 Donnie |
 The Mascot |
Wahrheit | |
| Seattle (+8) vs Green Bay |
Green Bay | Green Bay | Green Bay |
| Jacksonville (+11.5) vs New England |
Jacksonville | New England | New England |
| San Diego (+9) vs Indianapolis |
San Diego | Indianapolis | Indianapolis |
| New York (+7.5) vs Dallas |
New York | Dallas | New York |
| Record so far | 6-2 | 2-6 | 6-2 |
I think that we can ascertain that humans are better at picking games than eggs at this point.
If you choose the right expert’s picks to bet on, you’ll win money this weekend! (Maybe.)
Donnie |
The Mascot |
Wahrheit | |
| Seattle (+8) vs Green Bay |
Green Bay | Green Bay | Green Bay |
| Jacksonville (+11.5) vs New England |
Jacksonville | New England | New England |
| San Diego (+9) vs Indianapolis |
San Diego | Indianapolis | Indianapolis |
| New York (+7.5) vs Dallas |
New York | Dallas | New York |
| Record so far | 2-2 | 1-3 | 4-0 |
In college football (American), a ton of people start calling every year for a playoff system to replace the BCS. (Quick primer: usually, a champion of a sports league is determined by a playoff between teams who did the best during the season. Instead, the BCS determines the top two teams by a combination of human and computer polls, essentially creating a 1 game playoff.)
What people don’t think about is that a playoff system is not very likely to crown the best team in the country as champion.
Let’s take an 8-team playoff, for example, and have University of A to be “objectively” the best team in the country. And let’s assume the UA team is so good, it will defeat other elite ( top 8 ) teams 75% of the time. UA will have to win three games in a row, which it has a 42% chance of doing. This speaks highly of UA, but their chances of being recognized as champions are still worse than a coin flip.
The 75% number is higher than can be expected. 60% may be closer to realistic, giving the best team a 21% chance of winning the crown.
If that’s the system people want, then by all means they can clamor for it. As long as they recognize it’s unlikely that the best team in the country will be known as the champions. (College basketball is even worse for determining the #1 team, but everyone likes gambling on March Madness so no one brings it up).
My biggest beefs with the BCS system are:
1. Human pollsters, who cannot have knowledge of every single game played, cannot possibly hope to compare all teams adequately, and have ingrained biases, are given greater weight than the computers.
2. The computer polls are forced not to considered margin of victory in their calculations. This can throw them out of whack, as this story on Jeff Sagarin’s rankings indicates (at one point, North Dakota State was ranked in the top 20). I guess for some reason, the BCS thought that maybe these programmers wouldn’t have developed algorithms that made sure a 52-point victory didn’t mean more than a 35-point victory.
In other words, the BCS has to give computers less weight, because their own rules make computers less accurate in predicting the top two teams.
If it were up to me, I’d eliminate computer poll restrictions, and completely ignore the humans. The only check would be at the end of the year, a council would get together that could veto the computers’ selection if 75% agreed, at which point the human polls would be used to determine the game.
This is mostly off-the-cuff, so blast away with holes in this thinking.
Donnie |
The Mascot |
|
| Washington (+4) vs Seattle |
Seattle | Washington |
| Jacksonville (-1) vs Pittsburgh |
Jacksonville | Pittsburgh |
| New York (+3) vs Tampa Bay |
Tampa Bay | Tampa Bay |
| Tennessee (+9) vs San Diego |
Tennessee | San Diego |
| Record | 2-2 | 1-3 |
I am so glad I don’t bet on sports.
Speak for yourself.
Wahrheit went 4-0.
I still can’t believe you told people we could win them money last week. Now everyone can see you can’t make good judgments. You’re the kind of guy that would choose Velma over Daphne. We can’t trust someone like that.
Whuh? You mean from Scooby Doo?
Yar, if someone asked you which one you’d rather date, and for normal people (ie, not you) Velma’s just too, well, ugly.
Look, this blog is weird enough without getting into conversations about which cartoon characters are cuter.
I like that Esurance chick.
OK, fine! You’re a cartoon, it makes sense for you! It doesn’t for me!
*Sigh* I guess you’re going to want my picks for next week?
By tomorrow night, if you can.
As long as you don’t lord it over me if I go 0-4 next week.
Sure thing.
You really wouldn’t choose Velma, would you?
