Fantasy Football and Sports Reporters' Objectivity

As I’ve been immersed in the football and fantasy football season for the past weeks, a thought has been sneaking up on me bit by bit. If financial reporters are not allowed to purchase stocks and political reporters are not allowed to make contributions to candidates or even make their own political views public… why are we okay with sports reporters participating so passionately in fantasy football leagues?

And participate, they do: At the 13 minute mark of the 10-10-13 edition of ESPN’s fantasy football podcast (yes, I listen to it) fantasy sports pundit Matthew Berry mentioned that sports reporter Ed Werder tweeted:

To his credit, Berry told the audience that this was not official reporting from Werder but instead was conjecture. Berry built off of this with his own conjecture that perhaps Werder has some inside information on the situation based on his long history covering the team and the fact that Werder had picked up Terrance Williams to be on his fantasy team in a league with Matthew Berry. Berry often refers to a sixteen team league he plays in with other ESPN employees called the War Room. This league (if this isn’t a clever hoax) can actually be viewed here and its membership includes reporters and analysts like Adam Schefter, Michael Smith, Trent Dilfer, Mark Schlereth, Ed Werder, Chris Mortensen, and Stephania Bell. Is there money riding on the outcome of this league? Although that is common in most fantasy leagues, it’s hard for me to imagine ESPN would allow their employees to gamble on sports in this way. Then again, ESPN has moved off it’s traditional ignore-that-gambling-exists stance and now has a gambling blog and allows its top personality, Bill Simmons, to openly talk and write about gambling. Regardless of the money, given how often and publicly the War Room league is talked about, it seems to be fiercely competitive.

Berry’s  investigative reporting into reporters’ fantasy actions seems to be becoming a habit. On the same day he tweeted about a fantasy trade made by ESPN reporter Chris Mortensen and former NFL player, now ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer:

What can we make of this? Berry’s job is helping readers and listeners get an edge in their own fantasy leagues. He is suggesting that we use the information that reporter Ed Werder thinks it’s possible that Dallas receiver Terrance Williams supplants Miles Austin in the starting lineup or that Chris Mortensen thinks a lot of tight end Ed Dickson or not very much of running back Rashard Mendenhall to help our fantasy teams. I am open to that use of this information (Terrance Williams is now on my fantasy team) but I am suspicious of it at the same time.

My suspicion is multi-faceted:

  1. Fantasy owners get attached to the players on their teams. As I mentioned in a post on the arrest of Aaron Hernandez for murder, I found it harder to believe that he was capable of that crime because he had been on my fantasy team for years. Fantasy owners become fond of their players and are often prone to overvaluing them when engaging in trade negotiations with another fantasy team. Is it possible that a sports reporter would write favorably about a player because of the unconscious instinct to overvalue the players on one’s own fantasy team?
  2. Fantasy owners promote their players in an effort to convince other people to trade for them. The honorable art of trading in fantasy is finding a team whose strengths match your weaknesses and vice versa so that a trade can work out to benefit both teams. The disreputable art of trading in fantasy is convincing someone that a player who you think is not that good is going to be REALLY REALLY GOOD. I’ve certainly embellished my belief about a player’s prospects to a friend I was trying to trade him to. Is it possible that a reporter might use his or her twitter account to drive up the value of a player they are trying to trade? What about filing an article for the same purpose?
  3. Finally, (and here’s where it gets really crazy,) whether as part of an intentional act of fantasy negotiation or through unconscious bias generated by owning a player, isn’t it likely that something a member of the media says or writes about a player will eventually affect how a real football game is played? A negative article can motivate a player to vengeful greatness or shake a player’s confidence and cause his play to suffer. A carefully placed rumor could cause a divide between teammates or modify how a coach thinks about a player.

