How well do Vegas futures predict playoff results in each sport?

Spurs and Heat… again.

On Friday, I wrote a post for FiveThirtyEight discussing the rampant inequality and predictability found in the NBA. I have a few more thoughts on that subject…

While the NBA has successfully suckered tens of millions of fans into believing the 2014 playoffs have been thrilling and unpredictable, with the LA Times even declaring, “March Madness suddenly seems like such a bore by comparison” (this is a pretty odd comparison considering the Final Four concluded with a No. 7 seed beating a No. 8 for the title), I’ve had a much different opinion, and this year’s predictable results simply fall in line with recent history.

While my original post mostly analyzed the odds distribution in each sport, I didn’t much consider the actual results, and it got me wondering… How well do those futures odds predict what actually happens on the court, as well as in other sports?

To analyze this, I ranked all the teams in each sport according to their preseason championship odds* (i.e. for 2014, Miami is No. 1, Bulls No. 2, etc.) I then plotted this rank against their eventual playoff results (0 = missed playoffs, 1 = lost in first round, 2 = made conference semifinals, 3 = made conference finals, 4 = made finals, 5 = won title) over the last four seasons. For comparison, I also included the NHL, a league that also has an 82-game regular season and four rounds of best-of-seven playoffs:

*Because any betting odds will add up to greater than 100 percent, I simply divided all the futures by the sum of all the teams’ odds to scale them down to 100 percent.

The NBA has a clear strong correlation between preseason championship probability rank and playoff results, while the NHL is much weaker. Over the last four years, no NBA team ranked lower than fifth in preseason championship odds has made the finals. Compare that to the NHL, which has had six of eight non-top five finals teams in that time.

Here are the NFL and MLB distributions too:

(0 = missed playoffs, 1 = lost in wild card round, 2 = lost in divisional round, 3 = lost in conference championship game, 4 = lost Super Bowl, 5 = won Super Bowl)

(0 = missed playoffs, 1 = lost in Wild Card game, 2 = lost in LDS, 3 = lost in LCS, 4 = lost World Series, 5 = won World Series)

It’s easy to see how these other leagues’ plots differ from the NBA’s. Here are the correlations for each graph:

NBA = .647

NHL = .523

NFL = .440

MLB = .371

Clearly, the preseason favorites go further in the playoffs with a much higher frequency in the NBA than in any other sport.

Dominance of Miami

Much of the predictability in the NBA is due to the havoc the Miami Heat have waged on the wagering markets. To put Miami’s sports book dominance during the LeBron-Wade-Bosh era in perspective, here’s a scatter plot of the all the seasons in the MLB, NHL, NBA, and NFL over the last four seasons, plotting each team’s championship odds at the start of the season against their odds at the start of the playoffs.

(Sorry, no pretty graphic with this one—just a screenshot of an R plot. Chartbuilder doesn’t take to kindly to doing scatter plots with multiple series.)

Only once in the last four years have the Heat not been favorites to win the title—the start of the 2011 playoffs, following the Big Three’s underwhelming debut regular season. Now, to really see how Miami’s recent run stands out, here are those odds when the four years for each team are averaged together.

Over the last four seasons, the Heat have averaged 24.6 percent and 28.4 percent chances of winning the title at the start of the regular season and postseason respectively. Compare that to the Sacramento Kings, which have averaged 0.3 percent and 0.0 percent respectively over that time.

Another interesting takeaway from this chart is that the Patriots have often wildly outperformed preseason expectations during the regular season, accruing more than double the title odds by the time the playoffs start. The Lakers, on the other hand, wildly underperform (or are simply very overvalued at the start of the year), nearly slicing their preseason title odds in half over the course of the regular season.

Odds Distributions

Probably the most striking image from my FiveThirtyEight story was this line chart of the distribution of championship odds at the start of the season in each sport.

When you zoom in on the bottom two thirds of the chart, you can really see the near-zero odds of the barren bottom 50 percent in the NBA.

This NBA inequality is still apparent come playoff time. (I separated the MLB data into the years in which there was only one wild card per league and years in which there were two.)

While the NBA may look like it’s made up some ground here equality-wise, it’s important to note that the NFL and MLB have byes and play-in games, a structural advantage that automatically adds greater disparity in championship odds. The average top NBA playoff team, which has to win four rounds for the championship, still has better title odds than the average top MLB and NFL teams, which only have to win three rounds.

Solutions

The day after my FiveThirtyEight story ran, the NY Times published a story that touched on very similar topics. Most interestingly came a quote from former Stanford professor Roger Noll, discussing one of my most despised regulations in sports:

“If you didn’t have an individual cap,” Noll said in a telephone interview, “if LeBron James was in a position to sell himself to the highest bidder, his salary would be much higher and you wouldn’t have a small number of top teams with more than half the superstars in the league.”

“It’s a big mistake, and the N.B.A. hasn’t adjusted. So if you have as many as 25 teams that know before the first game is played that they probably won’t even be in the conference finals, doesn’t that make the regular season seem almost meaningless, more of an exhibition than a pathway to a consequential championship?”

I couldn’t agree more (and plan to write more on this in the NBA off-season).

In previous posts, I’ve argued against the randomness and extreme parity of college basketball, much of which is due to the 68-team single elimination playoff format—a huge contrast to the NBA’s best-of-seven series. If that sounds like the complete opposite of my above criticism of the NBA, then you’re right. The NCAA lies too far toward the extreme randomness/parity end of the spectrum, while the NBA goes too far to the extreme predictability/inequality end.

