Jens 'n' Frens

Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster

Monday, July 09, 2018 :::

I probably enjoy sports differently from many Americans, but would posit that one of the reason that many Americans like our football better than soccer is well-captured by the kurtosis of changes in win-probability graphs. Look at these games from fivethirtyeight.com :

This is, in fact, a pair of games that is somewhat generous (in the relevant sense) to soccer, in that the former in particular is unusually high-scoring. What you see in the graphs is ten jumps with regions of gentle drift in between. Compare this to the chart from advancednflstats.com :

This is, in fact, a game that is somewhat ungenerous (in the relevant sense) to football, in that it is a particularly close game. It is still a much more continuous graph; there are occasional "big plays", but the eleventh-biggest moment of the game has much more impact on the final result than in soccer.

One can advance arguments about information sets or the like (and perhaps a graph based on an active live-betting market would better make the point), but there's no plausible way the most expert of soccer observers could enrich the practical state-space of soccer enough to appreciably smooth down the soccer graph; possession and field position count for something, but not very much. Soccer advocates occasionally snark that the problem that soccer is low-scoring could be solved by multiplying the goals by 7 as football (more or less) does, but this confuses the issue of "scoring" with the more fundamental issue: even in a football game with 18 points between the two teams (7 times the average total score of world cup matches this year) will have meaningful progress toward points that is far less ephemeral than exists in soccer.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 1:29 PM

(2) comments

Tuesday, February 05, 2013 :::

The final round of Word Cup qualifying for North America starts tomorrow. Six teams will play a double round-robin, scoring three points for a win, one for a draw, and zero for a loss; the top three will go to the big event in Brazil and the fourth will have a winnable play-in match, probably against New Zealand, for another spot.

The following table contains the American team's schedule along with a "par score" that I made up to estimate whether the American team is on track. In the last couple of cycles, 17.5 points has been enough to qualify comfortably but not too comfortably, so I figure if we're on track to collect 17.5 points, we're in good shape, and if we aren't, we're at risk of not making it to Brazil. That obviously isn't a guarantee, but it looked like a reasonable conservative estimate to me. In the matches in the last qualifying hexagonal tournament, the home team averaged 1.5 points more than the visiting team, so I expect 1.5 points more out of each home game than out of the road game against the same team. Finally, some of our opponents are stronger than others, so I picked some numbers that seemed reasonable and add up to five - if our team gets a total of five points from its road matches and 12.5 from its home matches, a trip to Brazil is probable.

When Who Where Game Par Cumulative Par

2/6 Honduras Away 1 1

3/22 Costa Rica Home 2.5 3.5

3/26 Mexico Away 0.5 4.0

6/7 Jamaica Away 1.25 5.25

6/11 Panama Home 2.75 8

6/18 Honduras Home 2.5 10.5

9/6 Costa Rica Away 1 11.5

9/10 Mexico Home 2 13.5

10/11 Jamaica Home 2.75 16.25

10/15 Panama Away 1.25 17.5

UPDATE: The advantage of using a "par score" over just following the standings is that the standings don't reflect how difficult a team's schedule has been vs. how difficult it will be. But I believe that the teams play a complete round robin followed by another complete round robin - i.e., we play each other team exactly once before Flag Day and exactly once after Flag Day. So after the matches of June 11, a much better heuristic would be to look at the standings after adding 1.5 points per remaining home game (some teams will have three remaining and others will have two). As it happens, the American team's schedule is slightly tilted toward playing tougher games earlier, so if we stay in the top three of the standings, we're probably in good shape.
Labels: soccer, sports

::: posted by Steven at 6:40 PM

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Saturday, February 02, 2013 :::

