Numbers game: crunching sports scores and more with Jeff Sagarin.

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN--Daylight Saving Time! So how has it worked out for you so far? Has being in sync with the rest of the country made your life easier, your business more profitable? Has that extra hour of evening light helped you hone your golf score?

According to one Hoosier who knows a lot about scores, golf is not the tally we should be watching. How about our kids' grades and SAT scores? Most would agree they're more important, and the statistics crunched by sports analyst extraordinaire Jeff Sagarin of Bloomington suggest that Daylight Saving Time is bad for academic achievement. Even more important, he claims, aligning our clocks with the wrong time zone is bad for all of us.

Sagarin is best known for the sports ratings he provides to USA Today, Golfweek and the Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks. His stats compare the strength and ability-to-win of teams and players in a wide range of sports, including college and pro basketball and football, Major League Baseball, golf, pro hockey, NASCAR and Major League Soccer. The upcoming NCAA men's basketball tournament is one of many events that keep life busy for Sagarin, a New York native who is a lifelong sports fan and an MIT mathematics grad. But that's OK, because he's really into numbers, and sports.

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Among the other numbers that speak to him are sunrise and sunset times, and he's focused a lot of attention on Indiana's long struggle with the clock whether or not to adopt DST and what time zone is best for the state. He can provide reams of longitude and solar time data to prove that Indiana really belongs in the Central time zone, and that Daylight Saving Time is good for no one.

In fact, he did what mathematicians call a "multiple regression" study crunching Indiana school SAT performance data, each school's longitude and whether or not the school observes DST. "I got data for every high school for the last 10 years. Having DST lowers SAT scores 20 points," he says, noting that he adjusted for all other factors such as economic and ethnic data.

Why should DST make a difference with academics? Because, Sagarin says, it's not natural to be as out of sync with the sun as DST makes us, especially in Indiana, where observing Eastern time already makes the sun rise at a later time than in most places. "Statistically, the further west you are in a time zone, the higher the incidence of depression and illness," he says. "We are a creature of nature. Our brain needs sunlight in the morning to tell it to start functioning again."

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The data are intriguing, though Sagarin himself may be a contradiction. His brain is functioning well enough to make a good living crunching sports data, but a lot of his work is done before the sun rises each day. He typically wakes up and heads to the computer around 5 or 6 a.m. to work on the previous night's sports data. At least one morning a week, he gathers with friends for breakfast at 8 at The Runcible Spoon, a local diner.

Sagarin has been fascinated with sports data since the late 1950s when he was a 10-year-old in New York, trying every week to win the $500 prize offered by the New York Daily News to the person who could best predict sports scores. He never won, but by the time he finished up at MIT in the early '70s, he had devised a better system and started contacting newspapers. He got a decade-long gig with Pro Football Weekly, and in 1977 he moved to Bloomington.

"I was living in a bad neighborhood in Boston," he recalls. That spring he visited a friend who was teaching in Bloomington, and was intrigued to read the crime blotter in the local paper, which told of a woman whose potted plant was stolen from her porch, no doubt by a drunken college student. "This was a town where a potted plant being stolen was big news," he recalls. "I thought, 'this is a great place to be, and I don't even have any potted plants.'" Soon, his sports stats appeared in Bloomington's Herald-Telephone, and by the mid-1980s he was a regular in USA Today.

Though he had a brief job as an actuarial trainee in New York City and another even shorter job with a financial advisory firm serving pension plans, sports stats have been Sagarin's true calling for decades. "I have had only those two adult jobs, in which I worked a total of about nine and a half months."