You don’t want seasons to feel like they’re extremely predictable like the NBA, but at the same time, you want the true best team to win with a relatively high frequency so that it feels like teams are justly rewarded. It’s critical to have a good balance between the two, and finding that equilibrium is something sports leagues have wrestled with—and will continue to wrestle with—for decades.

 

Why an NFL auction would be far superior to a draft—for players, teams, and fans

Realistic rating: 8.0

Pretty much every astute fantasy player knows that auctions are far superior to drafts. Here are the three primary reasons:

1. More fair: If there’s a superstar head-and-shoulders above everyone else, then a team with the first pick in a fantasy draft lucks into a huge advantage. Conversely, if the top players are about equal, then the team with the first pick is at a disadvantage, since the teams picking behind him are still getting roughly the same caliber of player in the first round, and then that team has to pick last in the 2nd round. It all comes down to random luck of the distribution of player talent.

This randomness disappears in an auction, where there isn’t any lucky advantage or unlucky disadvantage to be gleaned from having particular picks. Every team has the opportunity to pick every player and to pay exactly how much they believe that player to be worth. Because of this, auctions are much more liquid then drafts, as auction dollars are a much more granular measure of value than draft picks.

2. More research/availability: In drafts, if you have the first pick, you’re pretty much locked into taking Peyton, AP, or one of the other handful of elite RBs. That’s all you really have to think about. On the other end of the spectrum, if you have the last pick, it doesn’t matter what your opinion of AP is. If you think he’s going to have the greatest rushing season in NFL history, you don’t have any opportunity to put your money where your mouth is (unless you trade picks, which seems to be a rare occurrence due to the aforementioned liquidity problem).

3. More strategy: There’s an element of strategy in auctions that isn’t very prevalent in drafts. At any given time, the number of teams that need a particular position and the total money is left across the league has enormous implications on the values of players, causing them to constantly fluctuate—and teams can do things (whether that be nominating specific players or positions or driving up the price on certain auctions) to manipulate those fluctuations to preferred conditions.

Application to the NFL (and NBA/MLB/NHL)

These draft issues are largely prevalent in the NFL too. While many teams do trade picks, the vast majority simply pick from where they’ve been assigned in the draft order, which surely doesn’t fit with their specific values/needs if they had the choice.

For example, only a handful of teams at the top of the draft were really researching the likes Jadeveon Clowney as they were the only teams with the means to select him. Thus, more likely than not, the Texans did not value Clowney more than every one of the other 31 teams, yet they still ended up with him. In fact, it’s highly likely that the vast majority of the 256 players drafted did not go to the NFL franchise which actually valued them the most. Again, the less liquid nature of drafts creates market inefficiencies. Auctions are the opposite. With each bidding party having a very granular amount of funds, they can pick and choose exactly how much they value each player available, and players will go to the teams that value them most the vast majority of the time.

Proposal I: Auction draft

Let’s say each NFL team had an allotted amount of auction “money” (I say “money” because it would be a nominal amount) with the worst team from the previous season having the most money to spend and the Super Bowl winner having the least.

Let’s say we use the modified draft pick value chart created by the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective. Here, I’ve totaled the values of the seven picks each team is currently allotted based on their draft order. I’ve then multiplied that sum by 10 to have a more granular “dollar” amount. If these draft picks were converted into auction dollars, here’s how each team’s starting funds would look:

As you can see, there’s a steadily declining distribution of funds down the auction chain. But how can this change things in practice? Here are some examples:

Kansas City was assigned the 23rd overall pick in the 2014 draft based on their 2013 record, and they selected a defensive end with that pick—but say they really loved Clowney and were willing to pay much more for him. As draft picks aren’t very liquid, it might be hard to find a trade that’s fair for both sides. In an auction, though, Kansas City can simply decide to allocate as much of its budget as it wants toward Clowney, and if Houston decides to match, then they have greater starting funds with which to outbid them.

Or say Houston, which has many holes to fill, decided not to spend a big portion of their budget on Clowney and take the standard one each of a 1st-, 2nd-, 3rd-, 4th-, 5th-, 6th-, and 7th-round caliber players. They could instead spend their $10,727 on seven 2nd round-caliber players (i.e. the 33-64th best players available; avg cost $1502) allowing them to plug in a very solid player at many different slots.

(In fantasy, this is known as the “stars and scrubs” vs. balanced roster strategies, but these plans have much more adaptability to NFL teams, which must account for their already rostered players when drafting rather than starting from scratch like most fantasy leagues.)

And in terms of strategy, a team highly coveting a WR might decide to nominate stud QBs early, in the hopes of depleting other teams’ funds and driving down the cost of WRs.

The process

The auction would work by rotating which teams could nominate players, with a nomination requiring a minimum starting bid of, say, $10 and a minimum $1 raise. All 32 teams could buzz in, and the auction would end after 20 seconds of no higher bids. (Let’s pretend there’s no high frequency trading “Flash Boys” going on here—although that would definitely be something Bill Belichick would love to explore.) Then the next team would nominate a player, and the process would continue until every team was out of funds.

