Wurster Hall: Southern Methodist University of Texas

Learn everything you ever wanted to about SMUT.

Hello and welcome back to Wurster Hall, our weekly data-focused article where we try to make sense of the letters and numbers and what exactly they can tell us about the teams on the field! Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Mapquest It

We start this week by examining the distance from each chancellor’s/president’s house to the campus stadium, and interestingly enough….we tie! Both the President’s House at SMU and the Chancellor’s House at UC Berkeley are 0.9 miles away from their respective stadiums! Interesting!

Diving a little deeper now however, Cal has to win this category as the President’s House at SMU is still being built! Point for Cal! But also man oh man I went and looked at the renderings and the SMU President’s House once completed will be 11.039 sqft with a 500 sqft cabana, 4 BR, 7 BA, an elevator, a 62 sqft wine cellar, and a kitchen that can hold 100 people! INSANE, but that’s oil money I guess. This lead me to look into the University House which, while smaller at 4,328 sqft boasts 4 BR and 10 bathrooms! 10!

Everyone’s Favorite Primary Source, Wikipedia

Next, we’ll dive into Wikipedia, the source of many of our statistics, to learn a little bit more. Interestingly, some time in the last week, Cal lost a citation, bringing the total down to 306 while SMU sits at a measly 129! That’s another Cal victory in the all important category. Do some more research SMU.

Dallas to Fort Worth

Next, we’ll look to see where Cal can draw power from locally. Unfortunately, BearPower will be in some short supply as the nearest Black Bear to Dallas is in the Forth Worth Zoo, over 40 miles away from Campus (shame on you Dallas Zoo). UC Berkeley wins of course with our resident Oakland Zoo bears just over 11 miles from campus. While Cal wins the category, I remain concerned about how the distance to the nearest bear will effect the team’s preparation at Gerald J. Ford Stadium (today I learned SMU has a donor name Gerald J. Ford who is different from the president. Imagine introducing yourself by saying, “Hi I’m Gerald Ford. No, not the president. I’m a billionaire.”)

The Grateful Dead Hats Are Sick (thanks for the hookup Rob)

Our final graph of the day will look at the number of hats available in each student store. With the additional of the new Grateful Dead Hats, Cal moves up to 149 total hats (listen I didn’t verify this because I’m tired but vibes wise it feels fine.) On the other hand, SMU only has a measly 74 hats. Kinda shocked to be honest. If I became a billionaire, I wouldn’t be wasting my money building a new vanity stadium. I think I’d make just a ton of hats and stickers so everyone could have cool hats and stickers. Anyways maybe we should that with the Prop 40 stuff. Don’t forget to vote. What was I talking about again?

Bear Power vs. Horse Power

This next section was originally going to be an investigation into the number of Pontiac TransAms present within some radius of each university currently for sale on Craigslist, but alas, there are not many. But that then lead me to an interesting thought, namely, what is Bear Power? Horse Power, as I’m sure we’re all aware, is a unit of measurement of power to calculate work, and is based on how many horses it takes to lift 550 pounds by 1 ft in 1 second. Or if you want to use real units, 250 kg, 30 cm, 1 second. Which is still really weird. What an insane thing to measure by!

Anyways, that lead me to thinking, well how does Bear Power computer? Reddit of course had the answer. Special thanks to u/TokyoBayRay in the r/theydidthemath for describing his math. Take it away TokyoBayRay.

According to wikipedia, "An analogue to a bear for muscle for its size is a dog". For now, let's assume a bear is just a big dog. We're going to scale up a calculation for a dog to a bear, and pretend that there is a linear relationship between size and power.

Sounds reasonable right? (Shut up)

• This guy calculated how much force his dog Jimmy exerts when pulling as 50N.

• There’s a lot of variation in the size of a bear depending on diet, habitat and time of year. A typical adult male is 180-360kg. Let’s split the difference and say 270kg.

• The aforementioned Jimmy weighs 20kg. So a bearpower, by our assumptions, is equivalent to 13.5 dogpower (or, more properly, jimmypower).

• From this, a bear could comfortably and consistently pull with a force of 675N.

That seems pretty good! It’s been a minute since I took Physics 8A (went much better for me than Chemistry 1B because Physics actually makes sense and is a real science!), but that math seems to check out. We could probably up that a bit to cover the true weight of a historical California Grizzly Bear, but we’ll stick with the Black Bear for now. Moving on now, how does a Horse Power compare?

Now let’s calculate the power of a bear!

• Horsepower was initially calculated by James Watt. It was the power a horse exerted when turning a 12ft mill wheel (wiki).

• James reckoned a horse could pull with 180lb of force. This is as close as makes no difference to 800N.

• As P = W/t = Fd/t, power is directly proportional to force applied.

• 1700N/675N = around 2.5 bearpower to a horsepower.

• Put another way, a Tesla Model S has the equivalent of 1040 bears under the hood.

Interesting! So it would theoretically take two and a half bears to do the power of one horse. I guess that kind of makes sense given general sizes and convincing a bear to lift up a 250 kg anything is probably a chore. I’m going to take this really as a sign of the Power of Unit, and how Bears operate on a team level. Maybe this will show up on the field Saturday?

Thanks for taking the time to read my insane ramblings. I very much appreciate it and hope I gave you a chuckle in whatever these times are. Always good to have community to laugh with. Hope you enjoy the game this weekend over some good strong coffee! Go Bears!