The Wall Street Journal presents 22 rules of Super Bowl parties. For example:
13. A Super Bowl Party host is always super-proud of putting a TV in the bathroom. The host has three kids, all of them honor students, and is more proud of the TV in the bathroom. The host is on the cover of Time magazine. Still: more proud of the TV in the bathroom.
If the host were on the cover of Time magazine in the 1980s, he might be more proud of that. But Time magazine today, assuming it still exists? Of course he's more proud of having a TV in the bathroom. He might not even know that he's on the cover of Time magazine. Or that it still exists.
14. Beyonce is doing the Super Bowl halftime show. And no matter what your conspiracy-theory loving Aunt Betsy is saying, Beyonce is actually in New Orleans. This halftime show wasn't prerecorded in an abandoned warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, in 2009.
Citation needed.
20. There's also going to be someone at your Super Bowl Party who says, with three minutes left in the game, "WAIT, the head coaches of the Ravens and Niners are BROTHERS? That's INCREDIBLE! Why didn't someone tell me?"
I tend to think that I follow the NFL, if not every nook and cranny, but I didn't know Jim Harbaugh's brother was a head coach until near the end of the AFC championship game.
Labels: NFL, sports

::: posted by Steven at 3:08 PM

(1) comments

Thursday, November 29, 2012 :::

I'm looking at this interesting project CNNSI did, with a mock committee of actual people who might be on a real committee selecting a college football playoff as will happen in a couple of years. I'm also considering the partial results in light of the playoff system for the Australian Football League, which is very nearly a system I suggested to my brother before I was aware it was used somewhere in the world, whereupon he informed me that it is used in the antipodes. This more or less suggests a bracket like

Notre Dame

Oregon Notre Dame Oregon

LSU Stanford Florida

Stanford Oregon

Alabama Alabama

Florida Florida Alabama

Georgia Texas A&M Notre Dame

Texas A&M

with game results projected in the first three rounds in part to clarify the structure of the bracket. The semifinals here feature Oregon against an SEC team and Notre Dame against an SEC team.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 3:36 PM

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Wednesday, December 28, 2011 :::

Some responses to Stewart Mandel's mailbag:
Hi Stewart. I've been reading a lot about how wrong it is for a team that didn't win its conference to be able to win the national championship and I must say I agree. I mean, the ninth place Big East team (UConn) is the national champion? Really? Oh, they are talking about football and Alabama? Sorry, wrong sport.
-- Chris Anderson, Shreveport, La.

Touche. College football's unique postseason system makes for some unique pet peeves. Teams that didn't win their conference or division constantly emerge as champions in other sports. In fact the reigning NFL (Packers), NBA (Mavs) and baseball (Cardinals) champs did not win their respective divisions. UConn was ranked 14th in the final RPI standings last year. The BCS equivalent this year would be No. 14 Oklahoma -- fourth in the Big 12 -- winning the national championship.

But of course we accept these results without hesitation because they stemmed from a playoff.
Which "we" are is Mandel talking about here?
I don't know about UConn per se, but I'm not sure the #14 team winning the NCAA tournament should necessarily be considered to clearly be the best team. A single-elimination tournament that large means that a good team can get unlucky early, leaving an easy path for a middling (in a comparative sense) team.
It's something of a curiosity to me that professional leagues tend to have longer post-seasons, making it more likely that the best team will win — I take that as a good measure of their being more "fair" — while college playoffs tend to be more heavily tilted toward single-elimination, which is probably more exciting. (Football is the big exception here.) On some level the entertainment business should skew more in the latter direction; the countervailing factor, perhaps, is that professional athletes can be asked to play more games than supposed and actual student-athletes can.
Given that only two teams get that opportunity in college football, I understand why some fans would find it uncomfortable that one of them did not even win its conference. However, it's not like in the NCAA tournament we make sure every conference champ is seeded before rewarding any at-large teams. If the two best teams in the regular season were ACC champion Duke and ACC runner-up North Carolina, they'd be given the top two overall seeds, thus ensuring the best possible chance to play each other in the title game. If the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils, no one would object to their being declared national champion. That's essentially what's happening here, albeit with five fewer layers between the seeding and the title game.
I would note that a national title system that insisted on having only "conference champions" in it would have good reason to exercise its own discretion as to how those champions are determined. If Arkansas had beat LSU late in the regular season, the SEC West's representative in the conference championship game would have been chosen by a tie-breaker that can only be described as pathological. As it was, the SEC East was represented not by South Carolina, which was undefeated in its division but lost an interdivision games against Arkansas, but by Georgia, which lost to South Carolina but won an interdivision game against Florida. The SEC can determine its champion, but a national championship game shouldn't be expected to manacle itself to that decision.
I was wondering if any of you sports writers realize that BAMA won every statistical category when they played for the first time in Tuscaloosa expect for the one on the scoreboard and yet "all" of you talk about how LSWho beat BAMA. Score wise, yes they did, but on the stat sheet they DIDN'T. For that very reson you are WAY off on your BCS Championship prediction. BAMA will Rolllllll into New Orleans on Jan 9th ranked #2 and ROLLLLLLLLL out National Champions!!!!!
-- Michael, Corinth, Ala.

