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wPride Of The Fall |
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If Baseball is America's Pastime, Football is its Heartbeat.
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w9.12.2002 |
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Much ado about a lot today in Pride of the Fall. Right now I am watching Marshall get pummelled by a superb Virginia Tech team, which travels to College Station, TX next week for a showdown against Texas A&M. Should be a fun game, that night of Maroon Madness.
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Who's Going to Run Your Wild Horses?
Resolute in his support of post-hangover Bronc QB Brian Griese "Lightning", Denver Broncos' Correspondent and Colorado U Law student Livy Keithley (C'98) gives us the weekly roundup for the men in blue and orange, this week telling us about the Broncs' "and the blood and the steel and the mud" 16-13 win over the St. Louis Rams:
"Broncos Beat, Week 1:
Nay, though you walk through the Valley of the AFC
West, you shall fear no Raiders, for Griese art
with thee...
I must admit, even the most faithful here in Denver
were impressed by the Donkeys this weekend. The
most amazing thing, really, was well-put by Kenoy
Kennedy after the game: "we didn't even play our best
out there." Although the media likes to push the
Griese-almost-got-bagged story, it was a non-story.
Griese was playing okay. The first INT wasn't his
fault, and the second INT was every bit as ballsy
as the touchdown pass 3 minutes later. Watch the
tape, he thought he was good enough to thread the
ball between 2 defenders - although he was only 1 for
2 on the thread, we only remember the second (a TD
with Eddie McCaffrey).
Frankly, I couldn't tell you how the next few weeks
will go. The League as a whole was such a farce on
week 1, it's hard to tell who will do what.
Cowboys LOSE to the Texans? I knew they were bad, but
they aren't THAT bad. Cleveland lose with no time
because of a loose helmet? Give me a break...
Next week, the shake-out will continue...but the
Mile High Burro Club will pack their way to the top
of the heap yet again..."
Predictions
Here is Jets Correspondent Sean Mullaney's (B'00) take on Super Bowl projections:
"The Super Bowl Champion the previous three seasons did NOT play on Monday Night Football that season. While if this holds true this year the teams with the best chances from where I sit are (in this order) Cleveland, Atlanta, Kansas City and Cinncinati, it would almost too predictable for a non-MNF team to win a fourth year in a row. So how about this: The Super Bowl Champion this year will be from the seven teams that only have one Monday night game. Here they are:
Washington
Baltimore
Seattle
Indianapolis
New York Giants
New York Jets
Tennessee
I think this could happen. The Jets, Colts and Titans (in that order) are probably the best picks. Washington and Baltimore will be horrible, and Seattle is in too tough a division. While I think the Giants will play hard all year, they probably don't have the talent to do it. So if one of these seven teams gets a ring, you've heard it here first."
Never tell me the odds!
Giants' Correspondent Pete Renz (C'00) sends us this revealing article linking football to the numbers of economic decisionmaking. Compelling stuff, dudes:
"Article: Strategies on Fourth Down, From a Mathematical Point of View
by Virginia Postrel, from the NYTimes:
FOOTBALL season has begun, and in stadiums, sports bars and living rooms across the land fans are asking the same question: "It's fourth down and what does the Bellman equation say?"
Or at least one fan is asking.
That's the title of a recent working paper by David Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (The paper is available, for $5, at www.nber.org/papers/w9024 .)
The paper uses the mathematical technique of dynamic programming — the Bellman equation, named for Richard Bellman, a mathematician who died in 1984, is a central tool of the technique — to analyze the value of different football strategies on fourth down. Given its field position, should a team punt, kick a field goal or go for the first down?
Consider a team that is just 2 yards away from a touchdown. Listening to a game on the radio, Professor Romer heard the commentators say the team should obviously take the easy 3 points from a field goal. "It wasn't obvious to me that it was the right decision," he said.
First he thought about the odds. If the team has a better than three-in-seven chance of scoring a touchdown — and the all but certain extra point — going for the touchdown has a higher expected value than kicking.
For an average National Football League team, the probability of a touchdown from 2 yards out is about 40 percent, making an attempt worth 2.8 points, or less than a field goal.
