BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE. In football, every play is planned after an interval for deliberation. Coaches now call most plays. In soccer, there is a continuous flow. A soccer coach has to prepare his players to react to events. Most basketball coaches take after football coaches. Aside from fast break situations, there are lots of set plays. At the end of the game, there are lots of time outs, and only rarely at the end of a game does a coach let his team take the ball after a basket and attack before the other team can set its defense. College coaches who don’t seem to call a lot of plays, who let their players play, (such as, I think, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse) are not rated as highly as their record deserves. Coaches by their nature hate mistakes. It seems that Tyrus Thomas has gotten crosswise with his coaches because he makes mistakes. For example, he is criticized for “poor shot selection”, although his shooting percentage is 48.6%, so he can’t be taking too many bad shots. (For comparison, Joakim Noah, who has a similar offensive game, is shooting 49.5% this year.) As for defense, you would think that you would want an agile shot blocker like Thomas to be doing some free lancing on defense (otherwise known as “playing help defense”). One report noted that Tyrus’s new coach is Larry Brown, who is know for being a stickler on how things are done. We’ll see what happens.
Archive for the ‘Football’ Category
BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE.
Saturday, February 20th, 2010AN ARGUMENT FOR MAKING REFEREE REVIEWS PUBLIC IN SOCCER.
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009AN ARGUMENT FOR MAKING REFEREE REVIEWS PUBLIC IN SOCCER. I have posted several times that referee reviews in baseball, basketball and football should be made public. Some of my arguments were that referee mistakes are part of the narrative of the game, that the leagues have some protection in the event a referee is dishonest (as has been the case in professional basketball), and that, as I posted on here, forensic economists can “look for statistical evidence of malfeasance.” The weekend Financial Times (November 21/22) had an article about how 15 people have been arrested in a match-fixing scandal which may involve over 200 European soccer games in nine countries, including three games in the European Champions League. Those arrested are suspected of offering payments to “players, coaches, referees and officials from leagues.” I don’t know why sports officials don’t embrace the opportunity to forestall some of the questions about refereeing.
NOT RUNNING UP 100 POINTS ON YOUR OPPONENT.
Sunday, September 20th, 2009NOT RUNNING UP 100 POINTS ON YOUR OPPONENT. On Friday, I posted on how Mike Francesa and people in Florida were speculating that Florida would score 100 points against Tennessee. In the event, Florida won, but the score was only 23 to 13. Florida is thought to be the best college football team in the country, but I have no idea what Francesa and the people in Florida were thinking.
RUNNING UP 100 POINTS ON YOUR OPPONENT.
Friday, September 18th, 2009RUNNING UP 100 POINTS ON YOUR OPPONENT. I heard Mike Francesa saying today that there are rumors that Florida is going to try to score 100 points against Tennessee tomorrow. Sure enough, this article in a Florida newspaper says that “Privately, there are whispers that Meyer wants to put 100 points on the board.” (Urban Meyer is the Florida coach). Florida is a 29 point favorite. All this brings back memories of the first college football game I saw in person. We lived in Elmhurst, Illinois, and the Elmhurst College football team was not very good. I went to see Elmhurst College play Wheaton College, which did have a very good football team. At the end of the first quarter, Elmhurst was losing by only 6 to 3. They lost 78 to 3. They lost the next year by 81 to 0. Soon, Elmhurst and Wheaton stopped scheduling each other. There was a story before the last game that the Wheaton College president had told his team that his mother was going to be 100 years old soon, and that breaking 100 would have some sentimental value. Elmhurst College held the score to 96 to 0. After the game, the streets of Elmhurst were filled with cars honking horns and Elmhurst College students celebrating.
BALLET TRAINING FOR ATHLETES.
