rc3.org Rafe Colburn on software development (and other topics)
Understanding offensive football in two paragraphs
Let’s say you are a casual football fan who doesn’t really understand how football strategy works. Chris Brown explains the purpose of every offensive scheme in two paragraphs:
With 11 players to each side, every play — but particularly run plays — often comes down to how the offense does or does not account for one or two particular defenders. In the modern NFL, if all of an offense’s players block their counterparts on a running play, the defense will have two defenders unaccounted for: The counterpart for the running back carrying the ball and the counterpart for the quarterback, who most likely has handed the ball off. Good quarterbacks like Peyton Manning seek to control their counterpart by faking a play-action pass, so that a deep safety must stand in the middle of the field.
But the ballcarrier still has a counterpart. NFL offenses work extremely hard to dictate who that guy will be — with motion, different blocking schemes, and even using wide receivers to block interior defenders — but at some point the math is the math. Until the quarterback is a threat, the math will always work against the offense. But spread coaches, without subjecting their quarterbacks to undue brutality, have learned to change the calculus.
That’s from an article on how the New York Jets will use Tim Tebow, but if you understand those two paragraphs, you will understand more about football than most people who watch it all day every Sunday.
The wealth gap and the NBA lockout
Malcolm Gladwell on the wealth gap:
It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame.
From a piece that defies summarization on how a real estate developer purchased the New Jersey Nets NBA team as part of a plan to acquire and develop a coveted piece of prime real estate in Brooklyn. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing.
March Madness dorkiness
As you may or may not know, the NCAA Tournament starts this weekend, and people around you are probably doing their best to predict the winners of all of the games in the tournament. Most years I join one (or more) pools, but I don’t watch enough college basketball to make educated guesses about who will win each game. This year, I wrote a program to do it for me.
I started with Ken Pomeroy’s team ratings. Here’s his explanation for how the system works:
My ratings produce a number that actually means something–it’s the chance of beating an average D-I team on a neutral floor. For instance, Michigan’s current rating of .8006 means that the Wolverines would win 8 out of 10 games against the average D-I team. Every March, I borrow Bill James’ log5 formula to take these ratings and compute probabilities for each team to win its conference tournament.
I’m not sure how the log5 formula got its name, but it’s fairly intuitive. Think of a coin with one side labeled “win” and the other side labeled “loss.” The chance of the coin landing on “win” is the team’s rating. Log5 is derived from the probability that a team’s coin will land on win and its opponent’s coin will land on loss. (If they land on the same side, you re-flip.)
My script takes the source from Pomeroy’s ratings page and reads in all of the teams and their ratings, and then picks a random winner for each game based on the log5 comparison of Pomeroy’s ratings. Here’s the output for a hypothetical Final Four the script generated:
FINAL FOUR
Maryland has a 45% chance of beating Syracuse
Winner: Syracuse
Kentucky has a 56% chance of beating Baylor
Winner: Kentucky
NATIONAL CHAMPION
Syracuse has a 51% chance of beating Kentucky
Winner: Kentucky
The script has no way of knowing which teams will upset higher seeded opponents, other than by giving teams that Pomeroy’s system likes a better chance of winning, but it should pick roughly the right number of upsets based on the odds.
I’ve uploaded the script to a repository named bracketologist on GitHub if you want to play with it. It’s written in Ruby.
How video games train football players
Chris Suellentrop has a fun article in Wired about how playing video games is creating a superior generation of football players. I think football players can learn more from simulations than most other athletes because football players have to think so much, and because they play fewer games. A lot of playing football is looking at how the other team has lined up and figuring out what they’re going to do. You can learn a lot about that by playing a realistic simulation. Sports like basketball and baseball are more about physical reactions, less about planning on the fly, so I’d expect that players of those sports benefit less.
Commodifying Moneyball
The challenge for Bloomberg is to create software that is better, faster and more visually useful than what rivals offer to help develop players and predict their performances. A demonstration of Bloomberg’s software showed dazzlingly colorful graphics and an easy way to plot statistics and compare players in complex combinations.
The developers say that after studying rival software makers, they can do more and do it better.
From an article in the New York Times, Bloomberg Technology Embraces Baseball. Moneyball was really a book about identifying and exploiting undervalued assets. The main thing that has changed since the book was published is that players are valued much more accurately than they were when the A’s were beating teams with higher payrolls.
