Tag: sports

Bad news for Boston

Tom Brady is going to be suspended by the NFL and Bill Simmons is going to be fired by ESPN.

Tom Brady will be the highest-profile player ever suspended in the 96-year history of the NFL. Roger Goodell’s decision is expected to be announced next week, and it is no longer a matter of if the NFL commissioner will suspend Brady, but for how long he will suspend him. In conversations I’ve had with several key sources who always have a good sense of what goes on at 345 Park Ave., there is little doubt that Goodell considers Brady’s role in DeflateGate a serious violation.

The NFL is convinced, according to sources, that connecting all the
dots of the evidence supplied by Ted Wells leads to one conclusion: Brady cheated.

Peter King made a good point about the fact that most of the evidence of Brady’s guilt is circumstantial: ex-Patriot Aaron Hernandez was recently found guilty of murder and convicted to life in prison on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Speaking of Roger Goodell, one imagines that he might have had a little something to do with ESPN’s otherwise inexplicable decision to rid themselves of The Sports Guy:

When Bill Simmons learned on Friday morning that his nearly 15-year-old relationship with ESPN was over, he responded with something uncharacteristic: silence. He
said nothing to his 3.7 million followers on Twitter. He did not pick
up the phone or answer requests for comment. His agent and publicist
followed his sounds of silence.

Simmons’s
decision not to respond to the announcement by John Skipper, the
president of ESPN, that his contract was not being renewed was
surprising. He had built an empire on having his voice heard, often
quite loudly, in a variety of roles: columnist, podcaster, editor in
chief of the website Grantland, television analyst, and one of the
creators of the “30 for 30” documentary series.

Simmons
seemed to have been blindsided by the timing of ESPN’s decision, which
came more than four months before his contract is to expire, at the end
of September. An ESPN executive, who was not authorized to speak
publicly, said Skipper had told Simmons’s agent, James Dixon, that a
decision had been made to end the relationship and that an announcement
was coming. But Skipper did not call Simmons before going public, the
ESPN executive said.

In an interview Friday morning, Skipper said: “I’ve decided that I’m not
going to renew his contract. We’ve been talking to Bill, and it was
clear that we weren’t going to get to the terms, so we were better off
focusing on transition.”

 I’m actually glad to see Simmons leaving ESPN. He’ll not only do fine without them, I expect him to be more interesting again once he’s free of the corporate leash. Don’t fear freedom, Bill!

UPDATE: This is apparently the phrase that sealed Simmons’s fate.

 I think it’s pathetic. Roger Goodell has handled so many things so
poorly that it’s reached a point now where you have something like this,
where it’s taken four months to release the report, and he knew
everything that was in it. He knows the results before the report is
released to the public, and yet doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to
do anything about it until he gauges the public reaction.

I’m wondering if it was less the criticism of Goodell and more the reference to manhood being a positive thing that more offended the ESPN executives who cut him loose. One thing is clear. They did NOT like him: “Ding Dong the witch is dead.” (That’s how one ESPN staffer describes the vibe in Bristol.) And it is perfectly clear that while his politics lean left, he is no SJW.

Boys vs women

So tonight Ender’s team played a friendly against a women’s 1st league team. Ender’s team are juniors, which means they are between the ages of 15 and 18; essentially a high school varsity team. 1st league is the top female level below the professional teams.

Out of curiosity, I timed it. Despite the boys mostly showboating and ball-hogging against a defense with 9 players in the box, the boys nearly had a tap-in goal in the first 30 seconds. And it took 9 minutes before the ball crossed midfield in possession of the women. It was 8-0 at halftime, at which point the coaches put some of our first team players who had finished their practice in with the women, and had some of the players switch teams. That made it a little more interesting for everyone.

Ender played the second half for the boys and only let in one goal, but it was against one of the first team men. So, when you hear people trying to tell you that women can compete with men in anything athletic, you’ll know they’re not to be taken seriously.

And to put it in perspective, this was the junior team that lost 5-1 to the men’s first team. Which lost to our veterans team. It’s not that the women couldn’t play, they were actually pretty sound both technically and tactically. But they just played at a much slower speed. You’d see a woman with a 10-foot lead on the ball, and yet the boy would still get to the ball first. The boys didn’t really use their strength or size advantage, merely the speed differential was sufficient to render the game uncompetitive.