It is possible that I’m on to something incredibly profound or that it’s 11:11 pm on a Friday, it’s been a long week, and I’ve watched the Matrix too much. Either way, I not sure I’ll ever be able to listen to an “NFL rumor” again without thinking “I wonder whose team that player is on in the reporter’s fantasy league…

 

Why You Shouldn't Spend All Day Watching Football

One of the joys of working on this website is that the WordPress software I run the site with tracks many of the search terms people have entered that lead them to Dear Sports Fan. Yesterday someone viewed the site after searching google for “why men shouldn’t watch NFL football every Sunday.” This is pretty exciting because it means that our core audience (non-sports fans who have important sports fans in their lives) exist and that they are curious or frustrated enough to take their questions to the internet and that once there, Dear Sports Fan’s content is relevant enough to pop up in searches and to be read! So, in honor of you, whoever you are, here are some thoughts about spending all day watching football and some tips on negotiating the topic with your favorite football fan.

Less is More

There’s different modes of football watching and one that is extremely enjoyable is the viewing of a single, important game. Watching football all day sometimes means you never really focus in on one game and enjoy it’s drama, it’s plot twists, it’s ups and downs as fully as you could. If the fan in your life has a favorite team, why not make it into a special occasion for him or her? Expressing the desire to watch with that person is likely enough to make it special but it wouldn’t hurt to add some props to the equation. Throw on some color coded clothing to support a team. Clear away distractions half an hour early. Get involved by cooking or ordering appropriate food. Football team names are often fun to play with in a themed event kind of way. When I was in college, my friends and I would throw a themed super bowl party. When the Buccaneers played the Raiders it was PIRATE BOWL. There’s no reason why you can’t steal this idea on a normal Sunday. Cook some gumbo for a Saints game, make some wings for a Bills game, or cook a corned beef (but start early) for a Patriots game. Making an occasion out of a game is a good way to make a single game the occasion.

Take a Bye Week

If the sports fan in your life has a favorite team there is at least one, probably two or three weeks during the football season where the negotiation for a football free or football light weekend will be significantly easier than others. In the NFL, every team plays 16 games over 17 weeks. The one week a team does not play is called their bye week. This is a great week to suggest that your favorite fan take a bye week too! Go away for the weekend or get some yard work done! Every team also has at least one prime-time game on Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night. These weeks are also good bets to suggest a Sunday day activity.

Plan Ahead

One of the under-appreciated elements of the sports business is how effectively is markets itself. Most of the time sporting events are generally unremarkable. Once in a while they’re drama and unpredictability make them transendent experiences for sports fans. ESPN, NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, and the sports leagues themselves do a great job of promoting upcoming games to convince sports fans that despite all probabalistic evidence to the contrary, this game is going to defy logic and has a 100% chance of being transendent. Think of the way big food companies market desserts and then double it. By the day of the game most sports fans have been looking forward to watching particular games for days. If you want to do something else with them, talk to them about it before they’ve bought the hype.

Lose the Battle, Win the War

Sometimes, it is great to watch football all day. As bizarre as it may sound if you are not a fan, planting your butt on a couch and watching football all day is an experience many of us prize. It’s an indulgence like spending the day at a spa or an amusement park or in a casino. And like all indulgences, it’s only really enjoyable if you feel good about doing it! So give the football fan in your life the gift of support some Sundays and make them feel good about indulging themselves. Tell them you understand how they enjoy a full day of football and that you want them to choose some Sundays to have that and some Sundays to share the day with you. I’ll leave it to you and your sports fan to figure out exactly what the right ratio is.

Good luck and happy negotiating.

 

Cue Cards 10-7-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

New Orleans 26, Chicago 18 — The Saints go marching into Chicago and come out with a win. Apologies for the pun. The NFL seems to be dividing itself into good teams and teams that look like they are unstoppable video-game football teams. Chicago is a good team. New Orleans is a video-game team.

New England 6, Cincinnati 13 — Cincinnati seems to specialize in winning ugly. In a New England rainstorm, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady did not score a single touchdown for the first time in 53 games.

Detroit 9, Green Bay 22 — Talking about video games, the Lions star wide-receiver Calvin Johnson (nick-named Megatron) did not play in this game because of an injury and his team was not able to generate much offense without him.