How World Cup seeding works
The system by which World Cup qualifying teams are seeded and assigned to groups is more interesting than you might think. Nate Silver explains how the system works and which teams are winners and losers going into the drawing this weekend.
Over the years I’ve seen lots of complaining about the group assignments various teams have gotten, but never an explanation of how they work. The ways FIFA intentionally sets things up to benefit the host country are particularly interesting.
Which analysis is worth paying for?
Last night offered a perfect illustration of one of the many reasons newspaper journalism is in trouble. In last night’s game between the Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots, the Patriots, up 6 points, went for it on fourth and 2 with 2:08 left in the game. They failed to make the first down, and Peyton Manning took the Colts in for the score, winning the game 35-34.
Let’s look at the analysis offered by a major metropolitan daily, the Houston Chronicle.
Here’s their NFL reporter, John McClain:
I still can’t believe what I just witnessed. Belichick is getting ripped because of his clock management and his unbelievable decision to go for a first down when he should have punted. They didn’t make it, and they gave Peyton Manning the ball at their 29 trailing by six.
And here’s Jerome Solomon:
There won’t be a much more exciting finish than this year’s Colts-Patriots. Of course, there won’t be a much more idiotic call than Bill Belichick electing to go for a fourth-and-2 from his own 28-yard line despite his team holding a six-point lead. There is no legitimate excuse for such a move. It wasn’t gutsy, and even if it had worked, it just wasn’t smart. Is the pressure of not winning a Super Bowl in five years starting to wear on the Hooded One?
So, according to them, Belichick is “idiotic” and his decision was “unbelievable,” but neither of those adjectives are accompanied by any analysis whatsoever. On the other hand, here’s some quick postgame analysis from a couple of blogs. First, Smart Football, which analyzed the decision without crunching the numbers:
The goal is, obviously, to maximize your chance of winning. If you punt, your chances of winning are your odds of stopping a streaking Manning who has just torched your defense the whole fourth quarter. He will have to drive about 70 yards. Because of his excellence in clock management, the two-minute warning, and their timeout, time was not really a factor. (The analysis would be much different if there was only, say, a minute left.)
If you go for it, your chance of winning hinges on two outcomes: (a) if you get the first down, you win the game; and (b) if you don’t get it, you still have a chance to stop Manning. So your chance of winning if you go for it is the sum of (a) your chance of converting; and (b) your chance of stopping Manning from the 30 yard line.
Here’s Advanced NFL Stats with the numbers:
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You’d have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats’ 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it’s pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.
Are we really going to miss those guys I quoted at the top?
Get rid of the football helmet
Last month I suggested in a post about concussions in football that it’s football helmets that are the biggest problem. Helmets are ostensibly protective gear, but they’re what enable football players to use their bodies as weapons. Most concussions are caused by helmet to helmet collisions, and those that aren’t are usually caused by the fact that players where enough protective gear to stay out of control. Now Reed Albergotti and Shirley Wang have a story in the Wall Street Journal asking the same kinds of questions. Football with different protective gear would be a different sport, but that may not be so bad.
Concussions and football
One of the oddest things I’m thankful for in life was that I didn’t love football enough to be really good at it. I played football in junior high and high school, but I never really loved it. To be more specific, I love the game of football, but I was never able to turn off the part of my brain that constantly does cost/benefit analysis. I have known for a long time that the more years you spend on the football field, the more you have to deal with joint pain and stiffness later in life, but it’s only been recently that people have started talking about the huge concussion problem that afflicts former football players.
I remember first hearing about the long term effects of multiple concussions when former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster died in 2002. It was also discussed when Merell Hoge was found wandering around his neighborhood, suffering from memory loss. HBO Real Sports has done a number of pieces on concussions, forcing the NFL to address the issue. And then this week, 60 Minutes ran a piece on concussions, and Malcolm Gladwell writes in the New Yorker on the similarities between football and dog fighting.
Every football fan should think about the moral implications of taking enjoyment in watching a spectacle that is literally killing the competitors. I love football, but I wonder if I should support it, given the injuries inflicted on the players.
I also wonder why we never hear about what is to me the real root of the problem — hard plastic helmets and face masks. Players make helmet to helmet contact because the shell and padding give the feeling of impunity.
