Some Blog Site

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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I ran a few different races this year – a 5k, a 10k, and a couple half marathons. Here are various thoughts from those events.

1. After running a few races, you get to see similar signs. By “signs” I’m referring to the notes of encouragement written by spectators and held by them during the race for the runners to view. A number of the signs are meant to be humorous, but the same jokes gets old quickly. This year’s notable entries (i.e. they made me laugh or at least smile, as opposed to the familiar signs that elicit no reaction anymore) were
You’re running better than the government.
and
Run like you just fumbled a punt!

For those of you who are wondering about the last sign – the run was the day after the Michigan-Michigan State football game, a significant rivalry which Michigan lost this year in the last 10 seconds by fumbling a punt.

2. When the Detroit Marathon website and email suggest you get there early (before 6:00AM) to avoid traffic problems – take them seriously. I took the route I normally take for major sporting events, but I was late because traffic for the marathon is much, much worse than it is for a Lions or Tigers game.

The race started at 7:00, and I couldn’t get to a parking spot until 7:15. Then I had to walk about 5 blocks to the starting line. When I was about a block away, I could see people crossing the starting line and I heard the announcer over the loudspaker start counting down “30 seconds”. The material they had sent out before the race informed everyone that once the last group has started, they close the starting line and no one else is allowed to start.

So I heard the countdown “30 seconds … 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1” and I’m a block away so I figured there’s no way I’m going to make it. But the mass of people continued to go through the starting line. I got closer and saw a ton of people (actually many tons of people) still in line. And then I heard the announcer start counting again.

It turned out he counted down to the start of each wave. I was supposed to be wave C, but I ended up in wave M. And there were more waves after that. It took about a half hour just to get everyone through the starting line. I suppose it is an interesting logistics problem – how to most efficiently get 27,000 people through a gate that is about 3 lanes wide on the road.

3. Don’t be late for a major city marathon or half marathon if you care about your time. If you don’t start with your group of people with similar paces, you will be stuck in the group of people with slower paces. This is a problem in big city races because there are tens of thousand of people in the race and if you are stuck in a slow pack, you are stuck. The people are packed curb-to-curb and there is no picking your way through the people like there is in smaller races.

The slower group was a relatively happy, festive group. And I witnessed something I never would have seen if I were in the faster group – the in-race selfie. People were stopping and taking photos of themselves at various landmarks. The most popular one was the Ambassador Bridge to cross into Canada. At first I thought it was amusing. But then some people in front of me stopped for that and I had to dodge them. A word of advice: if you have to (or want to) stop during a race, move off the side of the course first, so you don’t block the people behind you. And in this race, there were literally thousands of people behind them.

4. My time was slower than expected for the Detroit race. Much of that was due to the fact that I was stuck in a slow pack for a while, but some of it is because I ran a longer route than necessary. When there were breaks in the pack, I ran faster, but I had to weave around clumps of people. On the Ambassador Bridge, in particular, I probably did as much running side to side to find a break in the wall of people as I did running forward. The extra distance adds up.

With college football underway, there are plenty o’ pundits weighing in on who is the best.

It’s a perennial conversation because of the way that the NCAA has avoided finding a champion for college football. Instead, we have many winners. Everyone gets a bowl game!

But I digress.

My topic today is how I disagree with those who say that the previous year’s champion should remain the top-ranked team the next year until they lose.

I have a couple of problems with that.

1. The teams are not the same from year to year. The coach might be, and many of the players are, but it is not the same team. It’s college, so you should expect around 25% turnover each year.

2. That statement of “you’re the best until you lose” applies only to king of the hill and boxing. Unless you have to defend your title against challengers, you can’t claim to still be the best. Or have others claim it for you.

Last year’s champion should not be assumed to be the best this year. If you’re putting together a ranking, evaluate each team based on this year’s accomplishments and statistics.

Or for those who want to have a reason for pre-season rankings: you could propose a king-of-the-hill format. No more predictable scheduling – team #1 plays team #2 and whoever wins gets to be team #1 the next week. The loser is out of the running.