But there's more to the question than the probability of a score. "If you go for the touchdown and you don't get it, you've lost the 3 points but you've gotten something back in return," Professor Romer notes. "You've left the other team in this terrible field position," a daunting 98 yards from its goal.
A field goal, by contrast, leads to a kickoff, which on average in the N.F.L. gets the receiving team to the 27-yard line, a much better position. "Thus we need to know how much better it is to leave the opponent with the ball on its 2-yard line than on its 27," he writes.
That's where dynamic programming comes in.
The technique is a way to calculate the value of actions that have effects far into the future. Economists use it to look at things like a household's choice between saving and spending: how much you save rather than consume this year affects what you have to spend and save next year, and what you do then affects the following year, and so on into the future.
For football, points are at stake instead of money, but the mathematical principles are the same.
Using data from about 700 regular-season N.F.L. games, Professor Romer estimated the value in expected future points of getting a first down at each yard line on the field. To keep the analysis relatively simple, he looked just at the first quarter.
By these calculations, the value of a first-and-10 on a team's own 1-yard line, a terrible position 99 yards from a touchdown, is minus 1.6 points. Moving up the field, the value rapidly increases, hitting zero at the 15-yard line. From there on, each gain of 18 yards is worth about a point in the final score.
The bottom line: Teams tend to overestimate the value of field position, compared with keeping the ball, on their end of the field and underestimate it, compared with the value of a field goal, on the other team's end. When those estimates are corrected, the risks of going for it look a lot lower.
"The analysis implies that teams should be quite aggressive," Professor Romer writes. "A team facing fourth-and-goal is better off on average trying for a touchdown as long as it is within 5 yards of the end zone. At midfield, being within 5 yards of a first down makes going for it on average desirable. Even on its 10-yard line — 90 yards from a score — a team within 3 yards of a first down is better off on average going for it."
But, he said, "teams almost always kick on fourth down early in the game."
This result presents a puzzle for economists. Since football is highly competitive and the rewards for winning are great, teams should be doing what is optimal to win.
"We believe, we teach our students repeatedly, we base our models on the assumption that there are very strong pressures for firms to maximize, for firms to do the best thing," Professor Romer said. "We don't think they know calculus or dynamic programming. We think intelligence, ability in other dimensions, intuition, trial and error, imitation are going to lead, in a competitive marketplace," to the best strategies.
One possibility is that teams are not trying to win above all. "The costs of losing as a result of a failed gamble could be greater than the costs of losing from playing it safe," Professor Romer writes.
Or coaches may not realize they could do better by taking more chances. After all, away from the economists' blackboards, real companies constantly discover new and better ways to operate, some of which are made possible by better data and computing power.
Recently, for instance, retailers have begun using mathematical models to figure out when to put clothes on sale, something that used to be done by intuition and rules of thumb. Profits have increased substantially in some cases.
Football could be similar. If so, Professor Romer's paper could begin to change fourth-down strategies. But he'll have to overcome professional skepticism.
"If a football coach called me and said, `I have a new way to deal with the Social Security problem,' " he said, "my first reaction would be not, `Oh boy, someone solved this difficult problem.' My first reaction would be, `They're not qualified to talk about this. Who are they to think that they've solved this?' "
Which prompted Cowboys' Correspondent and American U. Law Student Simon Torres (F'00) to answer:
"Awesome find, Peter. I love the NY Times, but
sometimes they are too
wacked-out even for me.
I take from this that:
a) someone at Berkeley has too much time on their
hands. Reload the bong,
dude! and;
b) football and economics are the driving forces in
this country. I can't
stress that enough."
I'm not going to argue about that.
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Saturday Michigan and Notre Dame square off in the Battle of the Fight Songs. More info later!
posted by
Lorenzo at 9/12/2002 10:59:00 PM
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w9.09.2002 |
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A lot of fans were caught up in the emotion that was the opening weekend of the National. Football. League. The completion of the NFL's opening weekend was perhaps the most calamitous in the entire history of professional football. The Jets scored on 2 kickoff returns to obliterate Buffalo's wagons. Multiple overtime finishes, a heart-stopping debacle in Cleveland thanks to the helmet-throwing antics of linebacker D. Rudd, and a most unfortunate start for the Dallas Cowboys, who fell 19-10 to the hated Houston Texans in the latter's first regular-season game.
