Five reasons the NFL is almost certainly going to profit from the referee debacle

1) Ratings drive the NFL's profits, and your concerns about the fairness and proper administration of the games are irrelevant

The networks throw money at the professional sports leagues in proportion to how many people watch their games. They will continue to throw billions at the NFL and nothing at the professional lacrosse league because you will watch the former and ignore the latter, regardless of inherent credibility of the respective sports. They don't care if you're watching professional wrestling, the NFL or American Idol. Outside of basic decency standards of the FCC, they'll put anything on TV that you'll watch.

Clueless referees making bad calls that prevent your favorite team from winning a game is annoying, but it ain't illegal.

Which brings us to our second point.

It's entertainment, baby!

2) All this controversy is actually driving interest in the league 

I didn't watch the game last night, but I knew what happened because my twitter and facebook feeds blew up . Bill Simmons had an "emergency mailbag" this morning to address the controversy. That means that the NFL is generating more attention than normal this morning and it didn't have to pay for the advertising time.

All this crap has basically made the games "must-see" TV.  You're probably going to tune in next week to see what horrible decisions they make next.

3) This isn't about the referees' contract, it's about showing the players who is boss

The amount of money at issue in this dispute is a rounding error in terms of profitability for the NFL. The NFL are playing big bully with the players. Things didn't work out as well as the NFL wanted with the collective bargaining agreement last year, so they are using any form of leverage they can to show that they have backbone, and they will get what they want.

4) This might just be a cheaper way for the owners to figure out where they stand on anti-trust issues, without having to lose a full season

I haven't heard anyone throw this theory out there yet, but all the same legal issues that impact the players also impact the referees. Perhaps the owners are hoping that the referees will sue for anti-trust violations. Even if the NFL were to lose such a suit, any loss incurred from anti-trust violations would be a fraction of the cost that they would suffer from a comparable loss from the players' union.

And if they won, they'd then know they could go after the players.

5) If the NFL owners didn't want this, they would have made it go away already

You hear a lot of commentators and pundits talk about NFL commissioner Roger Goddell as if he were a wandering dictator severed from all other entities in the league. That's ridiculous. He's a tool hired by and employed for the sole purpose of administering the league in the interests of the owners. If the owners were as upset as the fans and the players, they would have a closed-door vote and make this go away. Until attendance drops and ratings go down, they probably won't do that.

The only leverage that fans have to make this strike go away is to collectively decide not to watch or attend the games. Something tells me that's not going to happen.

Why isn't the US men's national soccer team very good?

As a function of its size and population, the United States does not have a very good soccer team. Better than India, Indonesia, and China, I suppose, but still not very good.

According to FIFA, the United States has more soccer players than any other country -- 18 million, including 14 million under the age of 18. That means that the United States has more children playing soccer than there are children in Spain. Nonetheless, the United States is only the 33rd-best soccer playing nation, according to FIFA, while Spain is the best.

Spain is doing something to develop its best players into an international soccer-playing juggernaut while the United States isn't.  

Bad arguments about why the United States isn't very good at soccer

1) We didn't grow up playing the game

I'm 34 years old, and I grew up playing the game. If I were a player, I would be nearing retirement age now.

For over 30 years, every suburban neighborhood in the United States has had soccer fields. I lived in Sylacauga, Alabama, in the 1980s, and it had soccer fields. If Sylacauga has soccer fields, lack of soccer fields isn't the issue.

2) Our best athletes don't play soccer

Is Lebron James a better athlete than Lionel Messi? Is Usain Bolt a better runner than Ryan Hall?  These are dumb questions, because their talents are suited for different types of activities.  It's unlikely that the United States equivalent of Lionel Messi isn't developing into a great soccer player because he's working on his jump shot. 

Regardless, lack of athleticism isn't the biggest problem with the US soccer team. The US team is plenty athletic -- it's high-level skill that's lacking.