I couldn't wait for the first game to get here because I so badly wanted to see the teams play. I can't wait for the second one to get here to put an end to 36 days of this.
There is a certain prevalence of really stupid commentary in sports, and yet I find this mail remarkable. It's one thing to say "The team that won had these big breaks," another to say "All the statistics I look at give the wrong result as to which team should have won, so reality is wrong." Alabama missed four field goals, while LSU missed none; LSU punted four times more than Alabama, for an extra 150 yards of field position. Alabama's offense gained 56 more yards against LSU's defense than vice versa, while turnovers were the same, but if you ignore special teams then, yes, you're ignoring one of the reasons LSU is so good this year. After reading this, I'm hoping for another defensive battle of field position, hopefully with another 73 yard Brad Wing punt.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 3:09 PM

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Sunday, October 02, 2011 :::

Last December, my fiancee (now wife) gave me a Green Bay Packers shirt. The Packers haven't lost since.

This summer, we also got Buffalo Bills shirts. They are also undefeated so far this year.

On the other hand, last Wednesday night, I not only had but wore a Red Sox shirt. That shirt appears to be less magical.

I'm considering adding the "cargo cults" tag to this blog entry, but I don't think it quite fits.
Labels: NFL, sports

::: posted by Steven at 1:08 PM

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Sunday, September 25, 2011 :::

In their first two games, the Vikings outscored opponents in the first half by a total of 34-7. They were outscored in the second half by a combined 41-3.

In their third game, they have a halftime lead of 20-0. We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: They lost in overtime, 26-23.
Labels: NFL, sports

::: posted by Steven at 2:45 PM

(1) comments

Sunday, September 18, 2011 :::

A couple points of trivia from the NFL today:
The Packers never trailed by more than a touchdown last season. Their streak ended when they gave up the first 13 points of the game to the Panthers, though they did come back to win.
The Bills, who cofounded the AFL in 1960, still have the same owner who founded them. Today was the first home game he didn't attend. He suffered a broken hip last June.

UPDATE: Also on Sunday, the Bills scored three go-ahead touchdowns in the fourth quarter. This was the fourth time this has happened in an NFL game.
Labels: NFL, sports

::: posted by Steven at 3:16 PM

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Monday, February 07, 2011 :::

I understand yesterday's football game set a new record for largest ever American television audience.

If you saw the pre-game rendition of the national anthem and intend to ask me whether Christina Aguilera gets a license, I'm going to assume that you're kidding. I actually didn't know she had messed up the lyrics until I read about it online because I had already walked out on her before she did. I don't recall ever having done that before, though I did mute James Taylor before he even started the second time he performed ahead of a game that I watched (that happened several years after the first time I heard him, but pain is a powerful teacher). I usually just suffer through it, but her yodeling was so unbearable before she screwed up the lyrics that I stormed out of the room by the dawn's early light. If they call in the Black Eyed Peas next year to do an autotuned rap version, it will be a substantial improvement, even if they (sing?) perform the lyrics backward and produce Satanic messages.

