Punching with presidents
Jesse Kelly ruled out Teddy Roosevelt because he’s an obvious good pick. But who else is a good pick? I say Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, or William Howard Taft. I can already hear the likely reactions:

Wait, Taft? The famously fat “bathtub” president? What?

As a numbers guy, I like to be systematic. We’ll get to what’s special about Taft in a minute. First, note that presidents are typically distinguished elder statesmen. While many served in the military, most of them were past their physical prime.

What makes someone good in a brawl?

To score all the presidents systematically, I came up with two basic indices: Body and violence. Then I combined them to produce a composite score.

Body, given by height (in inches) minus age at inauguration (in years) plus the square root of how many years they had left in their natural lifespan at that point. This last factor may seem odd, but it’s a crude proxy for health relative to age. Size is usually an advantage in a fight, while age and health are the biggest likely limiting factors for an elder statesman engaged in fisticuffs.

For presidents who were assassinated or are still living today, I simply took the average natural remaining lifespan, based on a life table. Finally, I assigned a twenty point penalty to FDR’s body score on the basis of his partial paralysis.

Artist’s depiction of future president Teddy Roosevelt and company charging up the hill on the battlefield.

Violence, given as 10 points for each of the following: Military service of any kind at any point in their life, seeing ground combat action, having killed someone outside of ground combat, surviving being shot, and participating in a duel. A number of presidents had a documented interest in wrestling or other martial arts; for this, I added 10 or 20 points, on the following rubric:

10 points: Documented as competitive or at least serious hobbyists.

20 points: Capable enough to win championships or obsessively trained as a mixed martial artist while in office. (The latter being Teddy Roosevelt.)

Distribution of brawling scores. Lincoln and Roosevelt are clear outliers here.

After building these two indices, I had a minor issue to address: The range and variance of the violence scores (0–50) was significantly larger than the variance of the body scores (6.4–34.7). To equalize the impact of the two factors, I multiplied the body score by a factor of 1.6 before adding the two together. Composite scores then ranged from ten to one hundred.

The full ranking of presidents
['Tomas Mcintee']
['Data Analysis', 'Presidential', 'Taft', 'Funny', 'Us History']