Kansas City 26, Tennessee 17 — This game is an example of the importance of quarterbacks. The Chiefs remain undefeated behind their new quarterback this season, Alex Smith. After their quarterback, Jake Locker, sustained a hip injury last game, the Titans were forced to turn to backup quarterback and Harvard man, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and lose.

Seattle 28, Indianapolis 34 — For reasons unclear even to me, I consistently think the Seahawks are not as good as they are. Today I was right.

Jacksonville 20, St. Louis 34 — There is no better medicine this year for an ailing football team than playing the Jaguars.

Baltimore 26, Miami 23 — It’s pretty clear that both of these teams are good.

Philadelphia 36, New York Giants 21 — It’s pretty clear that both of these teams are not good.

Carolina 6, Arizona 22 — Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton played like a super-hero in his rookie year two seasons ago but seems to have wedged his cloak in a phone booth since then.

Denver 51, Dallas 48 — This game tied for the fourth highest scoring game in NFL history. Both teams played like video-game teams. Dallas’ quarterback Tony Romo has been known for always messing up at the last minute his entire career and played to type by throwing an interception in the last three minutes of the game that led to Denver’s winning field goal. Romo is the guy who does everything right, right until he stubs his toe, scratches on the eight ball, and steps on the tines of a hoe which flies up to hit him in the face.

Houston 3, San Francisco 31 — The story coming into this game was that Texans quarterback Matt Schaub had thrown an interception which the defensive team had then converted into a touchdown on that play in each of the last three games. Although that is the most destructive thing an offense can do, it’s also relatively random whether or not the defense scores once they intercept the ball. Random or not, Schaub had done it for a fourth time within the first few minutes of this game. He threw two more interceptions before being replaced by backup T.J. Yates. Fans will spend the next week talking about whether Schaub should lose his job for good.

Oakland 27, San Diego 17 — The Oakland Raiders share a stadium with the major league baseball Oakland Athletics who were hosting a playoff game Saturday night. The stadium workers needed more time to convert from baseball to football so the start time for this game was moved from 1:25 Pacific Time to 8:35 Pacific Time. We had the fourth highest scoring game ever in Dallas this weekend, this may be the latest game ever.

How do the Major League Baseball Playoffs Work?

I went to a Mets game this year and took this photo. They did not make the playoffs.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are among the most confusing playoffs for me because they have the most variety of format of all of the major sports’ playoffs. The MLB playoffs consist of four rounds and three different formats. It’s also confusing to me because it’s the sport I follow the least but since it started yesterday I’ve done some reading, some watching, and some listening and I am ready to report back to you what I’ve learned and then comment on what makes sense about it and what doesn’t. Let’s travel backwards through the playoffs starting with the most famous and familiar element, the World Series.

The World Series

The World Series determines the championship of the MLB. It is a best of seven series where the first team to win four games wins the series. This format is the one the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League use throughout their playoffs. Instead of dividing the league into East and West as the NBA and NHL have done for years, baseball (like football) uses history to divide their league in two. The National League was formed in 1876 and the American League in 1901. Teams from the two leagues have been facing each other in the World Series since 1903.[1] The first two games are played at one team’s home stadium, the next three at the other’s, and the last two, if necessary, at the first team’s stadium. Instead of using regular season record to decide who gets four potential games at home and who three, since 2003, this advantage was granted to the team representing whichever league won in the mid-season all-star game, an otherwise meaningless exhibition.

The Championship Series

To make it to the World Series, a team has to make it through the semi-final round, confusingly called either the American or National League Championship Series, again for historic reasons. This series follows the same seven game format as the World Series. Another oddity of baseball that stems from its history as two separate leagues is that each league plays under slightly different rules. The biggest difference is that in the National League, pitchers are required to bat whereas in the American League teams have the option[2] to replace the pitcher in the batting order with a player who only has to hit, never field. That “position” is called the designated hitter. These rules have all sorts of tactical consequences which deserve their own post but which become even more interesting in the World Series when both teams must play by the home team’s rules.

