10 winner, but what’s the fun in that?