The Super Bowl Winner Will Be…

By Blaidd Drwg

…the Denver Broncos.

Sorry Seahawks fans, you won’t win because of one simple factor – you lack a player from Boston College on your roster. Denver has 1.

Think I am joking? Looking at Super Bowls that have occurred in this century, the team with more former BC Eagles on their roster has won 7 times and lost 4 (there were 2 years in which no BC players appeared on either team’s roster). This is actually how I determine who I root for in the Super Bowl (and the playoffs in general) if the Steelers aren’t playing or the Patriots are playing (can’t root for them as a Steelers fan). It has served me pretty well.

What, you expected some deep statistical analysis?

Useless Super Bowl Trivia

By Blaidd Drwg

Interesting but useless: The top 3 passing games by yardage in Super Bowl history all belong to Kurt Warner, with games of 414 yds (SB 34), 377 yds (SB 43) and 365 yds (SB 36). No one else has topped 360 yards in the history of the game.

Even more interesting is that Warner and Craig Morton are the only 2 QB’s to ever start the SB for 2 different teams (Peyton Manning will be #3). They managed to combine to go 1-4 in those starts (Warner 1-1 with the Rams and o-1 with the Cardinals and Morton 0-1 with both the Cowboys and Broncos). Raise you hand if you had any idea that Craig Morton was the starter for any Cowboys Super Bowl (he started SB 5).

When the Mariners Traded Shin Soo Choo

By Blaidd Drwg

I love Rob Neyer. I think he is a great writer and we share many of the same opinions about the game of baseball. He recently wrote about the Shin Soo Choo for Ben Broussard ~~disaster~~ trade in 2006. One of the really cool things about the article is that he actually talked to Bill Bavasi about it. I was surprised by this comment from the former Mariners GM:

When I got there it was made REAL clear they didn’t want any five-year plans … and that I’d get a mulligan in 2004 but, from then on they’d expect consistent improvement toward a postseason. When I say “improvement” I mean relative to our record. So even though we operated under some pressure to tangibly improve on a regular basis, the Choo and Cabrera trades were a product of my own stupidity and good work by the Indians.

When was the last time that a GM admitted that a bad trade was his fault? I give Bavasi credit for laying the blame exactly where it is due. Now if Z would only realize the same thing about the moves he has made…

Bob Costas Angers A Handful Of People. Nobody Notices.

by A.J. Coltrane

You probably missed it. I did too. (This happened on the 6th and I didn’t hear about it on the 15th.) Bob Costas went on the Today show and ruffled some feathers with this comment about the new Olympic snowboard event, Slopestyle:

Costas: I think the president of the IOC should be Johnny Knoxville, because basically, this stuff is just Jackass stuff that they invented and called Olympic sports.

Lauer: You mean that in the best possible way, though.

Costas: I mean it in the kindest possible sense, yes.

If you asked the average person on the street to name ten sports broadcasters:

1. They couldn’t name ten.

2. The names would include: John Madden, Dick Vitale, and “That guy that bit the woman on the back”. (Marv Albert.)

I’m not even sure that Costas is relevant anymore, or the story would have made more waves than it did. Fundamentally, it doesn’t sound like a “Bob Costas” thing to say. He has a carefully cultivated image — he’s practically Dick Clark.

The other contributing factor that made it a non-story? C’mon. It’s slopestyle. It’s a bunch of rich white kids who are 3rd-tier athletes.

But he couldn’t say *that*. That would have offended people outside of the slopestyle community. People would have noticed.

Deadspin link with video.

Will … What?

by A.J. Coltrane

As I was driving home from work tonight I saw a couple in their 20’s holding up a sign. The font was very loopy and hard to read. It said:

“WILL SCREAM FOR TICKETS!!”

Like I said, it was hard to read. My first thought was that it said something else.

I think they’ll be waiting a while for tickets considering what they’re really offering…

Happy Playoffs everyone!

The Stupidity of the Pro Bowl

By Blaidd Drwg

The Pro Bowl is an idiotic game that vaguely resembles football that no one actually cares about – the players, the coaches, the fans, no one. So many players back out of the game that it is usually a bunch of marginally good players playing what amounts to pick up football.