The Divisional Series

The four teams that make it to the ALCS or the NLCS have won the previous round, the Divisional Series. The divisional series’ are the quarterfinals and consist of eight teams. The format is a five game series where the first team to win three games wins the series. Each League is made up of three five-team divisions. The team in each division with the best regular season record is a division winner and automatically gets a place in the divisional series. The other two teams that make it to this round are called wild-cards and until 2012 were the two teams, one from each league, with the highest win total among non-division winning teams.

The Wild Card Playoff

Since 2012 the two extra teams to make it into the Divisional series have been the winners of the Wild Card Playoff. The Wild Card Playoff (surprise, surprise) follows a third format. It is a single elimination game. One game, the winner of which advances to the next round of the playoffs. The four teams that make it to to the Wild Card Playoff, two from each league, are the teams with the highest and second highest win total in the regular season among non-division winning teams. In 2013, the Wild Card Playoff games were between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League and Tampa Bay and Cleveland in the American League.

What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t

There are elements of this complicated setup that make sense and some that don’t. Increasing the number of games in a series as the playoffs go on makes sense because the longer a series is, the more likely it is that the better[3] team will win, and it feels more important to get the championship right than it does the quarterfinals. Varying the length of the series’ also makes sense because it maximizes the number of teams involved while answering critics who say that the playoffs are too long to sustain interest. Maximizing the number of teams involved is great for fans who may wait years for their team to even make the playoffs and great for owners who might earn more money from one playoff game than a dozen regular season games.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Wild Card Playoff. Reducing a series from seven games to five as a trade-off between getting it right and making it worth watching seems reasonable to me but going all the way down to one game sacrifices too much. Any one game between professional teams, especially ones that are good enough to make it to the playoffs, approaches a coin-toss. The coin may be weighted in one direction or another but at most it’s probably a 40-60 proposition. One game is simply not statistically significant enough to be a reliable indication of who is better. This is particularly unsatisfying in a sport that takes statistical significance so seriously that it plays 162 games in its regular season as opposed to 82 in professional hockey and basketball and 16 in football. On an emotional level, I can’t imagine following a team for 162 games over six months only to have it end with one bad game.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Believe it or not, the two leagues only merged as corporate entities in 2000!!↵
  2. Which they basically always take.↵
  3. It’s easy to twist yourself into knots about this one. If the worse team wins then aren’t they the better team? It can be an endless argument or an unspoken agreement.↵

Why do Some Sports Play Through Bad Weather and Others Don't?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do I always hear about baseball games being delayed or rescheduled due to a light rain and yet soccer games continue around the world in a downpour?

Thanks,
Jesse

Sport, baseball. Hardest material, a wooden bat. Plays through rain? No.

— — —

Dear Jesse,

Thanks for the question! It’s true that sports react differently to the elements. I’m tempted to try to explain this culturally. I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, so it would be fun to bash them for not playing in the rain. A more fair explanation would probably explain that weather affects the trajectory of balls and that this is much more dangerous with a small, hard ball traveling at 95 miles per hour than a big soft ball flying at 35 miles per hour. What is most interesting to me is trying to explain the general phenomenon of why some sports play through bad weather and others don’t and if possible, coming up with a rubric that explains why.

There seem to be two or three simple rules that we can abstract to to explain how each sport deals with weather.

  1. If the sport is played inside, there should almost never be a weather related delay.
  2. The harder the hardest substance used in normal game-play is, the less likely the sport will be to play through bad weather.

Let’s see how these work in practice.

Pro or College Basketball, Volleyball, Boxing, Hockey, Ping Pong — all played inside and all safe from weather delays.

Soccer, Football, Rugby, Cross Country Running — all played outdoors and the hardest material involved is no harder than a soft, inflated leather ball. Their surfaces are all grass or dirt. The only weather that will stop these games is a lightning storm in the direct area of the game.

Golf, Baseball, Tennis, Cricket — all played outdoors and the hardest material is significantly harder than leather. Golf has metal clubs and hard resin balls, baseball has wooden bats and hard leather balls, tennis is played on concrete with fiberglass rackets, and cricket has wooden bats and a hard leather ball.