Back on the field

Soccer has started up again at the higher levels. Last night Ender’s team scrimmaged the first team on the main field while we veterans held a normal practice on the practice field. We ended early enough for me to catch the last quarter of the game; Ender played the second half and did pretty well. He only let in two goals, one of which should have been called for offsides, and while he was a bit shaky with the offseason rust, he did better than the starting goalie, who let in three, one of which was a disaster. Needs some work on his goal kicks and distributions, but the punting was good.

I’m rusty myself. Six shots, and all but one wide by inches. Everything is going a little to the right, so I need to adjust for that. The ball control is better than I’d expected, and while all my offseason running and stretching has helped – I can actually walk today, contra SB’s expectations – there is no substitute for the actual sprint-and-stop of gameplay.

It’s clear that Ender isn’t going to take over for the starter this season, he’s a good guy who is three years older and has earned his place. At this point, Ender is better off playing spot duty and second halves when the game is under control than dealing with all the pressure from still-immature players who blame the goalie for permitting scores after complete defensive breakdowns.

The first team won 5-1, and they did so without breaking a sweat. It was clearly humiliating to the cocky younger guys, who are of American high school varsity age and all seemed to be three inches taller than they were when the fall season started. Ender did not take it at all well when I mildly observed that when we veterans played the first team last fall, we beat them by three goals.

It’s rather amusing. The juniors tend to instinctively treat the veterans as if we’re old and past it until they notice that the first team players, who are all in their 20s, tend to regard us as older comrades. The kids don’t know that most of of the first-teamers have played with us from time to time because when we’re short; we’re allowed to field up to two younger players when we have less than 14 men.

The one thing the young guys never seem to figure out is that if you’re still playing soccer 25 years after you started playing at the first team level, you were probably pretty damn good at it back in the day. Our entire team is probably as talented as the average of the best four junior players, we’re just older, fatter, balder, and slower than they are. Technically, I’m one of the worst players on my team and there isn’t a defender on the juniors team that could shut me down. Combine that with the fact that we’re more experienced, more muscular, and some of our players have been playing together for 30 years, and they don’t have a chance. But they never put two and two together until they go up against the old men on the field.

It was the same at my old club, which competed at a higher level. When the club held a tournament of champions for its 75th Anniversary, and invited back all the teams that had ever won promotion for a 7-on-7 tournament, the team that won was not either of the two most recently promoted first teams, but my veteran’s team that had won two successive promotions the previous two years. For me, though, the most memorable thing was seeing a first team from 40 years before, and the frail, white-haired, white-bearded goalie who at 65 was still better than Ender or the starting junior’s goalie. I wasn’t surprised to hear that after playing for our first team, he’d gone on to play a few years for a championship team at the professional level.

It’s all part of the process, the circle of soccer. The juniors are growing up, some of them at different rates than others. The exposure to the first team at the end of last year was important, because it made it clear to them that all their idiotic pecking order games are over. At the first team level, nobody gives a damn about much except how well you play and what you have to contribute to the team. The kid who attacked and exchanged bloody noses with Ender in the first practice last fall is now polite and respectful, and as Ender noted, almost salutes when I address him. He and Ender aren’t friends, but they play well together, the kid is a solid defender who takes his job of protecting his goalie seriously. Conflict isn’t always a bad thing.

There are still some problem children. The tall and arrogant sweeper took the ball last night despite Ender calling for it as he came out, then told Ender that he didn’t give a fuck when Ender chewed him out for it. Their coach, who is a first team player and the first good coach most of these kids have had in their entire careers, shrugged and told Ender to simply go for the ball and take the sweeper out the next time he doesn’t listen. He’s one of those big, athletic kids who needs to be taken down a few times before he’s able to pay attention; I’m going to suggest to our captain that we scrimmage the juniors for just that purpose. The kid has three inches on me, but I’ve got 30 pounds of muscle on him; I figure that after I blow by him a few times, score a couple of goals, and put him down on the ground once or twice, he’ll be in more of a mood to listen.

Justice belatedly prevails

It doesn’t matter what you think of Adrian Peterson. It doesn’t matter if you think he should be hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of overdisciplining his son, for which he has already been dealt the legal consequences. All that matters is the basic legal principle that the worse commissioner in NFL history, Roger Goodell, violated, the principle of retroactivity:

The 16-page ruling from Judge David Doty that reinstates Vikings running back Adrian Peterson turns on one fairly simple conclusion:  The NFL cannot apply its new personal conduct policy retroactively.