For some reason, the NFL wants to try to make the ~~annual Hawaii vacation~~ game relevant again so they have tried a number of things. Move it to the same city as the Super Bowl – fail (they tried it one year in Miami). Move it before the Super Bowl (instead of after it) – fail. The latest gimmick is to eliminate the conferences and have 2 team captains – Deion Sanders and Jerry Rice, pick the teams. What just looked like schoolyard football now really is just a schoolyard football game.

To make the stupid game even more of a joke, Deion Sanders tweeted this on Monday:

Ladies and Gentlemen I am officially announcing “I WILL SUIT UP IN HAWAII” Please let @JerryRice know that a real captain leads by example!

The game moves to a complete joke if the NFL lets a guy who has not worn a uniform in almost 10 years even set foot on the field during the game. Either way, I won’t be watching it.

The Road to the Super Bowl Runs Through…

By Blaidd Drwg

You hear all about home field advantage in the NFL, and there is definitely an advantage to playing at home, in the regular season. Come playoff time, momentum seems to be more important than playing in your front. I think it becomes exaggerated because the #1 and #2 seeds end up sitting around, doing nothing for a week and lose some of their competitive edge. I decided to take a look at just what kind of impact the bye week had on the top 2 seeds since the NFL went to the 8 team playoff in 2002.

#1 Seed

Game	Wins	Losses
Divisional Playoff	13	9
Conference Championship	9	4
Super Bowl	2	7

#2 Seed

Game	Wins	Losses
Divisional Playoff	15	7
Conference Championship	5	10
Super Bowl	3	2

The results are definitely surprising. The #1 seed has won just 59% of the time in the Divisional Playoff game. Considering that is a team that generally has won better than 75% of its games at home during the season, I would have expected better. The #2 seed wins about 68% of it Divisional Playoff games, which seems about right considering that they get the highest remaining seed for that game (usually the 3 or 4 seed). I suspect that the #1 seed ends up getting the tougher team for their matchup since it seems, especially over the last few seasons, that there is at least one Wild Card team who ends up with a better record than a couple of the division winners.

When you get to the Conference Championship game, it gets a bit interesting. There have been 8 times in the 22 instances that #1 and #2 have squared off in that game, with the #1 seed holding a 5-3 advantage in those games. That makes the results look a bit weird against the other seeds:

	#1 Seed	#2 Seed
Vs. 1 or 2 seed	5-3	3-5 (On The Road)
Vs. any other seed	4-1	2-5 (At Home)

Basically, if you are the #1 seed and you survive the Divisional Playoff game, you really would rather face anyone other than the #2 seed.

Either way, I would almost be willing to bet that you won’t be seeing a Seattle – Denver (this year’s #1 seeds from their respective conferences) Super Bowl matchup. A battle of #1’s has only happened once in the last 10 seasons – in 2009 when Indy and New Orleans squared off.

The Idiot Auburn Fan

by A.J. Coltrane

There was an Auburn fan who stood to make $50,000 last night had they won the national championship.

Rather than hedge his bet he chose to ride it out, even though Auburn was about a 10 point (or 3-1) underdog.

He got zero dollars.

What he could have done would have been to place a $16,500 on Florida State at -330.

Had Florida State won he would end up with $21,500.

Had Auburn won he still would have had $33,500.

Hedging his bet still would have left him with his home-team rooting interest. He didn’t want to “jinx it”. What an idiot.

The NFL. What A Crapshoot.

by A.J. Coltrane

Over time I’ve decided that NFL outcomes are more random than I prefer to be involved with (read: gamble on). There are too few possessions per team, and too few scores — if the NFL awarded one point for a touchdown instead of seven a “normal” result would be something like 4 points to 2. Turnovers have a huge impact on the end result. Fumbles happen at random times. Which team recovers the fumble is basically a coin flip… as of today I think there’s too much granularity all around to try to predict outcomes with any accuracy.

With that in mind, Bill Barnwell’s playoff preview included this little gem:

Since 1990, teams that have won the turnover battle in a given game during the regular season have won that game 79.1 percent of the time. In the playoffs, that figure climbs to 84.2 percent. Of course, everybody knows that winning the turnover battle is important; it’s figuring out how to win the turnover battle that’s the hard part.

So there’s that. Yikes.

Maybe my current feeling about predictably predicting NFL results is party based around having seen so much unpredictability. When I was (much) younger the randomness issue didn’t concern me that much. Probably because it was difficult to quantify much of anything from a 1980’s box score. (And that includes baseball — in the 80’s there was no walk info, or ball-strike, or total pitches..) Even back then I couldn’t find a reason for 8-10% of the NFL results.