Here are my pet theories on why the US doesn't perform that well in soccer in international competition:

1) Our soccer fields are too well groomed

This theory isn't mine; it's Johann Cruyff's. Cruyff grew up playing soccer in the streets of Amsterdam, and credited the hard asphalt surfaces for his impeccable ball control and balance later in life. Similarly, when I lived in Spain, the only time I saw a grass soccer field was at the Camp Nou and the Estadi Olympic.  Only the professionals play on grass. Similarly, almost all the best Brazilians grow up playing soccer either on the streets

Ever try to play soccer in a parking lot or in a street?  Either you have precision and control or you have to chase after your ball. American children grow up accustomed to a well-groomed field stopping the ball for them. Children who play on a street need or kicking against a wall develop exquisite control. Those who play on grass don't have to, because the game is played entirely on the ground until they reach their teen years. By then, they're years behind.

2) Americans never play pick up soccer

14 million kids play soccer in the US, but how often do you see kids playing soccer at the park without a parent shuttling them around with cones?  It doesn't happen much. A two-hour practice isn't enough to develop extraordinary skill. You have to spend hundreds of hours honing your craft or it won't happen.

3) We don't have an evolved talent development scheme

Because there isn't a tradition rooted in soccer in this country, we don't have a talent development scheme.  In basketball, the best players get picked up by AAU teams by the time they're 12 years old. Then, they compete against the best players locally and around the country. These players then routinely attend the best high schools with the best coaches, who connect them to the best colleges and then the pros.

In soccer, we don't have as developed a system. Europe has elite youth teams in every major and minor city. The best players work their way through the ranks and get noticed by the best clubs. By the time a kid is 14 or 15 years old, if the kid has elite talent, he probably has elite coaching and access to world-class facilities. The United States has a competitive youth system that has only recently developed a direct pipeline to the local club teams.

I think the United States is starting to get there, but we just aren't there yet. But while the development scheme is improvement, it still only has a fraction of the resources of the equivalent European model.  As long as that is the case, we can probably expect our adult teams to lag behind.

Sabermetrics and Hurling

Warning: even by the standards of this blog, this is a very niche post.

Yesterday, while watching the last five minutes of the All-Ireland Hurling championships, it occurred to me that statistical analysis might be entirely absent from the GAA and Irish sports.  

To set the stage: Kilkenny was awarded a penalty with about three minutes to go in regular time. In hurling, you receive three points for scoring a goal and one point by hitting the ball over the bar and through goal posts.  It was a tie match.  One point was enough to put Kilkenny ahead with two minutes left in normal time and about three minutes of extra time.  In hurling, it's more likely than not that someone will score in five minutes of play. One point isn't much of a lead at all, but three points, with less than five minutes, is an overwhelming advantage.

Rather than go for a goal, the Kilkenny hurler hit the ball over the bar for a single point. It was the smart play, everyone around me said.  

Why?

A simple expected value analysis shows that it was almost certainly not the smart play. 

If you assume that a championship calibre player scores a goal on a penalty 50% of the time, that yields an expected value of 1.5 points every time you shoot for a goal. Plus, if you assume that a goalie might re-direct a shot on goal above bar the 10% of the time, that yields an extra .1 of expected value.  Plus, if a goalie re-directs the shot out of bounds, then the player gets a free, which they would likely convert, say, 90% of the time. That's an extra .09 expected value.

I could have won the game for my team, but I didn't

Add it up, and a player who goes for goal has an expected value of 1.69 for every penalty attempt. If a player who goes for a point converts 99% of the time, the expected value for the conservative route is only .99.

Unless my estimates are radically off, that means that Kilkenny's decision to go for a point was not the smart play, regardless of conventional wisdom.

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I googled sabermetrics and the GAA and I found nothing. There's a company called Avenir Sports that has software that analyzes video for the major county teams, but on their website didn't give any additional details on how they conduct their analyses.

These kinds of analyses are becoming mainstream in North American sports, and they are increasingly common at the international club level for soccer.  Do they exist at all in hurling?

If not, they should.

Driverless Cars and Location Privacy, Part I

One of the coolest developments in technology today is the advanced development of driverless cars. Sounds a touch Marty McFlyish (though it's certainly no flying car), but it's a lot closer to reality than you may realize.  The California legislature has passed a law allowing the cars to be driven on California state freeways.  According to Google, these cars are now significantly safer than their human counterparts.