“There is no dispute that the Commissioner imposed Peterson’s discipline under the New Policy,” Judge Doty wrote. “It is also undisputed that in the [Ray] Rice arbitration, the hearing officer unequivocally recognized that the New Policy cannot be applied retroactively, notwithstanding the Commissioner’s broad discretion in meting out punishment under the CBA. . . . Consistent with that recognition, the Commissioner has acknowledged that he did not have the power to retroactively apply the New Policy: ‘The policy change was forward looking because the League is “required to provide proper notice.”‘ . . . Yet, just two weeks later, the Commissioner retroactively applied the New Policy to Peterson.”

In other words, Judge Doty concluded that the NFL was making it up as went along.

This is further evidence that the Sports Guy was right and Goodell is a dishonest man who is overmatched by his responsibilities, overly concerned with PR details that he should leave well alone, and fundamentally out of control. As for those who feign concern for women and children, and claim that the likes of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson should be prevented from making a living, how can anyone possibly pretend that removing the ability of those who support them to do so going to help the victims of these petty domestic crimes.

And they are petty. It may, depending upon the circumstances, be wrong to punch a woman once. It is certainly too harsh to spank a child until he bleeds. But in a nation where not one single banker has been jailed despite the theft of literal trillions of dollars for a wide variety of shamelessly dishonest acts, it is ludicrous to pretend that these are the serious crimes that demand more significant punishments.

Addio, Alabama

Forget the Middle East and Europe. Let’s consider something truly controversial. Ohio State is poised to destroy Alabama’s recruiting dynasty:

The state of Ohio is particularly strong in the 2016, with 14 players currently ranked as at least 4-star prospects. And while the national prospects who have already committed to or have shown strong interest in the Buckeyes is certainly encouraging for Meyer, it’s not just the talent working in Ohio State’s favor.

As it currently stands, the Buckeyes are slated to lose 13 scholarship players to graduation at the end of next season. Between transfers and what looks like several underclassmen who have a chance to declare early for the 2016 NFL draft, that number could very well double, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility to think Ohio State could have close to 30 scholarships available in its 2016 class.

Factor in a 2015 schedule that sets up to keep the Buckeyes’ infomercial playing until at least late-November, and it becomes clear that Alabama’s five-year run of top-ranked recruiting classes is suddenly in danger. Meyer managed to defeat Nick Saban on the field in last season’s Sugar Bowl, and he’s well on his way to picking up another win over his rival next February.

Can you… can you hear the chants? B1G! B1G!

This is good news

In light of the terrible first-round games this year and the fact that a team with a losing record not only made the playoffs, but made it to the second round, the NFL appears to be backing away from the stupid idea of further expanding the number of teams that make them:

At his pre-Super Bowl press conference last year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that he thought there were a lot of benefits to expanding the postseason.

Among the benefits he cited were a “more competitive” league with better matchups as the regular season nears its conclusion and “more excitement” for the league’s fans. Talks about adding two teams to the postseason never came to a vote with the owners last spring and there was debate about the need to involve the NFLPA, but Goodell continued to sound optimistic about it when it came up in 2014.

He didn’t sound so optimistic about it during Friday’s pre-Super Bowl press conference.

“The possibility of expanding the playoffs has been a topic over the last couple of years,” Goodell said. “There are positives to it, but there are concerns as well, among them being the risk of diluting our regular season and conflicting with college football in January.”

The latter concern wasn’t aired last year and the better matchups that Goodell mentioned would seem to run counter to the risk of diluting the regular season, so it seems significant that they were specified while the positives were left undiscussed. Owners like John Mara of the Giants and Art Rooney II have come down against the idea since it was broached last year and Goodell’s tone may suggest he’s heard likewise from other owners heading into this offseason.

There is absolutely no good reason to expand the playoffs. If anything, they should be further limited; half the teams in the first round were uncompetitive and didn’t belong there. The games are really only reliably interesting at the divisional round anyhow.

Regardless, the current system did manage to not only match up the two best teams, but clarify a pecking order that had been modestly in doubt with regards to the Packers, Cowboys, and Seahawks, and Broncos, Ravens, Colts, and Patriots. It is working, even if the first weekend tends to be a bit boring, so for once Goodell should stop his incessant meddling and stop trying to fix what is quite clearly working.

Fortunately, the fact that the league’s more traditional and influential owners are against it should suffice to kill the dumb idea for the rest of Goodell’s bumbling reign.