These rules work pretty well to predict whether a sport will play through bad weather or not with only a few exceptions. You may have noticed that football is in the play through the weather category despite its helmets being much harder than an inflated leather ball. Two possible explanations for this are that historically the helmets were made of soft leather or that because the helmet is attached to the body, its danger is not modified by the weather. Of course if we allow the historic state of sports to enter into the equation, we’d have to admit that tennis used to be played only on grass and clay and that the rackets used to be made of wood. Then again, women’s tennis attire once “included a bustle and sometimes a fur” according to one history of tennis. Basketball’s treatment of weather is modified by its setting. If you are in an outside basketball league, played on concrete, games will be canceled if it is raining. Cycling admittedly breaks this rule entirely. They ride in the rain even though their bikes are made of fiberglass and the roads are made of road. I can only explain this by saying that cyclists are a little crazy and that no rule is perfect.

These rules should help you if you ever need to know whether your tickets to a sport are in danger of being rained out or if you decide to invent a new sport and want to set reasonable weather expectations.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

What's New for the '13-'14 NHL Hockey Season?

The NHL Hockey season starts tomorrow with games in Montreal, Edmonton, and Chicago. For nine out of every ten sports fans, this will have about as much impact on their lives as missing one quarter of a regular season football game because they had to run out to the store to get some pickles. The fringe popularity of hockey can be seen clearly in the low importance levels the sport receives on our daily and seven-day almanac forecasts. For the hockey fan though, it is a big day! Hockey fans have many reasons why they love hockey and the start of every season is a time when fans of all teams can be excited and optimistic about their team’s potential… even the Florida Panthers. The NHL is known to be one of the most flexible and quick-reacting leagues when it comes to tweaking the rules to fit the needs of their players, owners, and sponsors. A couple new rules this year highlight this characteristic.

No More Jersey Tucking

Not a new rule technically, the NHL has decided to start enforcing a rule against a player tucking in his jersey which has been part of the rulebook for 50 years. It doesn’t take long to realize that despite the head-fake towards explaining this rule through a ref’s easier identification of the player from behind, that this rule is all about the official sponsors of hockey. The makers of hockey pants (heavily padded) realized long ago that they could get some free advertising by putting their logo on the area that is exposed when a player tucks his jersey. No more!

If you take off mine, I’ll take of yours.

Fighting with Helmets, Visors, or None

For years the most hotly debated topic about hockey in the general media has been the place of fighting in the game. In our post, Why Do People Like Hockey, the seventh reason was “Blood (and Consent.) There are two new rules that affect how players will fight this year.

Players who fight this year, in addition to the normal five minute penalty for fighting, will be given an additional two minute penalty if they take their own helmet off. You might be wondering why a player who is about to get into a bare-knuckle fist-fight on ice would take his own helmet off. Hockey is governed by a highly ritualized set of unwritten rules. There’s a big section of this code that pertains to fighting. For instance, a fighter will not fight a player who isn’t a fighter during the normal course of play but, if a non-fighter makes a dirty play, he’s likely to be challenged by a fighter on the other team and he’s got to fight back. Players who fight a lot have more in common with fighters on other teams than they often do with the skill players on their team. So it’s probably no surprise that they don’t wear visors because a visor is likely to break the hand of whoever is fighting against them.

This year is the first year under a new collective bargained agreement between players and owners that requires new players to wear visors on their helmets that protect their eyes. Joe Haggerty explains that while this rule is meant to protect injuries, it may also cause some injuries for players who are determined to fight:

“Guys have been fighting long enough and punching enough guys in the helmet that your hand is a big, calloused club. You’re used to that. Even when guys don’t have visors on, you’re still hitting a lot of helmet. It takes more area away from the face where you can make contact, so it will be a learning curve.”