As far as broadcasting, don’t worry, Mr. $25 billion commissioner, there could still be a Thursday night primetime show in which the best players are selected. According to the Harvard study, the 32nd pick is worth 200.3 points, or $2003 in auction money. For the first night, each team would nominate a player, but the minimum bid on that player would be $1500 so as to ensure it’s all big names coming off the board. (Personally, I’d rather not have this de facto “first round,” since auctions are more fun and strategic when some studs are still lurking on the board late, but it’d obviously be hard for the NFL to pass up a free night of primetime TV rights.)

One of the best things about this is that you could in theory speed up the draft, because trading would be rendered almost entirely irrelevant (i.e. No team no longer has to trade up to get a guy.) This absence of trades would mean that you wouldn’t have to allocate much time between auctions. At the same time, though, there could be many more than 256 players drafted in an auction format.

Some other notes:

• Compensatory picks could easily still be awarded in this auction, simply by calculating their value and adding them to each team’s total funds.
• Draft money could easily be traded during the season and might facilitate more trades. Say two teams can’t find even ground. If they each had an auction money allocation, one could easily kick in a bit to smooth out any deal.

Finally, here’s the best reason for an auction: Who wouldn’t want to see Jerry Jones blow half his budget on Day 1 on some pricey college star?

From the players’ point of view

Auctions would be much more fair for the players as well. With the draft, rookie salaries are largely pre-slotted by each draft position, without much regard for discrepancies in actual value.

For example, in 2012, Robert Griffin and Andrew Luck were the consensus top two picks and were huge outliers in terms of talent/value compared to the rest of the draft. Yet, due to the rigid rookie pay scale, they only received a marginal pay upgrade over the No. 3 pick Trent Richardson. In an auction, rookie salaries could be scaled by the amount of auction money spent on them, making it a big more meritocratic. If the next Andrew luck comes along and causes a team to splurge $3,000 auction on him, his rookie salary would be in proportion to that amount.

Proposal II: Free agency

This idea’s a bit more radical: How about no draft or auction whatsoever—and instead players coming out of college are simply free agents who can sign with any team? An obvious objection would be that the best players would simply sign with the best teams, and the bad teams would stay bad in perpetuity, but is that really the case?

Teams that are rebuilding would allocate much more of their salary caps to prospects coming up from college, whereas contenders in “win now” mentality probably wouldn’t want to tie up much of their cap on young prospects who could take years to develop into their prime. Also, thanks to a hard salary cap, no team could horde all the best talent.

Another thing to consider is that teams are in a constant state of roster turnover. As great as the Broncos and Seahawks are today, every one of the players on their roster will have become a free agent in the next five years. Because the NFL isn’t anywhere near as star-driven as the NBA, and the best players aren’t global icons that want to gravitate toward NYC, LA, and other “prestige” cities, complete free agency isn’t something out of the realm of possibility in terms of competitive balance.

And from the players’ point of view, it’s probably the most fair of all, as they aren’t locked into playing for a particular team or for a particular salary. (Of course, since college players don’t have a seat at the bargaining table when it comes to negotiating the NFL CBA, they receive the extremely raw end of the deal and will continue to as long as current NFL players are the only players with a voice.)

The death blow to this free agency plan, though, is that it would remove a big prime time ratings event from the NFL’s annual TV calendar, which Commissioner 18 Games probably wouldn’t be too happy about.

Bottom line: In a vacuum, complete free agency seems like the way to go. An auction is pretty close, though, and certainly a lot more entertaining. Not only would a auction make draft night more fun and fair for fans, it’d also help during the season in facilitating more trades. And on top of all that, it’s more fair for the players too. Seems like a win-win-win.

NHL Playoffs Statistical Preview

The stats love the Kings.

(Note: From time to time, I’ll take a break from proposing new sports ideas. This is one of those times.)

While the hockey stats revolution is still about a decade or so behind baseball, there are still some pretty telling stats in our toolbox today. My favorites are Corsi, Fenwick, and PDO.

Here’s a description of each from the awesome Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com:

• Fenwick = Shots + Missed Shots
• FF% = Fenwick For% = Fenwick For / (Fenwick For + Fenwick Against)
• Corsi = Shot Attempts = Shots + Missed Shots + Blocked Shots
• CF% = Corsi For% = Corsi For / (Corsi For + Corsi Against)
• PDO = Shooting Percentage + Save Percentage while on the ice

There’s obviously a lot of overlap, but we’ll just ignore that for now. The main takeaway is that possession and shots are extremely important.

I compiled the FF%, CF%, and PDO on all 30 NHL teams from the 2013-14 regular season and standardized them into a z-score. For Fenwick and Corsi, a higher z-score is good. For PDO, a lower z-score is good.

I averaged these figures up in the “Total” column ((FF + CF – PDO) /3) and sorted them by that metric. To compared them to the actual regular season results, I also added the regular season standings points and goal differential.