Super Bowl XLIX

This would be the Super Bowl open post. I’m standing by my pre-playoff prediction of New England over Seattle.

UPDATE: 14-14 at half. New England should be winning this, but Carroll’s gutsy coaching is keeping Seattle in it. Great call with six seconds left; that’s plenty of time for a quick shot into the end zone, then kicking the field goal.

But Belichick are making Seattle pay for Lane’s injury. And Wright may be a great cover linebacker, but that’s not good enough to stay with Gronk. Bad matchups on both the Gronkowski and Mathews touchdowns.

UPDATE 2: Patriots 28, Seahawks 24. Crazy game, but fun. Seattle absolutely had it, but Pete Carroll had to get cute instead of simply doing the obvious and winning the game.

A true team player

I picked Belichick and Brady to beat Seattle in the Super Bowl before the playoffs started. I’m not changing that prediction now barring Brady being ill at gametime; this is their last hurrah, they know it, they’ve got a healthy Gronk, and Belichick has had two weeks to prepare. That being said, I really like Richard Sherman, as for all his flash and attitude, he is far more a hard-working team player than many a fan and media favorite.

I was lucky to be drafted by Pete and John, who
assembled around me one of the most talented and diverse defensive
backfields in football. More than I want individual success, I want to
be remembered as part of the Legion of Boom, which is why all of us are
on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine this week. In football,
unlike various other sports, it takes a total team effort to be
successful.

I can’t perform at
this level without Kam Chancellor, the lion of the Legion, the guy who
once picked off Peyton Manning by ducking to make it appear as though he
couldn’t leap for the ball. He’s also the guy we go to with our
problems, who doles out advice about a lot of issues that arise outside
of football.

I can’t perform at this level without Earl Thomas—The Example—who can
show you how to do the right thing better than he can explain it. When
everybody else is joking, he’s locked in, a reminder of what we’re here
for.

I can’t perform at this level without Byron Maxwell, our chill guy,
oblivious to the pressure. I remember him joking around with Carroll in
our rookie camp, saying that if he was allowed to play nickel he’d choke
out the slot receiver. Carroll relented and Maxwell delivered, only to
get injured in camp. Now he’s the corner on the other side, and his
consistently high level of play makes QBs’ decisions very difficult.

I can’t perform at this level without Jeremy Lane, the scrappy guy
from Tyler, Texas. Competition brings out the dog in him; just look at
what he’s done to the Packers’ Randall Cobb.

He’s also entirely sound on Roger Goodell. One thing I always pay attention to with regards to public figures is how they are regarded by those closest to them. The men who tend to have the strongest characters are those whose friends and colleagues are loyal and stand by them even when the heat is on. The fact that Sherman, the most famous and outspoken member of the Legion of Boom, doesn’t pretend to be the top dog but instead defers to Chancellor as the leader, helps explain why a collection of fairly low draft picks – one first-rounder, two fifth-rounders, and two sixth-rounders – evolved into the most fearsome defensive secondary of all time.

It’s strange how many people involved in team sports insist on focusing exclusively on individual talents when the evidence clearly indicates that how well you operate as part of a unit is more important for ultimate team success than your individual talents. I suspect it may not be an accident that at least two of the Legion of Boom members, including its leader, are devout Christians. And although Sherman doesn’t come right out and say it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the original plan had been to put him on the cover alone.

And if the Seahawks do knock off one of the two best pairings of coach and quarterback in NFL history, that will be further testimony to the sum being greater than the whole of the parts. I can honestly say that aside from the original Purple People Eaters and the Buddy Ryan Bears, I haven’t enjoyed watching a defense more than Seattle’s over the last two years. I wasn’t the only one who decided the Super Bowl was over after seeing this hit by Chancellor. Watch the battle between him and Gronkowski for an early clue on how the game will turn out.

Probability and belief

A few days ago, in Probability and the Problem of Life, I pointed out that there is no need to precisely calculate probabilities that we cannot possibly know in order to reach logical conclusions about them. Contra the opinions of the misguided math fetishists, logic is the foundation of math, not the other way around, and we can reach perfectly sound logical conclusions even if we are not able to make precise mathematical determinations or quantifiy all of the various factors involved.

Throughout the course of the discussion, it soon became abundantly clear that those who defend the theory of TENS on probability grounds do not actually believe their own position. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to demonstrate that although the very low probability events to which they appeal are mathematically possible, they are so highly improbable that no sane human being can credibly feign to take seriously, as evidenced by their own daily behavior with regards to other, much more likely events.

