STUDIO CITY : Statistician, 70, Makes Lessons in Charts Lively

At 70, Bud Goode is plenty busy as one of the nation’s best known football statisticians. But to the students in the computer science class at Belmont High School in Los Angeles, he’s the lively visiting teacher who once a week assigns Monday Night Football as homework, using the game as a way to teach statistics.

Goode graduated in 1941 from Belmont, and during his 50th reunion, the principal asked him to speak.

Soon, he was a regular.

He brings computer charts based on the performance of all the NFL teams updated weekly, looking ahead to the weekend games as homework assignments.

Each student keeps track of a different team, entering information from each game into a computer. The codes they use are designed to reproduce Goode’s statistical graphs, which represent an analysis of the game.

The idea, he said, is to teach about the uses of statistics--whether it’s to understand a football game or figure out what’s going on in the economy.

“At the end of the semester they can understand why teams win, and why interest rates go up and down and more,” Goode said.

The students’ regular teacher, Jim Herrman, said that without Goode, he’d be teaching “the same old dull stuff.”

“My goal is for them to be able to read, understand and criticize a chart or graph in a newspaper whether it’s on the sports, editorial or financial page,” Goode said. “The world is full of numbers and that’s why we need statistical methods.”

Goode came to football statistics from entertainment analysis, working in television marketing in the late 1950s and into the 1960s.

In August, he was honored by the American Statistical Assn. for his 30 years of research in sports.

He has developed an educational sports computer software package, which he hopes to distribute free of charge to inner city schools.

“There is a growing gap between the educational haves and have nots,” Goode explained. “With only 1% of high tech Ph.D. degrees going to non-Caucasians, the low-income kids are purely non-competitive.”