Team	FF%	FFZ	CF%	CFZ	PDO	PDOZ	Total	Points	Goal Dif
Los Angeles	56.1	1.83	56.8	2.01	1000	0.00	1.28	100	32
New Jersey	53.6	1.07	54.4	1.29	985	-1.33	1.23	88	-11
Chicago	55.4	1.62	55.5	1.62	999	-0.09	1.11	107	47
San Jose	54.6	1.38	53.7	1.09	998	-0.18	0.88	111	49
Florida	50.8	0.23	51	0.28	980	-1.77	0.76	66	-72
NY Rangers	52.6	0.77	52.4	0.70	997	-0.27	0.58	96	25
St. Louis	53.7	1.10	53.1	0.91	1007	0.62	0.46	111	57
Vancouver	51.6	0.47	51.3	0.37	995	-0.44	0.43	83	-27
Ottawa	51	0.29	52.4	0.70	997	-0.27	0.42	88	-29
NY Islanders	49.1	-0.28	49.4	-0.19	984	-1.42	0.32	79	-42
Detroit	51.5	0.44	51.5	0.43	1000	0.00	0.29	93	-8
Winnipeg	50.5	0.14	50.1	0.02	994	-0.53	0.23	84	-10
Carolina	49.6	-0.13	50.3	0.08	994	-0.53	0.16	83	-23
Nashville	49.4	-0.19	48.5	-0.46	989	-0.97	0.11	88	-26
Dallas	50.9	0.26	50.5	0.14	1002	0.18	0.07	91	7
Tampa Bay	51.3	0.38	51	0.28	1007	0.62	0.02	101	25
Boston	53.4	1.01	53.9	1.15	1025	2.21	-0.02	117	84
Phoenix	50	-0.01	50.5	0.14	1003	0.27	-0.05	89	-15
Philadelphia	49.2	-0.25	50	-0.01	1003	0.27	-0.18	94	1
Pittsburgh	49.2	-0.25	48.7	-0.40	1001	0.09	-0.24	109	42
Calgary	47.7	-0.70	46.3	-1.11	988	-1.06	-0.25	77	-32
Columbus	49.8	-0.07	49.9	-0.04	1008	0.71	-0.27	93	15
Minnesota	48.8	-0.37	48.6	-0.43	1010	0.89	-0.56	98	1
Washington	47.1	-0.88	47.7	-0.69	1002	0.18	-0.58	90	-5
Montreal	47.9	-0.64	46.7	-0.99	1005	0.44	-0.69	100	11
Anaheim	50.1	0.02	49.8	-0.07	1024	2.13	-0.72	116	57
Edmonton	44.1	-1.78	44.3	-1.70	990	-0.89	-0.87	67	-67
Buffalo	42.8	-2.17	43	-2.09	982	-1.59	-0.89	52	-91
Colorado	46.7	-1.00	47	-0.90	1018	1.59	-1.17	112	30
Toronto	42.3	-2.32	42.9	-2.12	1013	1.15	-1.86	84	-25

 
It’s not hard to see why Toronto and their notoriously anti-analytics front office fell off the rails, but how did Colorado manage to achieve a No. 1 seed in the West? (Answer: Unsustainably over-achieving goaltending from Semyon Varlamov.)

For the sake of comparing these stats to regular season results, here’s how Total looks plotted against goal differential:

(Sorry some of those are cut off. The far left is Toronto, and the far right are Los Angeles and New Jersey.)

The correlation is only .1845, which suggests that these metrics should probably only be used as a guideline in telling us what teams may have over- and under-achieved this season relative to their actual performance.

First round match-ups

Ok, so how do these teams’ stats compare for the first round match-ups?

Home Ice	Total	Road Ice	Total	Difference
Colorado	-1.171	Minnesota	-0.512	-0.66
St. Louis	0.106	Chicago	0.905	-0.80
Anaheim	-0.575	Dallas	0.289	-0.86
San Jose	0.926	Los Angeles	1.233	-0.31
Boston	0.101	Detroit	0.356	-0.25
Tampa Bay	0.018	Montreal	-0.377	0.40
Pittsburgh	-0.200	Columbus	-0.483	0.28
NY Rangers	0.753	Philadelphia	-0.244	1.00

 
In the West, every matchup’s lower seed has a higher total, which suggests that upsets could be rampant. Most notably, Minnesota and Dallas have a considerable edge over the two No. 1 seeds. And whoever emerges from the San Jose vs. Los Angeles showdown (two of the three highest Totals in the playoffs) should be a serious contender to make the Stanley Cup Finals.

In the East, it’s a bit more chalk, but again, a No. 1 seed (Boston) has a lower total than its opponent (Detroit).

Does this mean all the No. 1 seeds are going down? No, probably not. But it does indicate they’re very susceptible to being upset—not just in the first round, but in every round of the playoffs.

Vegas odds

Finally, let’s take a look at how these Total figures for each team compare to Vegas. My (extremely unscientific and non-statistically sound) formula for a stat I call “BetFigure” is:

BetFigure = [(Total Differential + 2.5) * 0.2] / Vegas Win Percentage

From my (again, unscientific) experience, anything over 1.50 is generally a profitable bet.