WRF3 asked me to identify the precise point at which mathematical possibility and belief part company; I said that for me it was somewhere between 1 in 4,165 and 1 in 17,347,225. The latter are the odds of being dealt four aces twice in succession from two properly shuffled card decks; I would not view that as credibly possible and continue to play poker with a machine that dealt out such hands. The absolute outer limit for even the most credible individual is probably 1 in 72,251,192,125, which would be three such unlikely hands.

But the reality is that for the average individual, the credibility ratio is much lower. Consider the recent statistical evidence of the New England Patriots having systematically cheated by deflating the football since the 2007 season:

While speculation exists that “Deflate Gate” was a one time occurrence, data I introduced last week indicated that the phenomena MAY have been an ongoing, long standing issue for the New England Patriots. Today, that possibility looks as clear as day.

Initially, looking at weather data, I noticed the Patriots performed extremely well in the rain, much more so than they were projected.  I followed that up by looking at the fumble data, which showed regardless of weather or site, the Patriots prevention of fumbles was nearly impossible.  Ironically, both studies saw the same exact starting point:  2007 was the first season where things really changed for the Patriots.  Something started in 2007 which is still on-going today.

I wanted to compare the New England Patriots fumble rate from 2000, when Bill Belichick first arrived in New England, to the rest of the NFL.  Clearly, one thing I found in my prior research was that dome teams fumble substantially less frequently, given they play at least 8+ games out of the elements each year.  To keep every team on a more level playing field, I eliminated dome teams from the analysis, grabbed only regular season games, and defined plays as pass attempts+rushes+times sacked.  The below results also look only at total fumbles, not just fumbles which are lost.  This brought us to the ability to capture touches per fumble.

To really confirm something was dramatically different in New England, starting in 2007 thru present, I compared the 2000-06 time period (when Bill Belichick was their head coach and they won all of their Super Bowls) to the 2007-2014 time period.  The beauty of data is the results speak for themselves:

The data is jaw dropping, and this visual perfectly depicts what happened.  From a more technical perspective, John Candido, a Data Scientist at ZestFinance who is a colleague of mine over at the NFLproject.com website and was also involved in the development of this research, comments:

Based on the assumption that plays per fumble follow a normal distribution, you’d expect to see, according to random fluctuation, the results that the Patriots have gotten since 2007 once in 5842 instances.

Which in layman’s terms means that this result only being a coincidence, is like winning a raffle where you have a 0.0001711874 probability to win. In other words, it’s very unlikely that results this abnormal are only due to the endogenous nature of the game.

Many of the arguments giving the Patriots the benefit of the doubt are evaporating.  While this data does not prove they deflated footballs starting in 2007, we know they were interested in obtaining that ability in 2006. (This is something I found out AFTER I performed the first two analyses, both of which independently found that something changed starting in 2007.)

I was skeptical when I first read the analyst’s theory, because he initially used fumbles lost rather than all fumbles; it is generally believed by football statisticians who have considered the question that fumble recoveries are random. And when fumbles rather than fumbles lost are utilized, the Patriots are considerably less of a radical outlier, although they are the only team that plays outdoors that fumbles as little as a dome team.

My first thought was that the anomaly was more a result of New England’s pass-happy offense than statistical evidence of ball deflation. However, a look at the passing statistics showed that New England was pass-happy as early as 2002, when they threw 601 passes, compared to 582 in 2014, and the fact that their plays per fumble from 07-14 increased so dramatically from 00-06 after the rule change that they requested does tend to confirm the analyst’s original suspicions.

 But my point is not to take a side in the latest New England scandal, only to observe that for the professional statistician, observation of a successful event against 1 in 5,842 odds is sufficient to indicate the results observed are probably not obtained naturally. And while this statistical evidence is not absolute proof (although it is interesting to see that the statistician’s odds are in the range I suggested should preclude belief), it is enough to indicate that the greater part of one’s efforts should be directed at discovering the precise nature and mechanism of the unnatural tampering indicated rather than on the unlikely natural explanation.

“The bottom line is, something happened in New England.  It happened just
before the 2007 season, and it completely changed this team.”

Which brings us back rather to my long-held position contra Mr. Sherlock Holmes: Once you have calculated the sufficiently improbable, you must reconsider your assumptions of the impossible.