The solution? Until the league outlaws fighting all-together, the players will find their own solutions. In the preseason, Krys Barch and Brett Gallant found their own solution. They took each other’s helmets off before beginning to throw punches! David Singer of hockeyfights.com (yes, that exists) commented that this was “Victorian era honor. The Code. A ridiculous loophole on display.” Which is more ridiculous though, the response or the rule? There’s a set of hockey players that make their living partially through fighting. Unbroken hands are a job requirement and punching a visor or helmet too hard is a good way to lose a place on the team; one that, once gone, may never be regained.

Cue Cards 9-30-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Baltimore 20, Buffalo 23 — A great example of how the NFL is the least predictable league. The Bills were 6-10 last year and the Ravens were 10-6 and played in the Super Bowl. This year they are as close as can be; playing a close game that came down to the last few minutes and both having a 2-2 record after four games.

Cincinnati 6, Cleveland 17 — Cleveland won their second straight game after losing their starting quarterback to injury and trading their starting running back to the Colts.

Chicago 32, Detroit 40 — Detroit won this game by scoring 27 points in the second quarter, a feat more suited for a video game than a divisional game versus the Chicago Bears.

New York Giants 7, Kansas City 31 — The Giants are 0-4 and have been outscored 69-7 in the last two games. Coach Tom Coughlin’s job, despite his two Super Bowl wins with the team, may be in serious jeopardy.

Pittsburgh 27, Minnesota 34 — One of two games this year to be played in England, the players in this one put on quite a show in a game that was more likely to determine the team with the worst record at the end of the year than the best.

Arizona 13, Tampa Bay 10 — The Cardinals scored all 13 of their points in the fourth quarter to steal the victory from the floundering Buccaneers.

Indianapolis 37, Jacksonville 3 — Two years ago the Colts went 2-11 and selected quarterback, Andrew Luck, with the first pick of the draft. Jacksonville’s best bet this season and probably their only choice is to lose all their games and hope for the first pick in next year’s draft.

Seattle 23, Houston 20 — The Texans dominated this game in the first half, 20-3, but the Seahawks managed to wriggle back into the game, push it to overtime, and win it there with a field goal.

New York Jets 13, Tennessee 38 — The Titans continue to surprise the league with their strong play but may have to adjust to losing their starting quarterback, Jake Locker, to a hip injury.

Philadelphia 20, Denver 52 — Denver seems completely unbeatable right now. They’ve scored 179 points in four games, more than 5o points higher than the second highest scoring team.

Washington 24, Oakland 14 — The nation needed this outcome so that the inhabitants of Washington D.C. can take a few days off from their football crisis and concentrate on that whole government shut-down crisis.

Dallas 21, San Diego 30 — Although the Cowboys loss makes their record only 2-2, that’s still good enough for first place in the NFC East division. The NFC East is always the highest rated and most talked about division in the NFL but this year, the four teams have a combined 4-12 record.

New England 30, Atlanta 23 — The more things change, the more they stay the same. Quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick continue their 13 year run of success.

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does games back mean in sports standings? And how can a team be a half game back?

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

That’s a great question! Games back can be a confusing concept. Games back is a metric that attempts to show how far behind a team is, controlled for the number of games they have played. A team can be a certain number of games back from another team or from a position in the standings. In both scenarios, the target is moving. Games back is a concept that confuses many people who follow sports religiously so showing an understanding of this concept gives you a simple way of flashing your sports expertise, even among sports fans!

On the first day of a season, Team A beats Team B. Team A’s record is now 1 win and 0 losses. Team B’s is 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B is behind Team A in number of wins and in games back. So far those are the same thing. On the second day of the season, Team A plays Team C and wins again. Team B doesn’t have a game. Now Team A’s record is 2 wins and 0 losses and Team B’s record is still 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B now has two fewer wins in the standings but they are not two games back of Team A. This is because Team B has played one fewer game and the games back metric tries to control for that. Games back controls for unplayed games by counting them as one half of a win. You may hear these unplayed games called games in hand, so just remember that while a game in hand may be worth two in the bush, it’s only worth half a game in of games back. Team B is said to be 1.5 games back from Team A.