Team	Line	Win Pct	Total	Opponent	Total	Total Diff	BetFigure
Detroit	235	29.9%	0.356	Boston	0.101	0.25	1.85
Dallas	165	37.7%	0.289	Anaheim	-0.575	0.86	1.78
Columbus	210	32.3%	-0.483	Pittsburgh	-0.200	-0.28	1.37
Minnesota	115	46.5%	-0.512	Colorado	-1.171	0.66	1.36
Chicago	-105	51.2%	0.905	St. Louis	0.106	0.80	1.29
Los Angeles	125	44.4%	1.233	San Jose	0.926	0.31	1.26
NY Rangers	-150	60.0%	0.753	Philadelphia	-0.244	1.00	1.17
Tampa Bay	-117	53.9%	0.018	Montreal	-0.377	0.40	1.07
Montreal	-103	50.7%	-0.377	Tampa Bay	0.018	-0.40	0.83
Pittsburgh	-250	71.4%	-0.200	Columbus	-0.483	0.28	0.78
San Jose	-145	59.2%	0.926	Los Angeles	1.233	-0.31	0.74
Philadelphia	130	43.5%	-0.244	NY Rangers	0.753	-1.00	0.69
Colorado	-135	57.4%	-1.171	Minnesota	-0.512	-0.66	0.64
St. Louis	-115	53.5%	0.106	Chicago	0.905	-0.80	0.64
Boston	-280	73.7%	0.101	Detroit	0.356	-0.25	0.61
Anaheim	-190	65.5%	-0.575	Dallas	0.289	-0.86	0.50

 
So there you have it, Detroit and Dallas. Take it to the bank. Guaranteed*

*Maybe

 

Restructuring the March Madness bracket

Realistic rating: 5.5

With a No. 7 and No. 8 seed qualifying for the Final Four, this year’s tourney again highlights some of the same issues that have always plagued college basketball—the extreme unpredictability of the postseason. While most fans probably love this aspect of the sport, it brings up a number of problems with the college basketball season as a whole, namely: the meaningfulness of the regular season and the frequency with which the best team actually wins the championship.

Perhaps the most fundamental concept every sport must confront is how to balance fairness vs. excitement—or in other words, how often should the best team win? There are some sports that probably have too high a percentage (e.g. sprinting, NBA) at the expense of excitement/unpredictability, while others have far too low a frequency of the best winning but enjoy a very high level of excitement/unpredictability (e.g. MLB).

College basketball falls about as far on the excitement end of the spectrum as any sport. This makes the postseason extremely fun and unpredictable, but the regular season, well, is just about meaningless. Plus, the “champion” is rarely the best team.

This is due to the postseason’s structure—a 68-team single elimination tournament in which every team, with the exception of the eight involved in play-in games (no, I’m not calling those “round one”), has ostensibly the exact same starting position, requiring the six victories to win the championship (i.e. there’s not much reward for regular season performance other than a higher seed, which in many cases is actually a negative.) Thus, as much as ESPN likes to hype a regular season game such as No. 1 Syracuse vs. No. 5 Duke last month, it really doesn’t matter who wins, as there’s not much reward for the victor.

A couple of weeks ago on Deadspin, I wrote a piece discussing some of these issues with this format and proposed a few alternatives, such as a World Cup style, a bye tiered bracket, and a standard bracket with randomized lower seeds. (The heavy math for these proposals is there.) While these were all certainly improvements on the current format, they were, as Mike Ehrmantraut would say, a “half measure.”

Expanding (Yes, Expanding) the Bracket

Considering there are 351 Division I basketball teams, allowing 68 (19.4%) into the postseason a good figure if you must have a single-elimination, limited-tier (by “tier” I mean giving certain teams byes or other hard advantages other than playing a weaker first round opponent). However, contrary to what most hardcore fans may believe, making the postseason more exclusive will only make the regular season more meaningful for roughly the top 25% of teams. With fewer teams in the tourney, the regular season would be far less meaningful for the bottom 75%, because for the vast majority of teams in smaller conferences, their season is entirely meaningless only a dozen games into the season. (Note: Yes, there are incredibly dumb conference tournaments that render single-bid conference regular seasons meaningless, but we’ll just ignore that for now.)

But how can you make the regular season more meaningful for all 351 teams without making the postseason even more of a crapshoot? Here are a couple of straightforward solutions, which could really be applied to all sports:

1. Simply have best-of-three series at certain rounds of the tourney. This would be highly impractical for a number of obvious reasons, though, so let’s assume we have to stick to single elimination. Also, while decreasing the randomness, best-of-three series still wouldn’t make regular season success more meaningful.

2. Have a dramatically bye-tiered bracket. The example for this kind of setup in the Deadspin piece only had three bye tiers: #1-4 seeds on bye to the round of 32, #5-8 at the normal starting position, and #9-16 with a play-in game to the first round. This still didn’t result in quite as much significance for regular season success as I would have liked, though, but how about some of these?

Or

In each of these brackets, there’s now a much greater reward for landing a higher seed, which would make the regular season far much more meaningful while also giving much higher likelihood to the chances of the best teams being there the final weekend. I’m a huge proponent of tiered bracket systems in which higher seeds get greater rewards (in the form of byes or otherwise) and wish more leagues other than the NFL would adopt such measures. (More on this in future posts to be sure.)

I’m not sure if I’ll be rooting for UConn or Kentucky this weekend. Should either win, it will be a glaring mark on the legitimacy of the NCAA champion title, but at the same time, it might garner further exposure for the sham the current format really is.

Bottom line: These proposals really don’t shake up things all that much (i.e. still single-elimination bracket, still four regions, etc.), but with the NCAA making a boatload of money as is, the probably won’t want to change much. Still, with even the highest regular season game (a 5000+ game sample size) rating falling well below almost all of the 68 tournament games, there’s certainly a missed revenue stream opportunity.

Why doesn’t the NFL stagger games every hour on Sundays like March Madness?

There’s a better way to do this.