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009BALLET TRAINING FOR ATHLETES. The Wall Street Journal reports here that the Minnesota Twins have signed Max Kepler-Rozycik, the sixteen-year old son of two professional ballet dancers, with an $800,000 bonus. One of the advantages that the ballet background gives him is the work ethic. Ballet dancers practice more intensively than athletes. The article quotes a saying of the phenom’s mother: “Three days away, out of the ballet.” When the mother was 15, she was dancing from ten a.m. to six p.m. at the Joffrey Ballet school. The Berlin ballet, where the mother starred, gave dancers 52-week contracts so they could practice every day. Another advantage of the ballet background for the young player is what he has learned about movement from his parents. One of his coaches says: “”Max’s athleticism is precise, without wasted movement, like in ballet.” Football teams have experimented with ballet training, especially for linemen, and I remember one ballet teacher commenting that ballet dancers have learned how to move their bodies from point A to point B in various ways and that football players didn’t seem to have learned that.
SCAMS: FLOOD PREPARATION.
Saturday, March 28th, 2009SCAMS: FLOOD PREPARATION. The article by Pablo Torres tells about an athlete ” who invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry.” The promoter came back with a request for an additional investment of of $500,000, but by this time, the athlete had obtained professional investment advice. Somehow I was reminded of the precautions against flood that are taken in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.”
IT’S NOT ONLY MADOFF: ATHLETES AND INVESTMENT SCAMS.
Saturday, March 28th, 2009IT’S NOT ONLY MADOFF: ATHLETES AND INVESTMENT SCAMS. This article from Sports Illustrated by Pablo Torre says that 78% of National Football League players have either gone bankrupt or are under financial stress within two years of retirement. For National Basketball Association players, an estimated 60% are broke within five years of retirement. Many of these men made millions of dollars during their careers. The biggest factor is bad investments (including real estate). Just as a number of Madoff’s victims were social friends, many of the bad investments by athletes result from investing with friends.
IT’S THE FIELD, NOT THE CHAINS (COMMENT).
Thursday, January 15th, 2009IT’S THE FIELD, NOT THE CHAINS (COMMENT). I had posted here on the football ritual involving the ten yard chain and noted a recent game in which the chain did not reach the ten yards between the 20 yard line and the 30 yard line. I mentioned three logical explanations. Stan commented that the chains are tested before each game, while yard markers are not marked exactly. I thank him for the comment which clarifies something I have always wondered about. I should have pointed out that I don’t think that any errors with the chains favor one team or another. For me, any errors just add to the mystery of the ritual.
LOCATING THE CHAINS (REVISITED).
Thursday, January 1st, 2009LOCATING THE CHAINS (REVISITED). A few days ago, I posted on something that I had been puzzled by for many years: the casualness with which football chains are located on first down and the ceremony of exactness when there is a measurement to see whether a team has gained the ten yards for another first down. Today an article in the New York Times by John Branch addresses the same question. I learned that the chains go back to 1906 when the rule that provided for a first down when a team gains ten yards went into effect. Dozens of inventions have been patented for more accurate replacements for the chains, but it seems unlikely that any new method will be adopted. I had referred to the ceremony attached to bringing out the chains. The National Football League’s vice president for officiating acknowledges that it is a ceremony: “When we measure, we make sure the players are clear so that TV can get a good shot of the actual measurement.” I had suggested that one reason why the chains might show that a team had gained ten yards even though it had started at the 20 yard line and had not reached the 30 yard line was that there was less than 10 yards between the 20 yard line and the 30 yard line. Today’s article quotes an official of the NFL rules committee: “Who’s to say that the yard lines on the field are perfectly measured in every stadium?”
LOCATING THE CHAINS.
Saturday, December 27th, 2008LOCATING THE CHAINS. I have always thought that there is an arbitrariness to bringing out the chains at a football game to determine whether the team with the ball has picked up the ten yards necessary for the first down. If the ball is short of a first down, the officials hold the chain with their fingers to make sure that the end of the chain is placed back in the correct spot. But what about the beginning of the series of downs? I always thought it was placed arbitrarily—or by rough guess—and I was watching a game last Sunday (December 21) which illustrated this. Toward the end of the first half, Philadelphia took the ball at its own 20 because of a touchback. After the third down, the ball was spotted just short of the 30 yard line. There was a measurement, and the ball was beyond the end of the chain. The officials and the announcers accepted that this would be a first down, even though as a matter of arithmetic, it couldn’t have been a first down. Either the initial spot of the chains was wrong, the chains weren’t ten yards long or the distance between the 20 yard line and the 30 yard line was not ten yards.