As the season goes on, this metric becomes a little harder to calculate in our heads like we just did for Team B and Team A. Wikipedia has a simple calculation for games back and though I don’t exactly understand why it works, I believe it works. It’s Games Back = ((Team A’s wins – Team A’s losses) – (Team B’s wins – Team B’s losses))/2. In our scenario, that’s ((2-0)-(0-1)/2 which simplifies to 3/2 or 1.5 games back.

In addition to calculating how many games back Team B is from Team A, it’s also common to express games back relative to a position in the standings. Two common ones are games back (or behind or out of) first place or the last team that would qualify for the playoffs. In this case, the calculation is the same, it’s just done by comparing Team B to whatever team represents that place in the standings. If today Team A is in first place, Team B would be 1.5 games out of first place. If tomorrow Team C, D, or E[1] is in first place, the calculation would be done between their record and Team B’s record.

AL StandingsBefore we leave this topic, let’s look at some real standings as of today in Major League Baseball. The WCGB column stands for WildCard Games Back. The way baseball playoffs work is that the three division winners all make the playoffs automatically and then the next two teams with the best records make it as well. These two playoff spots for non-division winners are called Wildcards. The WCGB column is calculating the number of games back a team is from getting that second and last wildcard playoff spot.

Right now the Indians are in the last playoff spot so they are zero games back. They are the target. The Rays have played the same number of games as the Indians and have one more win and one fewer loss so they are said to be +1 games back. Don’t worry about how stupid that sounds, this means they are a game ahead. The Rangers have also played exactly the same number of games as the Indians. They have one fewer win and one more loss though, so they are 1 game behind the last playoff spot as represented currently by the Indians.

We have to go all the way down to the Mariners to find a team that is an uneven number of games back. If you add their wins and losses, you see that the Mariners have played 159 games compared to the Indians’ 158. That explains the .5 in the games back column. The Indians have 18 more wins than the Mariners but because they have a game in hand, they are given an extra .5 when calculating how far back the Mariners are compared to the Indians.

Data visualization guru Edward Tufte uses sports standings to show how much data can be packed into a simple table and remain understandable (even to dumb sports fans is the unspoken ellipses that I hear) and why making a chart for any fewer than a few hundred data points is usually not necessary. As a devotee of his, I’m happy you asked this question. Hopefully this post has made all those tables in the sports section a little easier to read!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Cue Cards 9-23-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

New England 23, Tampa Bay 3 — Despite having put Boston in a constant state of crisis for the past three weeks, the Patriots are 3-o and it’s the Buccaneers who are lost at sea.

Indianapolis 27, San Francisco 7 — Colts quarterback Andrew Luck beat his college coach Jim Harbaugh, now head coach of the 49ers, whose team and quarterback specifically have looked confused while losing the past two games.

Cincinnati 34, Green Bay 30 — In the most entertaining game of the day, the upstart Bengals beat the Packers in the type of shoot-out game that the Packers were designed to win. The winning score came as the result of a fumbled fumble recovery returned for a touchdown. The football!

Carolina 38, New York Giants 0 — The Giants are known for slow starts but losing their first three games and getting shut out against the previously winless Panthers may be taking things too far.

Detroit 27, Washington 20 — Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III looked more like himself today than in previous games this season. Unfortunately the Washington defense continued to look exactly like themselves.

Miami 27, Atlanta 23 — This game is a great example of how unstable the fortunes of most NFL teams are from year to year. Last year the Miami were 7-9, this year they are 3-0. Last year the Falcons were 13-3, this year they are 1-2.

Baltimore 30, Houston 9 — Missing their star running back, Ray Rice (RUTGERS!!), the Ravens won this game due to the strength of their defense and special teams units.

New Orleans 31, Arizona 7 — Saints keep their perfect record going and look like one of the strongest teams in the NFL.

Cleveland 31, Minnesota 27 — Cleveland played without their starting running back (who they traded to Indianapolis this past week) and their injured starting quarterback and still managed to score more points against the Vikings than they had in their two previous games combined.