Realistic rating: 8.0

After being transfixed by the first two days of the NCAA tournament, in which games are starting/ending every hour all day (a scheduling format that somehow wasn’t implemented until only a few years ago), my first thought was, “Hmm, what other sports league has 16 games to broadcast each week, pretty much all on the same day…”

I’ve long had many issues with the NFL’s weekly schedule. I’ve never understood why every Sunday the league always dumps a whopping 8-10 games at 1 p.m. and only three at 4 p.m. (four if we’re lucky). After 10-game chaos during the early slate, which makes it impossible to keep track of everything around the league, RedZone abruptly screeches to a halt around 4:15. Plus, there’s a giant vortex of nothing from 7:30-8:30 between the late games and Sunday Night Football (not to mention the vortexes at 2:30 and 5:30 when each slate of games’ halftimes align).

The NFL could certainly stand to spread out its games a bit more. Now ideally, this would include Fridays and Saturdays, but because of an anti-trust agreement, the NFL isn’t allowed to broadcast games those days, a measure in place to prevent the pro ranks’ cannibalization of high school and college football. (This rule seems pretty dumb. The NFL is only one of thousands of entertainment options that compete with high school and college football viewership. It’s not like they prohibit movies from being shown on Saturday afternoons. Imagine how much NBC’s already low ratings would plummet if they prevented The Voice from airing on certain nights to protect other shows. But I digress…)

However, if we must operate under the (dumb) limit of only having NFL games on Thursdays, Sundays, and Mondays, here’s how each week could be scheduled…

(All times EST)

Thursday

Game 1: 8:00 p.m.

Sunday

Game 2: 11:00 a.m.

Game 3: 12:00 p.m.

Game 4: 1:00 p.m.

Game 5: 2: 00 p.m.

Game 6: 3:00 p.m.

Game 7: 4: 00 p.m.

Game 8: 5:00 p.m.

Game 9: 6:00 p.m.

Game 10: 7:00 p.m.

Game 11: 8:00 p.m.

Game 12: 9:00 p.m.

Game 13: 10:00 p.m.

Monday

Game 14: 7:00 p.m.

Game 15: 8:00 p.m.

Game 16: 9:00 p.m.

That’s right, a MNF triple header! And this is only for the eight weeks in which all 32 teams are playing. For bye weeks, you could easily take out the 8 p.m. MNF game, the late 10 p.m. Sunday, and/or the early 11 a.m. Sunday games.

Now, this might seem so obvious that there surely has to be a reason the NFL hasn’t done it already, right? One reason might be that the primetime deals with NBC, ESPN, and now CBS are far more lucrative when they’re stand-alone games, but surely the price the NFL charges for these rights wouldn’t be cut by more than half if it came with the caveat that there was another game at that time on a different channel. Plus, as the NFL learned from some unspeakably dreadful MNF match-ups this season—and even one SNF one despite flex scheduling (Giants-Redskins), it’s probably a good idea to have some backup in case there are some clunkers.

I suppose the FOX and CBS might also want a designated time to synchronously broadcast halftime shows, but are Jimmy, Terry, Howie, and the gang really so invaluable to prevent implementation of PERPETUAL Sunday football?

And sure, the NFL likes its “Game of the Week” at 4 p.m., but it already has a Thursday, Sunday, and Monday national game (and under my proposal, would have multiple Monday night games). Plus, it’s not like the NFL can’t designate the 4 p.m. game as the “Game of the Week” and nationally broadcast it for all the markets who don’t have a local game at that time.

And while a staggered slate might be more difficult for CBS/FOX to schedule for a national audience, I figure each local area will still get its local game at its designated time, with CBS/FOX filling in the rest of the time as they so choose in each market.

Bottom line: Even if the league did want stand-alone primetime games, there’s no reason the afternoon slate couldn’t be staggered. And the best part? They can still run RedZone, only now all day!
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The mind-blowingly obvious solution to “instant” replay

Why must this charade continue?

Realistic rating: 9.5

There was much consternation last season about the inability to review penalty and missed penalty calls. Rightfully so. There were tons of critical penalties that were called or not called, many of which likely decided key games (e.g. Panthers-Patriots defensive holding no-call, Saints-49ers roughing the passer call, etc.)

The classification of what’s reviewable certainly does seem arbitrary, and the “challenge anything” movement appears to be building momentum. Sadly, though, a solution doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. Here are Tuesday’s comments from St. Louis Rams coach Jeff Fisher, a member of the NFL’s competition committee:

“We discuss replay every year,” Fisher said. “I think we go back to the foundation of the replay system, it was designed to overturn an obvious error. We knew it was not going to be a perfect system, just from a time standpoint and a number of challenges standpoint. I think that will be discussed but I think it’s unlikely we move in the direction of penalties. That’s a hard thing to do. The only penalty that’s actually reviewable on the field is too many men on the field. I think once we look at penalties you’re asking for problems.”

Fisher’s first sentence immediately sets off my “but this is the way we’ve always done it!!!” dumb argument siren. Secondly, the “solution” for time concerns doesn’t make much sense. Rather than arbitrarily deciding what kinds of calls can and cannot be challenged, if one really wanted to limit replay time, it seems much more reasonable to simply limit the number of reviews. (For example, the vast majority of touchdowns and turnovers are pretty obvious, so it’s odd that the NFL has decided to automatically booth review all of these.)