Er…yeah…probably I would.
Seriously? *Blanches* OK, that makes things easy…my picks for next week are the opposite of yours.
Tired of paying money to those handicappers who can’t win you money anyway? (”Call Jonathan Rock Sports now to get the Rock Hard Pick of the week. He feels you can move on this game like it’s already been played!”) Unlike those guys, the experts at Liquid Egg Product give away ALL their NFL playoff picks on their website FOR FREE!
The problem is we couldn’t agree on a lot of the picks. So, uh, just go with the guy you think knows more about football.
Donnie |
The Mascot |
|
| Washington (+4) vs Seattle |
Seattle | Washington |
| Jacksonville (-1) vs Pittsburgh |
Jacksonville | Pittsburgh |
| New York (+3) vs Tampa Bay |
Tampa Bay | Tampa Bay |
| Tennessee (+9) vs San Diego |
Tennessee | San Diego |
| Super Bowl Winner |
Jacksonville | New England |
Oh, yeah; forgot about this commercial. “Unstoppable. Eli Manning Is. So is his Citizen Eco-Drive.”
Eli Manning threw 3 passes in the second half of yesterday’s game. 2 of them were interceptions.
As BDK has already noted, the Dolphins won their first game of the year, beating the Baltimore Ravens 22-16 in overtime.
I first saw this news landing in Houston this afternoon. It actually put me in a bit of a foul mood (???), so I listened to my hip-hop/rap CD while driving home. (There are two major things which will motivate me to listen to rap: being in a bad/aggressive mood or highway driving. The confluence of the two factors meant my choice of music was a foregone conclusion.)
There is little else to say, except my interest in the rest of the NFL season has taken a nosedive. The only thing to look forward to is hoping the Texans can finish above .500 for the first time in franchise history.
Haven’t voted yet? Cast your vote for the 2007 Liquid Egg Product on the Face Award! December 18th is the last day to vote!
This season, Marty Booker leads the Dolphins in receiving with 430 yards. Who’s gained the second most for the Dolphins?
a. Derek Hagan
b. Justin Peelle
c. Ted Ginn Jr.
d. Chris Chambers, who played only 6 games, then was traded
e. Ronnie Brown, who isn’t even a WR and was injured for the year in game 7
The road to history remains paved: the Dolphins fell to 0-13, losing by 21 on the road. The Patriots improved to 13-0, winning by 21 at home.
The Fins have looked bad enough the last couple weeks to give me a lot more faith in them (and these games were considered “winnable”. Ha!):
…rookie Dolphins starter John Beck was untouched in the pocket when the ball slipped out of his hand and fell directly into Wilson’s arms, allowing the converted receiver to score his second defensive touchdown this year….
[Dolphins backup QB] Lemon threw two interceptions including one picked off by Whitner after the quarterback attempted a play-action fake with no one in his backfield. [emphasis mine]
But now’s not the time to get overconfident.
The post’s title is a reference to a muffed call by the Dolphins’ radio play-by-play guy some time back; I think it was earlier this season. It was the Dolphins’ opponent that had scored a TD, so he had to quickly cover himself by slapping the “against them” at the end.
Or so I hear.
If anyone knows where I can find an audio clip of that call, please let me know; you will gain my eternal gratitude.
Last night, on my way to Fry’s Electronics, a radio program was discussing the relative safety/non-safety of mixed martial arts competitions (MMA). The two hosts, one of them an MMA’er himself, referred to a study that found MMA has three times as many head injuries and concussions as boxing. The study consisted of watching hundreds of matches that took place during a decade period, and recording the results, so it’s not exactly like there’s a huge margin for error.
Two of the first three callers called in attacking the data, saying they don’t see how it could be true. The hosts must have supressed the sighs that I expressed out loud. It’s human nature, I suppose; if we don’t like the implications of data, we tend attack the data. That’s not to say that data-gathering methods shouldn’t be scrutinized and to make sure the research is done properly, but it shouldn’t be the automatic place we go when we don’t like the results.
The hosts mentioned a better way to defend MMA would be to look at fatality rates compared with a plethora of sports. For example, horse racing and college football both have a greater percentage of participants dying than MMA.
You could also go the route of emphasizing the fighters are well-aware that their sport is dangerous, and it’s a risk they’re willing to take. And reiterate that how brutal any sport appears does not necessarily correlate with actual health risks.
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