San Diego 17, Tennessee 20 — The Titans scored 10 straight points in the fourth quarter including a touchdown with 15 seconds remaining to beat the Chargers.

Dallas 31, St. Louis 7 — Believe it or not, this game was not as close as the score would suggest. The Cowboys dominated the Rams from start to finish.

Chicago 40, Pittsburgh 23 — Pittsburgh has pride and tradition but not much of an offensive line. Those guys are important.

Plot in Football: A Case Study

Sports fans watch sports more like fans of dramas, sitcoms, or soap operas than one might expect. Sure, the sporting contest itself is interesting, but there is a whole lot of interest driven by plot and character. The NFL football game tonight between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is a particularly good example of this. As is most often the case with football, the most visible and compelling characters are the head coaches and the quarterbacks. Here’s a description of who they are and the plot that intertwines them.

Before this year, Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent the last 13 years as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. During that time, he led the team to five NFC Championship games (basically the semifinals of the NFL) and one Super Bowl but never won the championship. For the NFL, this is a notably long tenure and a very successful one, only partially marred by a sense that he was responsible for some of the failure to win “it all.” His last few years were saddened by the death of his son from a drug overdose. It’s unclear whether his death was intentional or not. The gravity of that situation and the way Reid handled it[1], his long history with the team, and his close relationship with the owner made his firing at the end of last year surprising despite the flagging success of the Eagles over the last few seasons.

Reid was hired soon after the season as head coach of the Chiefs and has won his first two games this season.

Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the man who took over for Andy Reid, is a polarizing figure. Before this season, he was head coach at the University of Oregon. While there, he developed an offense that has become known as the “blur” offense because it emphasizes speed in all ways. He likes his players fast, and he has them run plays on offense as frequently as possible. Where most offenses may run a play every 25 or 30 seconds, Kelly’s teams aim for 10 to 15 seconds in an attempt to exhaust the opposing defense. Kelly does this by reducing the amount of thinking his players have to do between plays and increasing it during the play. Instead of calling a play with a voice command, Kelly’s teams use some still unbroken code involving hand gestures and large cardboard cut-outs. During the play, his quarterbacks often choose between handing the ball to the running back, running it themselves, or throwing it to a wide-reciever. Because the quarterback is supposed to make this decision based on what the defense is trying to do, this strategy is called the “read-option.” One of the big stories coming into this NFL season was whether this combination of speed and read would work as well in the pros as it did in college. So far it seems to be working although the Eagles are only 1 and 1.

The plot surrounding the two starting quarterbacks in the game is one of great heights, a great fall, and potential redemption but in very different ways.

The Eagles quarterback, Michael Vick, has prodigious physical talents. I once ran across Vick in an airport and I watched as a man went up to him and said, “Michael Vick??! I love playing with you in [the video game] Madden!” Vick’s talents were rewarded with great fame and fortune until he was charged and convicted for running a dog-fighting ring. He served over a year in prison and returned to the NFL when Andy Reid and the Eagles took a big PR gamble and signed him. His personal redemption has been successful, but he hasn’t reached the playing heights in Philadelphia that he did before his incarceration. Perhaps Chip Kelly can help him get there.

The Chiefs quarterback is Alex Smith. Smith was the first pick in the 2005 draft by the San Fransisco 49ers. Although he showed some promise in San Fransisco, he mostly struggled until last year. Last year it seemed he had finally put it together and was not only playing the best football of his career but also as one of the best quarterbacks, as judged by statistics, in the league through the first half of the season. That’s when Smith got a concussion and had to miss a couple of games. The backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stepped in and played so well that Smith never got back on the field. The 49ers went to the Super Bowl. Alex Smith was sent to Kansas City where he will try, under Andy Reid, to prove that last year’s first eight games were no fluke.

Will the notoriously nasty Philadelphia fans boo Andy Reid when he walks onto the field tonight? Will the new whiz kid Chip Kelly stump the old maestro Andy Reid? Which quarterback will continue on his path to redemption? Tune in tonight at 8:30 to find out. Sports!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Reid did not miss a game↵