Back in the good old days, players wore leather helmets like the one pictured here. I can guarantee you that these guys didn’t smash into each other face first or have hard helmet to helmet contact on every play. Players would hate it if the protective equipment were scaled down in football, because it would take a lot of the speed and recklessness out of the game, but it would increase the safety in a big way.
Learning to love an upwardly mobile coach
So the big news for me this weekend was that the University of Houston football team beat Oklahama State (then the number 5 team in the country) 45-35 on the road. It was their first win on the road against a top 5 team since 1984. For one weekend, my team was the toast of college football and the subject of widespread discussion. It’s not every day that UH leads the highlight real on the college football scoreboard show. Unfortunately, in the wake of the win, some people are saying unhelpful things that need to be addressed.
Houston Chronicle sports columnist Richard Justice wrote a column on Saturday congratulating the team on its big win, and in the process gave the school and its alumni some really, really bad advice. The context here is that UH has a second year coach, Kevin Sumlin, who’s doing a great job. The team went 8-5 last year and won its first bowl game in 27 years, and just won its biggest game in 25 years this weekend. Things are going well. So his advice is to do whatever is necessary to keep Sumlin around:
UH has found one of those special coaches in Kevin Sumlin, and now it’s a matter of holding onto him. UH should be aggressive, not reaction. Sign him. Now. Offer him 10 years or 15 years or whatever he wants. UH president Renu Khator wants a Tier One university. She wants money for research and facilities and all the rest. She knows a winning football team can do wonders for a school in terms of enrollment, donations and exposure. At the moment, Kevin Sumlin is about the best ambassador UH could have.
Let me say that I would love for Sumlin to stay at UH forever. When UH was looking for a coach, I came up with a set of criteria for the kind of coach I’d like to see them hire, and Sumlin fit every one of those criteria. But UH cannot put all of its eggs in the Sumlin basket. I think Sumlin has a real chance to take the UH program as far as it can go, but Sumlin is an ambitious young coach, and I’m sure that once he’s taken UH as far as he can, he’ll want to pursue opportunities to take his own career further.
What I worry about with Justice’s column is that it risks convincing UH fans that things won’t be OK if Sumlin does move on. It’s the UH program, not the Kevin Sumlin Program. It wasn’t the Art Briles program either. Briles, the coach before Sumlin, came to UH, took the team to four bowl games, and was hired by Baylor at twice his old salary. Of course he took the job. And that was OK, Briles did a great job for UH for four years, and put the program in position to hire an even better coach. Thanks, Art! Things are working out well for him and for UH.
For a program like UH, this is an approach that will work. Every program in college football with a coach under the age of 65 is subject to having their coach hired away, either by a bigger, richer program or by the NFL. So counting on building around a particular coach for the next 15 or 20 years is not a realistic strategy. What UH needs to focus on is hiring well and getting the most out of the coaches that they do hire in the time that they have them.
This is the thing that worries me most about UH’s having lost athletic director Dave Maggard earlier in the year. He was great at hiring football coaches. Art Briles was a high school football coach who had spent a couple of years as running back coach at a school that never runs the football. Kevin Sumlin was co-offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, a great program with a great head coach, but he wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list of head coaching prospects. And yet Maggard saw something in both of them, and UH has gone from the dregs of Division I football to being the country’s media darling, at least for a week.
That’s the strategy UH has to pursue. Remaining a place where coaches can make their bones and advance their own careers is the most a school in a non-BCS conference can hope for. At one time, Nick Saban was head coach at Toledo. Rich Rodriguez was head coach at Glenville State. Urban Meyer was head coach at Bowling Green. Those guys are all making many millions of dollars now but they started out somewhere. UH needs to focus on being the very best stepping stone it can be.
And UH supporters have to learn to be the kind of fans who don’t get their feelings hurt when coaches take a better offer. Many UH alumni were so depressed by losing Art Briles that they wanted to hire former coach Jack Pardee, who is 73 years old and has been out of coaching for 13 years, because they knew he’d be loyal. Loyalty is an elusive commodity in college football — Pardee himself left in 1990 after only three years for a job in the NFL.
UH fans, enjoy the team’s success, and worry about the coaching situation if and when Coach Sumlin gets that offer he can’t refuse. And when he’s coaching UCLA in the Rose Bowl or OU in the Fiesta Bowl, you’ll be able to say, “I remember when …”
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