Ever.
The Texans' plan was to ride the creaming wave of momentum of playing in Reliant Field and soar to victory. Unfortunately, the Cowboys were bombshelled by both the Texans' "offense" and the relentless defensive pressure on QB Quincy "the Answer?" Carter. There were few bright spots -- the snarling play of Le'Roi Glover and the sure hands of rookie wideout Antonio Bryant. It didn't help that the ESPN crew of Dan Patrick, that punter guy whose name I forgot, and Joe Notre-Dame-Changed-My-Name-To-Be-Cute did its best to perform the sports broadcasting equivalent of "not sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky" in Houston. You'd have thought the Texans had 5 Super Bowl trophies already in the case.
Just because I'm bored and beyond furious, I'm going to be everybody's Chris Mortenson and predict that Bob Stoops will leave OU for the Cowboys.
Here are some choice quotes from the readership:
Cowboys' Correspondent Simon Torres (F'00):
"Listen, it was a tough and unnecessary loss. It's
one game, though, and a
game that most teams in the league would have been
hard-pressed to win
going away given how fired up Houston and their
fans were and the state of
most teams, which is mediocre. The one good thing
that I can take from it
is that Dallas really beat themselves. I think
this is less about talent
(except at QB...the drought continues) than it is
about making mistakes
that for the most part can be corrected. Watching
Dallas all preseason, I
can tell you they are better than they looked last
night. Can they beat
half the teams in the league? Yep. Will they?
Lord knows. I think they
can beat TN in Dallas. The other two? Less likely.
We'll see how shit
shakes out by the time the underwhelming G-men come
to town...."
Giants' Correspondent Peter Renz (C'00):
"3 weeks? this is going to be over in 1! quincy, hit
the showers! You know, the funny thing is i didnt intend to use
that email to be a
"Giants are great, Dallas sucks" type email. but
apparently i hit a nerve.
good thing your dogs are 1500 hundred miles away.
you must be really
disheartened too if your first retort is " don't
they have spellchecker in
email programs?" what next, are you going to attack
my grammer? go for it.
apparently you got more time on your hands than i
thought. as for you
saying that the giants played as poorly as the
cowboys did last night, well
i think you had a few TOO many beers thursday if
you are going to make that
comparison. after week one, i still believe the
giants can go 8-8. as for
the cowboys, i would be surprised if they win a
game by the time the giants
come to town in october. if you think you are going
to beat TN or the rams
or Phily at their places...i would say that you are
being a little overly
optimistic."
More Simon:
"By the way, disregard everything I say. I am
bitter and angry."
Well, at least Tiffany (F'00) is a pro cheerleader.
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Meanwhile, Pride's All That Matters Top 5 rumbled along nicely. The headliner was the Day of Crimson Rage down in Norman, OK, as ATM-#2 Oklahoma scored 2 TDs in the final 2:11 of the game to rally past a probation-slapped but hungry Alabama Crimson Tide by a 37-27 tally. The Tide came out with guns blazing in Norman, opening the game with an onsides-kick and furiously overcoming an early 23-3 deficit with a fake field goal to go up 27-23. However, OU churned out a drive for the ages and forced a decisive turnover to seal the win.
The Duel of the Floridas degenerated from marquee matchup to pitch-and-catch scrimmage, as the ATM-#1 Miami Hurricanes crushed Florida 41-16 at the Swamp in Gainesville, FL. The Canes established a clear line between the nation's best college team and everybody else. The Canes have both the offensive line, running game, clutch receiving, and vital secondary play to overwhelm the nation.
Texas A&M's defense saved the day again for the umpteenth time, holding the Pitt Panthers to 12 points and bagging 8 sacks in a 14-12 win over the Panthers at Heinz "57" Field. Derek "The Hard Workin'" Farmer scored on 2 short TDs for the Ags, who looked really good on defense.
posted by
Lorenzo at 9/09/2002 10:52:00 PM
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