On a happier note, the 2010 Packers were distinctive in two opposite ways: they tied for the worst record of any Super Bowl winner with six losses (and, actually, were the first sixth seed from the NFC to win out), but they were also the first team since 1962 to go a whole season (including postseason) without trailing by more than seven points. Two of their losses were by 3 in OT, two by 3 in regulation, and the other two by 4.
Labels: Packers, sports

::: posted by Steven at 11:42 PM

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Thursday, January 06, 2011 :::

From SI college football writer Stewart Mandel's "mailbag" column:
Hi Stewart, this quote from your TCU Rose Bowl column sums up my feelings about all the ink that has been spilled about the injustice of the BCS system:

"I don't really care about the national championship right now," said standout (TCU) defensive end Wayne Daniels. "I'm living in the moment. ... I'd say we're pretty good."

I realize that college football has morphed into the Junior NFL (except that everyone but the players get rich), but I think the goal is and should be to win your conference championship and then go play in a great postseason game in some warm location. They still give out trophies for winning those games. Forget computers and pollsters trying to match the true No. 1 and No. 2, and forget a playoff. I wish everyone else would stop complaining.
-- Eric, Columbus, Ohio

Eric is part of a small and increasingly drowned-out minority, but my personal views are closer to his than to those of the rabid anti-bowl, playoffs-now crowd. The most interesting part of covering TCU's Rose Bowl win was that it reinforced for me the gaping disconnect between the sentiment of fans and the actual participants when it comes to the playoff debate. You'd think the Horned Frogs would be the most outraged at being denied the chance to play for a national title, but not a single coach or player expressed anything other than sheer joy after the game. And I've found that to be the case with nearly every player from every bowl team with whom I've dealt.

Personally, I think TCU should get that title shot, and under The Mandel Plan it would. But it amuses me to no end when I hear fans deride the bowls as "meaningless," considering just how emotional the players get about winning and losing them. (Did you see Wisconsin star J.J. Watt break down on the podium afterward?) At the end of the day, the obsession with determining an absolute clear-cut national champion in college football is far more prevalent among fans and media than coaches and players. We want to be entertained. We want more football. We want a more climactic finish to the season. But we don't particularly seem to care what the coaches and players themselves want.
Especially at a level that is still supposed to be amateur, calling any game that doesn't influence some "national championship" ipso facto "meaningless" seems awfully bleak.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 11:22 AM

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Saturday, December 18, 2010 :::

CNNSI has a feature inviting you to "create your own college football playoff", though it seems to be rather rigid. "Your" college football playoff has to have 16 teams in a single-elimination format where the winner of one match is always predetermined to play the winner of another given match (unlike, for example, the NFL playoffs). Further, contrary to what I had imagined — I imagined this in particular due to another feature on their site, where they seeded a sixteen-team playoff of this nature and had people vote who would win each matchup — they don't let you pick the teams that win, or otherwise designate a criterion for figuring out which team would win. You set up your bracket and they'll tell you who wins which games.

What I do like about the feature, though, is that it includes a realistic number of upsets. I hope strong proponents of a playoff will set these things up, play it through a few times with the same teams, and ask themselves whether a different team is really the best team in the country each time.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 9:22 PM

(1) comments

Tuesday, November 30, 2010 :::

The election being over, Nate Silver is writing about college football:
Since the beginning of the B.C.S. in 1998, the computer ratings have predicted the winners of B.C.S. bowl games correctly 32 times and incorrectly 20 times. That’s marginally better than the 30-22 record put up by the overall B.C.S. formula, using a combination of human polls and computer ratings, and only marginally worse than the 33-19 record the computers would have compiled if they were allowed to consider victory margin and home-field advantage. Teams favored by a composite of human polls are 30-21-1 in the same games. The teams considered the favorites by Las Vegas gamblers are also just 30-21-1.

The Associated Press preseason rankings, at 31-20 (excluding one case in which neither team was ranked at the beginning of the season), turn out to be about as reliable at picking the winners of B.C.S. bowl games as these end-of-the-year rankings are.
When you're looking at a sample of 52 binary results, even if they are identically distributed, 33 and 30.5 are essentially the same. I'm curious how he ascertained what the computers "would have" predicted - some of the BCS computer ratings have alternative, non-crippled versions, but I don't think all of them do. I'm also curious to what degree the picks differ. I suspect a lot of games had consensus favorites, even where the favorites didn't end up winning.