I'm all for it. But there is one legal issue that would be wonderful to address before the movement goes mainstream.

These cars function by using satellite and network data to navigate roads -- essentially a more complex and developed GPS system. This means they can be tracked. And anything that can be broadly tracked is a handy tool for law enforcement officials to follow individuals whom they suspect might be up to no good. In the non-virtual world, there's a Constitution (specifically, the Fourth Amendment) that safeguards individuals from warrantless searches and seizures. In the virtual world, um, not so clear.

Driverless cars make those two worlds, ahem, collide.

Federal judges, old farts that they tend to be, typically find it challenging to grapple with the workings of the internets and newfangled technology. Cellular network tracking data can reveal a detailed picture of your life. It tells where you are, what you want to know, and what you do. And that can make things easy for police looking for hints on where to find you when you're doing bad stuff.

To give one example, imagine if police requested all the data of bar patrons from 10 pm to 2 am throughout a city, and could then track those patrons' movements home. Driverless cars makes this easy. That sure would be an efficient way of cracking down on DUIs. But so would waiting outside a bar and giving everyone who left a breathalyzer. The latter is illegal. At this stage, it isn't perfectly clear that the former isn't.

The underlying legal question is whether a law enforcement official, by requesting location tracking data, is conducting a "warrantless search" under the Fourth Amendment.

The simple answer is, we don't know yet.  

Estonian 1st Graders to Learn Programming

Stumbled across a link to this article on Geek.com on Slashdot yesterday. Estonians have undertaken an initiative to teach computer programming as an integral part of the curriculum to all school-aged children from ages 6-18. To my knowledge, this is the first such program in the world.

This sounds like an extraordinary and ambitious plan. Theoretically, the thousands of hours of programming experience that Estonians would receive under this plan would give them an enormous professional advantage over other countries' students who seek to work in programming. Estonians might turn out to be the Kenyan Marathoners of programming.

The implementation of such a plan would doubtless be complicated. I can't imagine the pedagogy of computer science to pre-pubescent children is very developed (pun intended?). But that could be said of any novel discipline. That's not a good reason not to do it.

The United States isn't producing many more computer scientists now than we were 25 years ago. It makes sense that other countries would nudge their future working population to cover those gaps.

Paul Ryan and the mystery of the easily disprovable lie

Suffice it to say if you're a candidate for Vice President of the United States, you don't want this associated with your political brand. 

I won't debate whether Paul Ryan knew the difference between a 2:5X marathon and a 4:01 marathon. He did.

I won't debate whether Paul Ryan misled the reporter into believing he had run a pretty darned fast marathon when he was really a mid-packer. He did that, too.

I won't debate whether Republicans lie more or less often than Democrats. I don't care. I don't get all excited watching either party's convention. I don't have cable, and I don't consider myself a Democrat or a Republican.

The only thing that's interesting is why someone under such intense scrutiny would mislead a reporter so easily disprovable. 

Paul Ryan had so little to gain from lying and so much to lose. Democrats criticize Paul Ryan for being disingenuous, stupid, his ill-fitting suits, and the douchey hair. If there is one area of his life, however, where Ryan has been immune from criticism, it's his fitness level.  The guy's in good shape. No one's disputing that.

Yet he got caught in a galactically stupid lie about his fitness.   

It makes no sense, from a rational political perspective. But humans are rarely rational. And how we self-identify even less so. My only guess -- and this is pure speculation -- is that Paul Ryan made up this story a long time ago, as a way to reinforce his reputation as an impressive physical specimen (which he is). Mr. Ryan told it many times to many people, and he had actually come to believe it was true as part of the narrative of who he was. The race was a long time ago, but this narrative had been a part of his life for a while.

The first time you lie about something, it's a conscious act. If this were the first time he had made up this whopper, he would have caught himself, because he's a VP candidate now. But after a while, when you tell a story, you're just representing a narrative version of yourself that you've come to recite many times before. Neither the true nor the gently (or greatly) exaggerated versions of that narrative form part of the conscious mind. And that's why he got into trouble. He just told a story he had told many times before.  

Only problem: he had forgotten it wasn't true.