The bigger thing, though, is that these time concerns are only an issue because of the current review system, in which a referee must trot over to a tiny monitor tent and manually replay the video for a seemingly endless amount of time.  Why is it called “instant replay” when the process is anything but “instant”? We currently live in a sporting world in which the millions of fans watching at home know the correct call long before the only guys who actually have the authority to make a decision. How absurd is that? How many times have you been sitting at home watching a game, watched a play live, seen a replay five seconds later that immediately clarifies what the correct call should be, and then…. Have to wait five minutes and a full commercial break while a ref to trots over to some cramped replay booth to look at the play on some tiny screen.

There’s such an obvious solution to assuage just about any concerns about accuracy and speed that it’s really quite shocking that no major sports league has implemented this idea yet:

Have the refs make all the calls. Have them all wear earpieces connected to a centralized review station. Have the review station—which watches the games on crystal clear HD monitors with slow motion replay—instantly radio in any wrong calls, and have the refs at the stadium quickly and seamlessly correct them as needed.

For example, if a ref throws a flag for holding, the the review booth immediately sees upon (actual) instant replay that there shouldn’t have been any call, they can instantly radio down to the crew chief to pick up the flag. Ditto for a player stepping out of bounds, a pass interference no-call, or just about any ruling.

This is of course assuming leagues are unwilling to install cheap and 100 percent accurate lasers or RFID tag technology that could (even more) instantly determine a large majority of calls. If we must accept that human eyes must determine all calls (for those who prefer on human eyes to machines, I hope you’re not an airline pilot, brain surgeon, or election ballot counter), then this replay format seems like a no-brainer.

Bottom line: The “instantly radio down any corrections” solution seems incredibly easy to implement. Hopefully, some day soon, a league will adopt it. (Or, you know, lasers.)

Update: After publishing this, I noticed that Brian Billick made a similar argument two years ago. Brian Billick! Who knew? Sadly, if this idea has been out there for two years with no progress, it’s not looking too great in the short-term…

Time to take judging out of ski jump

Carina deserves better.

Realistic rating: 9.0

I tuned into some sweet ski jumping action last week and quickly realized it had to be the most boring sport I’d ever seen. Made-for-TV packaging doesn’t help either: The qualifying rounds, a condensed broadcast that just rapid-fired through all the action, still bores you after no more than a few jumps. Four-hour Tour de France stages are more interesting. Even the women’s final, which should have been an incredibly awesome finish (the last jumper, German Carina Vogt, took gold on her final leap), lacked any drama. So why does ski jumping fail so spectacularly as a spectator sport?

Answer: The lack of instantly identifiable exciting moments due to the fact that we have to wait for judges to assign “style points.”

The only noticeable cheers all week were when a German guy completely ate it on his landing and quickly popped up. So no, not a long jump, great landing, or anything else drew a really loud cheer—just the assurance that one of the competitors hadn’t become an insta-quadriplegic. Exciting stuff!

In a piece in The Atlantic this week, I wrote about why judging in ski jump should be eliminated and how this change could be implemented.

Now, I’ll concede that if there were ever an pure distance/height event that had some kind of landing component, this would probably be it. Admittedly, it does make some sense that a jumper who belly flops like a rag doll should be penalized a bit versus someone who sticks the landing, but those should really be the only two delineations: landing on your skis or not. (I’m trying to view this sport as it would be applied in real-life conditions. If you’re a CIA spy fleeing Soviets in Siberia, who cares if you don’t have a flawless landing when you ski over that cliff? If you crash and burn, though, then sure, that’s probably an issue.)

Read the full story here.

Bonus: I also offer my unequivocal endorsement for this addendum:

Why prevent NBA teams from only playing four players?

Chris Kaman seeing his psychiatrist.

Realistic rating: 9.5

Last night, Lakers center Robert Sacre invoked a little-known NBA rule when he fouled out of the Lakers-Cavs game. With the Lakers not having any players available on their bench at the time of Sacre’s sixth foul, they would have been down to only four players had Sacre been forced to leave the game, thus triggering Rule No. 3, Section I, which states:

“No team may be reduced to less than five players. If a player in the game receives his sixth personal foul and all substitutes have already been disqualified, said player shall remain in the game and shall be charged with a personal and team foul. A technical foul also shall be assessed against his team. All subsequent personal fouls, including offensive fouls, shall be treated similarly. All players who have six or more personal fouls and remain in the game shall be treated similarly.”

First off, let me say that as a huge proponent of instituting “power play”-type situations in many sports other than hockey (I’ll save that for a later post), I’m vehemently against this rule. Wacky things in sports like a shortstop having to pitch, a goalie having to take a shootout shot, or a quarterback having to punt are ALWAYS insanely entertaining—highlights fans talk about for years. Playing a basketball game with four players more than qualifies for that category. Why go out of your way to prevent such fun from occurring?

Possible exploitations

The other issue I have is that I don’t understand how referees can arbitrate when a team qualifies for this rule. The reason the Lakers triggered it was because they only dressed eight players that night, and that number shrank down to five due to a Nick Young knee injury, a Chris Kaman foul out, and a Jordan Farmar leg cramp all occurring prior to Sacre’s sixth foul. But how could the refs know if Farmar’s cramp was really a “cramp”?*

The reason I bring this up is because teams could theoretically lie about the health of their players if it would keep a star player with six fouls in the game. A prominent example of a situation in which a team could benefit from exploiting this rule would be Game 4 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics. When LeBron James fouled out with 1:51 left in the first overtime, the Heat fell apart without the league MVP, eventually losing in a second overtime to notch the series at 2-2. Since LeBron was such a valuable asset to have on the floor, it’s almost certainly  worth the tradeoff of having any potential fouls he commits be technicals, so the Heat would surely prefer to have him on the court, even with that corollary in place.