I didn't give this a lot of thought before reading the piece, but I think the prior should have been that 52 games wouldn't suffice to provide a statistically significant result. I would have guessed ahead of time that the good computer algorithms might be a little bit better than the humans (i.e., that human bias would slightly outweigh the additional information human experts can incorporate) and both would be better than the BCS computer algorithms and probably the pre-season polls. But any remotely-plausible rankings will be fairly similar, and 52 games isn't much of a sample.
Labels: sports

::: posted by Steven at 10:59 AM

(2) comments

Friday, October 01, 2010 :::

In football, in order to validly intercept a pass, you have to catch the pass and establish yourself in bounds by touching the ground. (Some details vary from league to league, but the basics are the same.) On the other hand, even if you're outside the field of play, you don't count as out-of-bounds until you have touched the ground; if you leap from in bounds and catch the ball on the other side of the line, you aren't really out of bounds until you land. This means that you can still pitch the ball to a teammate who is in bounds as long as you do it before hitting the ground.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 11:23 AM

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Wednesday, June 23, 2010 :::

The US men's soccer team had lost its third match of the World Cup every time before today. Today, winning 1-0, they advance to the single-elimination tournament, finishing ~~second~~ first in their group ~~behind~~ ahead of England, which also won 1-0.

Update: I should add that the winning goal was scored by Landon Donovan in stoppage time, just minutes ago; I was first alerted to it by a shout of "USA!" from outside my window. (If the US had been scoreless for a few more minutes, Slovenia would have advanced instead.)

Update 2: I don't know why I thought the US had finished behind England in the group; the US finishes first, on the goals-scored tiebreaker, and will play the second-place team from group D, which will be determined this afternoon.

Update 3: If my understanding is correct, the US will play Ghana, which, if my memory is correct, knocked the US out of the last World Cup. The winner of that match would play Uruguay or South Korea in the quarterfinals.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 11:51 AM

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Friday, June 18, 2010 :::

I didn't see the contested goal, but my jingoist chauvinism assures me that we was robbed.

England v Algeria is underway. The US plays Algeria next Wednesday. Supposing England wins, if the US loses to or ties Algeria, we're out; if the US beats Algeria by more than one goal, we're in; if the US beats Algeria by one goal and England and Slovenia do not tie, we're in. If the US beats Algeria by one goal and England and Slovenia do tie, it's a bit of a mess; I'll update this entry after the England/Algeria game.

Update: England and Algeria tie, 0-0.
If the US loses next Wednesday, we're out.
If the US wins, we're in.
If the US ties,
If England wins, the US is out.
If Slovenia wins, the US is in.
If both matches are ties,
If England scores less than 2 more goals (on Wednesday) than the US does, the US is in.
If England scores more than 2 more goals than the US does, the US is out.
If England scores 2 more goals than the US does, then FIFA draws lots.

The only way in which the US can win the group is if the US and England both win, and the US does so by a wider margin or scores no more than 2 fewer goals than England in winning by the same margin.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 2:32 PM

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Tuesday, April 06, 2010 :::

A few sports comments:
I cheer against the Philadelphia Eagles, principally because I think of them (and Philadelphia in general) as having among the least civilized sports fans this side of Liverpool. As such, I am quite pleased that they traded away a very good veteran quarterback with at least five years left in his career for two pigs in a poke. And not even first-round pigs in a poke. They had more good quarterbacks than they needed, but I'm surprised they couldn't at least get a better deal.
The NCAA Division 1 women's basketball championship game is tonight. It is fitting that UConn will have to beat Stanford again for the title. Nebraska fans might say they should have a shot, having gone undefeated in the best conference in the country, and I don't know what happened in their loss against Kentucky. But Stanford's only loss this season was to UConn, in Connecticut, and only by 12; in fact, Stanford had the lead at half-time. UConn hasn't won a game by less than 12 all season, but Stanford has no other losses and only two single-digit wins, and some of those convincing wins were against good teams. Stanford hasn't lost to a team other than UConn since January of 2009 and gave UConn their last loss two years ago. If there were no UConn, some of the stories you've seen about UConn in the last few weeks might have been written about Stanford. UConn is and should be the favorite, but don't assume that their victory is preordained.
The NCAA Division 1 men's basketball championship game last night was excellent. I was hoping the last-second shot would go in, but, because it didn't, the better team won. They weren't better by much, though.
Labels: sports