Maybe I’m older and wiser.

Nah.

But at least I know to avoid the NFL.

Predicting the 2013 NFL Season

By Blaidd Drwg

The great thing about baseball is that you can generally use advanced metrics to make a prediction about the performance of a team in an upcoming season with reasonable accuracy. There are certainly things you can’t predict (injuries, guys significantly over/under performing, luck, etc.) but those metrics have been tested and tweaked to give you a pretty reasonable picture of what will happen in the upcoming season.

Football, for whatever reason, doesn’t seem to enjoy the same level of prediction accuracy. Back in August, ESPN had their NFL preview and included projected standings based on a computer simulation. Here is what we got:

Team	Overall W-L	Home W-L	Road W-L
MIA	10-6	7-1	3-5
NE	9-7	8-0	1-7
BUF	5-11	5-3	0-8
NYJ	4-12	4-4	0-8
CIN	11-5	7-1	4-4
BAL	9-7	8-0	1-7
PIT	9-7	7-1	2-6
CLE	5-11	4-4	1-7
HOU	11-5	8-0	3-5
IND	8-8	6-2	2-6
TEN	6-10	6-2	0-8
JAX	4-12	4-4	0-8
DEN	13-3	8-0	5-3
KC	10-6	7-1	3-5
SD	5-11	5-3	0-8
OAK	4-12	4-4	0-8

WAS	10-6	8-0	2-6
DAL	8-8	7-1	1-7
NYG	8-8	7-1	1-7
PHI	6-10	6-2	0-8
GB	11-5	8-0	3-5
CHI	9-7	8-0	1-7
MIN	7-9	7-1	0-8
DET	5-11	4-4	1-7
ATL	11-5	8-0	3-5
TB	9-7	7-1	2-6
CAR	7-9	7-1	0-8
NO	6-10	6-2	0-8
SEA	13-3	8-0	5-3
SF	13-3	8-0	5-3
STL	7-9	7-1	0-8
AZ	3-13	3-5	0-8

It wasn’t the most accurate prediction as they only got 4 out of the 8 division winners correct and 2 out of the 4 Wild Card winners correct. The win totals look reasonable on a cursory level until I actually looked at what made up the records. According to the simulation, 10 teams would go undefeated at home in 2013, 10 teams would go 7-1 and only 6 teams would be .500 or worse. On the flip side, they predicted that only 4 teams would be at least .500 on the road (with no one going better than 5-3) and 19 teams would be either 1-7 or 0-8 away from home.

Now I don’t know exactly what went into the programming of the simulation, but let me tell you, this just looks wrong. It seems that the programmers put too much emphasis on home field advantage and caused some whacky results. I am surprised that they let this be published, given that any average football fan would realize these numbers just look wrong. Just how wrong are they? Well, I decided to look at the road records and over the past 11 NFL Seasons (2002 – 2012), there have been 13 teams that have failed to win a game on the road, which is about 4% of the teams. The prediction for 2013 was for 10 teams to go winless away from home, or 37%. On the flip, over the same period, 46% of NFL teams played at least .500 ball on the road. The computer for 2013? Just 12%. Um, I am pretty sure that you have a significant error in the calculation here.

In some ways, I am comparing apples to oranges by looking at the historical numbers. How did the computer actually do with its predictions? Well, here you go:

Number of Wins	Home Prediction	Home Actual	Road Prediction	Road Actual
0	0	0	12	1
1	0	2	7	6
2	0	1	4	4
3	1	5	5	8
4	5	6	1	6
5	2	7	3	2
6	4	5	0	5
7	10	3	0	0
8	10	3	0	0

Those numbers look pretty bad in comparison, especially at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum.

How about total wins? Well, that looks a little better, but only because the increased number of bands flattens out the distribution:

Number of Wins	Projected	Total
13	3	2
12	0	3
11	4	4
10	3	2
9	5	1
8	3	7
7	3	4
6	3	1
5	4	1
4	3	5
3	1	1
2	0	1

The moral of this story is if you are trying to figure out how many games your team will win in 2014, take a look at their schedule, go through it game by game and predict a winner. My guess is that you will be more accurate than the computer.