The issue, though, is that according to the wording of the rule, it seems that since the Heat had available players on their bench, LeBron could not remain on the floor. This is wherein my question lies: What would have prevented Heat bench players like Norris Cole and Mike Miller from suddenly “””””“cramping up”””””” (add like seven more quotation marks) and reducing the number of available Heat players to just five, thus forcing LeBron to stay in the game? (Even if the Heat couldn’t sub out for the rest of the game, retaining a player of LeBron’s caliber would still likely make such a ploy more than worthwhile.)

*It should also be noted that the Lakers were on the verge of putting Steve Nash—who was resting that night—in the game, but decided against it. Wouldn’t that technically have made him “available,” thus negating the Sacre situation?

Miscellaneous issues

1. Another issue about this rule is that it—admittedly, very marginally—changes the strategy of the game before a player fouls out. Whenever a player has five fouls, it gives a strategic edge to his opponents, because the player theoretically doesn’t want to foul out, so he may be a bit more tentative on defense, allowing teams to deliberately go at him when they have the ball. Without that fear, a five-foul player may continue to play at his normal defensive standard.

2. If the six-foul player accrues a tech every time he fouls, what happens if he draws two of these? Does he simply not have a technical foul limit anymore?

3. Can other players who had previously fouled out now come back in the game with the technical corollary in effect? So many questions.

4. What if Sacre suffered a truly debilitating injury. Would his writhing body have to lay in the corner of the court while his teammates played? Or would the Lakers have had to forfeit, even though they had a double-digit lead?

It’s worth noting that the Golden State Warriors encountered a similar situation in 2010, but when Devean George fouled out, the referees forced Don Nelson to play a clearly hobbled Chris Hunter.** This seems like a clear double standard compared to the one the referees employed for the Lakers last night.

**Nellie had to swap in three injured players, instructing each of them to throw a quick intentional foul, so that he could eventually put George back in the game. Here’s a video of some of that genius strategy:

Solution

Well, the obvious solution to me, as referenced above, is to simply remove this rule and force teams to play with four players.

If the league *must* have some form of this rule, then I’d simply suggest a steeper penalty than just a technical foul whenever the six-foul player draws a whistle to prevent any of the aforementioned chicanery. Perhaps something like a flagrant foul—where the team gets two free throws and the ball—would do the trick.

Bottom line: Teams playing four players would almost never come into play, so changing this rule really isn’t that intrusive. (According to SportsCenter, it’s only happened twice in the last 10 years.) If a team screws up this badly, let the opposing team (and fans) reap the benefits.

Who to really blame for sports stadium subsidies

Your tax dollars at work.

Realistic rating: 5.5

Last week, I wrote a piece for the Federalist about how the media covers government subsidies for professional sports stadiums. (Like my last post on tennis ranking methods, this is a post about media coverage—not a proposal about a formal rule or protocol from a new team, but it still gets a “realistic rating” simply for the likelihood of it occurring.)

First off, if you aren’t familiar with this issue, I’d direct you to a piece in The Atlantic about how government subsidies for stadiums are a horrible deal for taxpayers. (In my article, though, you’ll see why you should skip the headline on that story and just go straight to the text.)

Unlike the tennis rankings post, this idea of placing more blame on the politicians who hand out these sweetheart deals rather than the owners who ask for them has a much higher likelihood of being more widely adopted by the media. (For obvious reasons, mainly that this isn’t some entirely new-fangled statistics idea being thrown out by some guy on the Internet but simply a shifting in what appears to be a 2-3 option decision.) And as the terrible effects of crony stadium subsidy deals become more well-known, more smart people will investigate the true causes and see where to point the finger.

Anyways, take a look at the whole piece here.

A better way to rank tennis players all-time

Realistic rating: 1.5

Over at Deadspin last week, I wrote about a better way to rank tennis players than the current format of simply ranking the most grand slams won.

Most sports media members learned long ago how incredibly mindless the “who has the most rings” argument is—well, except Shannon Sharpe, and Dave Dameshek, and ok, well a lot of not-so-smart talking heads and writers. Still, most people are at least smart enough to understand that Robert Horry isn’t better than Michael Jordan. But for some reason, we still apply this methodology when ranking tennis players.

(Before you read any further here, you should probably go read the original post.)

There aren’t formal rules for leagues to adopt being proposed with this idea, but it still gets a “realistic rating” for the likelihood this methodology is actually adopted by analysts and the general public. The big issue to consider is simply that the bigger numbers get, the harder they are for analysts to easily spit out on TV or fans to bring up in bar debates. Smaller numbers like the number of rings (or in the case of tennis, really fancy cookie jars) are ones anyone can easily remember, and thus, they’re the ones we universally associate with certain athletes.

This isn’t to say we should just give up on ratings systems that produce metrics that have than two significant figures, but it’s simply an acknowledgement that for statisticians to push their ideas into the mainstream, they should take hurdles like this into consideration.