Let’s assume 128 teams total, so 64 matchups each week.
1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, 5 vs 6, 7 vs 8, etc.
1v2 winner becomes #1, loser becomes #65
3v4 winner becomes #2, loser becomes #66
5v6 winner becomes #3, loser becomes #67
7v8 winner becomes #4, loser becomes #68
.
.
.
63v64 winner becomes #32, loser becomes #96
.
.
.
127v128 winner becomes #64, loser becomes #128

So the formula is
For n teams, your new ranking is
if you win: r = rp/2
if you lose: r = rp/2 + n/2
where r is your new ranking and rp is your previous ranking

That way, if you win all your games you can stay #1.
If you lose a game, it will take you log2(r)+1 games to get back to #1.

This method would not be good for relative rankings late in the season, or at the end of the season. But if you want a method for defending the title, you can’t be concerned with the losers.

As I was listening to a pre-game interview on the radio recently, I was interested to hear all the questions coming from the reporter guy.

• So-and-so had a good game last time against this opponent. Talk about him.
• The team is 3 games behind the leader in this division. Talk about the importance of this game.

I’ve written about the issue of sports reporters and the use of “talk about” before.

Since I can’t beat them, however, I will join them. Rather than trying to get reporters to ask real questions, I now suggest replacing them with a robot. Simple natural-language AI that starts each statement with “Talk about” and then adds some keywords relevant to the team and the schedule and the players – that should be indistinguishable from the current situation.

Think of it as a reverse Turing test. If the audio clips are so meaningless/predictable/boring that they could be replaced by a computer and no one would notice, then why hire reporters to ask the questions?

Also, the answers the coaches/managers/players give can be just as bland:

• I thought everyone played well individually today, we just didn’t play as a team
• We had a good game plan, we just didn’t execute well
• I was glad to be able to do my part to help the team get the win today
• We had some trouble early, but everyone pulled together and it showed in the second half

If the AI is good enough, it could replace both sides of the interview and neither reporters nor sports figures would need to be bothered.

The only problem would be the audio itself – getting the computer to sound like the actual person. Maybe have the computer generate the scripts, hire a couple of voice actors and they can read the scripts and produce the interviews for the whole league in one batch.

I’ve also come to view pre-game and post-game interviews as the equivalent of comments sections of news sites: they’re going to have them, but I know they’re a waste of time so I avoid/ignore them.

They were the police, the jury, and the executioner all in one.

They were The Commissioners.

So maybe he’s not the executioner. But he will approve your sentence and then hear your appeal and decide if he agrees with himself or with you.

In the last week, we had the announcement of the 2015 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2014 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Cleveland Browns = 4-12
• Detroit Lions = 10-6
• New York Giants = 5-11
• Pittsburgh Steelers = 10-6

How they actually did was

• Cleveland Browns = 7-9
• Detroit Lions = 11-5
• New York Giants = 6-10
• Pittsburgh Steelers = 11-5

Pretty good, except for the Browns.

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Everyone familiar with timed sports (football, basketball, hockey, etc.) knows that the last minute of the game lasts a lot longer than the first minute of the game.

But how bad is it? And how does it change during the game?

I thought I would put together a chart showing the concept. I don’t have any actual data – I’m just going off my instinct here.

Maybe the chart is skewed toward the worst case, not average. For example, how long – real time – does the last 10 seconds of a close NBA game take? How many plays can occur in the last 15 seconds of an NFL game if a team is trying to rally a win? That is what I was thinking when I chose the Y-axis scale of multiples of game time. If 15 seconds of the game clock takes 2 minutes of my life, that’s a scale of 8x.

One of the more annoying aspects of sports is the delay that is part of the game but shouldn’t be. Example #1: intentional fouling near the end of a basketball game. Example #2: trying to ice the kicker for field goals in a football game. I hope at some point they change the rules to forbid those.

Any recommendations for the Y-axis scale?
Any other proposed changes to the rules to make the ends of games less annoying to the fans?