Good Advice

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

What's Fair About It?

Joe Posnanski is, I am convinced, the most insightful sports writer working in America today, and he had another gem of an article a couple days ago. Posnanski was writing about the "fairness" of the NFL playoffs.

We, as American sports fans, like endings. I think that speaks a little bit to who we are. We tend to think of September baseball games being more important than April games. We tend to think of heroics in the fourth quarter being more meaningful than heroics in the second. We tend to put more stock into great Sunday finishes in golf than great Thursday opening rounds. I think the vast majority of us believe in the fairness of playoffs over the fairness of extended excellence, the value of single-elimination games over the value of many weeks of consistent winning. Like I say: I think that speaks a little bit to who we are.

I think this is right on target, American's like to duke it out, to settle the score, and that fits with the NFL playoff system. But Posnanski is just getting warmed up. After going through the intricacies of the NFL playoff system, he gets to a very interesting and important question, but one that he points out is often off limits for discussion.

I love the NFL playoffs. I love the randomness of it. The NFL is built around that Any Given Sunday credo, and the game thrives largely because of that. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. But the question I think about, the question I want to ask here, is: WHY do we love that sort of randomness?

I bring up the BCS again. Lately, it feels like I have been arguing a lot in favor of the BCS, which is a weird thing because I don’t like the BCS system, don’t have any desire to argue for it, and I absolutely would prefer a well-designed college football playoff. My problem, I guess, is that I want to have a discussion, and it seems that almost nobody wants to talk about it. It seems like just about any time I bring up the question — is a playoff really MORE FAIR — I get yelled at, even by close friends. The BCS has been demonized past the point of absurdity, past the point where anyone even LISTENS when someone suggests that, hey, maybe it’s not that bad.

Is a playoff really MORE FAIR? What does fair even mean? This year in college football, the BCS system had Oregon play Auburn for a trophy they called the national championship trophy. This left out other very good teams, particularly undefeated TCU. This wasn’t fair. There was much griping about it, and rightfully so. It is absurd and somewhat arrogant to believe that we can use our eyes and our computer systems and our innate sense of the game to look at more than 100 Division I football teams playing somewhat self-determined schedules and simply pick the two best teams. The flaws in the system are obvious.

But aren’t the playoff flaws obvious, too? This year in the NFL, the playoff system included a seven-win team and took one 10-6 wild-card team while leaving two other 10-6 teams at home. The system made a 12-win team and two 11-win teams go on the road for their first game, while three teams with 10 or fewer wins (including the NFL’s first seven-win playoff team) played home games. This year, the NFL rewarded New England and Atlanta for their 14- and 13-win seasons by giving them an extra week to heal and home field advantage. This seems like a seismic advantage. But is it really? We cannot argue that they promptly lost convincingly — making that one loss much more important than their stellar 16-game seasons. We cannot argue that 12 of the last 24 bye teams have lost their first playoff game.

I think this is an oft misunderstood point among most American sports fans, and especially most critics of the BCS system in college football. I would argue that the argument against the BCS is not that it is more unfair than a playoff alternative, but that it doesn't give enough teams the opportunity to settle things on the field. Those aren't the same thing. A playoff simply by virtue of increasing the number of teams competing for the championship increases the odds that the team that wins the championship will not have had the best record during the regular season. A playoff, as Posnanski says, prizes success over a smaller time frame. The BCS does as well, but in order to make it to that prized smaller time frame (the 1 game championship) a team has to be successful (at least as determined by the BCS system) over a longer time frame. This is less true in the NFL playoff structure (e.g. 7-9 Seattle made the playoffs this year while two 10-6 teams did not).

This is all my way of saying that we should get discussions of fairness out of the BCS debate. If we as Americans like the idea of settling things on the field with a winner take all game at the end of season as the culmination of a sudden death playoff as opposed to allowing pollsters and computers to tell us who the best teams are and then having them duke it out then so be it, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that will make things more fair. In fact the fairest system may well be that of the English Premier league and other sporting leagues that share its structure. Here is Wikipedia's description of how it works.

There are 20 clubs in the Premier League. During the course of a season (from August to May) each club plays the others twice (a double round-robin system), once at their home stadium and once at that of their opponents, for a total of 38 games. Teams receive three points for a win and one point for a draw. No points are awarded for a loss. Teams are ranked by total points, then goal difference, and then goals scored. At the end of each season, the club with the most points is crowned champion. If points are equal, the goal difference and then goals scored determine the winner. If still equal, teams are deemed to occupy the same position. If there is a tie for the championship, for relegation, or for qualification to other competitions, a play-off match at a neutral venue decides rank.^[21] The three lowest placed teams are relegated into the Football League Championship and the top two teams from the Championship, together with the winner of play-offs involving the third to sixth placed Championship clubs, are promoted in their place.

This is a fairer system because by prizing success over the course of an entire season as opposed to a few games, one makes certain that the team with the best record wins the championship. Why is this fairer? Because with chance any team can lose one game, especially at a high level of competition, but over the course of a season the best team will win out because of the greater sample size of games to weed out those succeeding because of chance from those succeeding because of talent, hard work, and teamwork. But we'll never get such a system in America fair as it may be because as Posnanski argues, its not the American way. Success over the long term may be immeasurably harder than success over the moment or over the course of a game, but it's also more fun to watch two teams compete for it all when the stakes are at their highest.