::: posted by Steven at 1:21 PM

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Saturday, March 27, 2010 :::

Baylor will play Duke in the regional finals in both the men's and the women's basketball tournaments.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 7:13 PM

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010 :::

The NFL has changed its overtime rule for the playoffs; instead of a straight sudden-death format, if the team to receive the opening kickoff scores a field goal on its opening possession, the other team gets a possession. The primary motivation for the change was the fact that winners of the opening coin toss for the overtime period have won 59.8% of the overtime games since the kickoff was moved from the 35 to the 30 yard line 16 years ago.

My thoughts on the new format:
I don't hate it. In particular, I think this is a lot better than the college football "overtime", which I still insist resembles football the way miniature golf resembles golf.
I understand that, particularly in the playoffs, it is necessary that one team win, and people have ingrained senses of fairness. That said, if two teams have played to 24-24 in regulation, any overtime mechanism will not primarily be a function of which team is playing better that day; it will be a function of some form of luck. If the objection is that the winner of the game was being determined by a coin toss, I would like some acknowledgement that it is now to be determined by a much more ornate equivalent.
In particular, is a 3-2 odds advantage really that big a deal? Even if the coin toss winner wins 59.8% of the time, a lot more luck is coming from the field than from the coin toss.
Why does everything the NFL does have to end up so baroque? The obvious solution, I would think, is not to do a coin toss; have the team with the ball at the end of regulation proceed with its drive. If you had to score a last minute touchdown to tie the game, you should be at a disadvantage in overtime. If there's a pronounced advantage to having one end zone or the other, there may be some difficulty in determining who ought to get which end zone, but even that doesn't bother me terribly much, in part because it's not likely to be a big factor in many games, in part because of the previous point that luck will determine the game anyway, and in part because it's knowable ahead of time:
NCAA fencing includes an overtime period that begins with a coin toss; if the overtime period ends in a tie, the winner of the coin toss is declared the winner. The idea is that a player who has been given the disadvantage knows about it in time to play more aggressively; the other player, with an effective half-point advantage, will play a little bit more defensively, insofar as a half-point advantage can be held. One way to do this in the NFL would be to have a coin toss at half time that would govern the overtime period. Another would be to declare as the winner of the OT coin toss whichever team lost the opening coin toss. You could just give it to the visiting team (though that doesn't work in the Super Bowl). In all cases the team that is down three with a few minutes left can take account of the fact that it needs to be a little bit more aggressive, or that, if it plays for the tie in regulation, it has slightly better odds in overtime.
I really think they should drop overtime altogether for the regular season. Recording the result as a tie in the standings is a more accurate depiction of what happened than pretending it's a win or a loss by either team.
Labels: sports

::: posted by dWj at 10:27 AM

(1) comments

Sunday, December 13, 2009 :::

A few days ago, Mankiw noted that UCLA professor Matthew Kahn predicted that Tiger Woods would play more golf in response to his diminished endorsement income. But Woods appears to be playing a signalling game that Kahn failed to account for.
Labels: signalling, sports

::: posted by Steven at 1:20 AM

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009 :::

Was the US Men's Soccer team's victory over Spain today "the second-biggest upset by an American team, behind only the 1980 Miracle on Ice by the hockey team over the Soviet Union in the Olympics"? (link via Althouse) Soccer seems the right sport in which to look for an American upset, and the assertion that this was the "greatest victory by the men's national soccer team" is at least plausible. I'm trying to think of other contenders; the 2002 World Cup victory over Portugal comes to mind; it was a less surprising result, but it was a bigger stage.
Labels: sports

::: posted by Steven at 11:45 PM

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