In the wake of their defeat, few are probably ready to recognize the greatness of the Patriots. What they have achieved over the past 10 years is much harder to achieve than what the Jets achieved over one game, but to the victor goes the spoils, for now at least.

A Child's Dream

James Fallows hits the nail on the head for why Obama's speech tonight was so successful

Because it was hopeful and positive, even joyous, rather than morose.

The standard comparisons of the past four days have been to Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster and Bill Clinton after Oklahoma City. Tonight's speech matched those as a demonstration of "head of state" presence, and far exceeded them as oratory -- while being completely different in tone and nature. They, in retrospect, were mainly -- and effectively -- designed to note tragic loss. Obama turned this into a celebration -- of the people who were killed, of the values they lived by, and of the way their example could bring out the better in all of us and in our country.

Also, Andrew Sullivan wrote reflecting the President's call to live up to the dreams of what those who died in Tuscon have for our country.

To rate this address on any political meter would be to demean it. The president wrested free of politics tonight and spoke of greater things. I pledge myself to try and follow his advice and debate with vigor and spirit and candor and bluntness, but with more civility, more empathy, and, yes, more love.

I was personally affected by this speech perhaps more than any other political speech I've ever heard, and I think that's because it focused so much on people's personal lives, who the six victims of the shooting were as wives and husbands, parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbors and colleagues. You could see in his eyes that the President was very moved by the tragedy, and that the death of 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green affected him most of all. It must be his greatest fear that someone would target his daughters, and I think the central message of the speech reflects that. The message was, can we live up to Christina Taylor Green's imagining of what this country can be? Can we be as good as she wants us to be? For a father I think that must be a very powerful feeling, to think about what your daughter's wishes for you are, what her wishes are for this country, especially if you can imagine her being taken from you before she got to grow old. The dreams of a child who's gone become in some ways a burden, or a task unmet. She wasn't able to see it through, but perhaps we can see it through for her. It's sort of a modern day "better angels of our nature." The best in us are the beautiful dreams of our children. It's a wonderful message in this time of sorrow, it is a way to heal us, a way to remind us of our own dreams and that we once believed them attainable and perhaps can again.

A Sacred Effort

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The President captures the emotion and the spirit of the times. As Frederick Douglas once said of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that was "a sacred effort."

History Runs Together

This is a great photo/graphic showing the layers of graffiti over a thousand years on a rock in Red Rocks Canyon National Monument just outside of Las Vegas.

The Crush of Search

There is something very sad to me about search engine optimization, that the search for content is ruled often by a very savvy computer algorithm devoid of human emotion searching out what it has been told (partly by me and partly by coders and partly by its own interactions with the web) are the things I want without ever engaging with me on a purely human level. I think that may be why as Andrew Sullivan argues so many of the main media aggregation sites, the Daily Dish, Huffpo, Drudge, et al. have a single human being at their core. You trust that person to deliver the news of the day filtered through their own foibles and unabashed human uniqueness. We still seek out human connection on the web even though we are interfacing through so much inhuman code. It's why facebook and twitter have seen such explosive growth. We go to people we know, people we can interact with to get the information we're after. Of course some might argue that since code is a human creation it can't really be inhuman. Perhaps I just don't understand it well enough to see the human behind its creation. But of course code is designed to straighten the lines of what it means to be human. It is not designed to be a cardigan wearing bespectacled librarian with an exquisite and intricate knowledge of 19th century Russian literature, it is designed to take me to the site with the most connections to the search terms I entered, whether that is the best source of information I was looking for or not. Search is of course an incredible innovation that has made finding information millions of times easier than it ever was before. Information no longer has to be cataloged, it simply has to be available for search. But there is a loss implicit in this transaction, and perhaps that loss is worth it, but there is a loss just the same in that we no longer connect with people as directly (and by that I mean there are now layers of technology between us)as we once did in our search for information, and that leaves me a little cold.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

The Science Behind Why Oregon is #1 in Football

What if Political Boundaries Were Based on Social Connections?

H/T @spatialanalysis

Slow to Change

Ezra Klein has a nice short post quoting an academic involved in developing "metrics" to measure the effectiveness of government programs. This is all to0 sadly true:

Many academics--myself included--have participated in efforts to produce these numbers. GPRA- measures are quite valuable to document that you have done the work, and to characterize the populations an intervention serves. These measures do not provide the kind of program evaluation information policymakers really need to understand which programs are most effective or cost-effective. Funders generally require too many numbers and reports, which have a way of being collected in a nice binder that sits on a shelf, pleasantly undisturbed.

It's not enough just to count things and measure things, that counting and measuring has to actually mean something, it has to actually have a purpose, and generally speaking for program management purposes, performance information should facilitate better decision-making so that programs and agencies become more effective and efficient. But 250 year-old organizations that face no competition are slow to change.