football

There was a discussion in another thread (click here) about Roger Goodell and the potential for kickoff elimination as a way to curb concussions. 

My thought* (which I shared in that thread) was simple: if the powers that be really care about concussions, there is probably one real way to address them: by imposing a maximum weight for playing football. The thinking is this: players are simply just too big and fast these days.

Of course, there are a lot of possible nuances to such a scheme, including different limits per position, and what the actual limits should be. Your idea goes here!

My feelings on Goodell's positioning is that it all relates to potential lawsuit deflection, i.e., concrete small actions he can point to saying "look, we have been trying to make it better!" The real problem lies in something more fundamental: huge, fast men bashing heads over and over. Unless that changes, concussions, for better or worse, are likely here to stay.

That, or some kind of awesome weird big football helmets.

Your thoughts?

* - actually my wife suggested this. She is pretty smart though.

In case you don't frequent Grantland, they've added a picture-pages esque feature called the "Trenchies" that details OL and DL play from the past week in the NFL.

Since many on this blog can't consume enough football info, I figured I'd pass along a link:

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/44528/the-trenchie-awards-some-vintage-john-abraham-and-the-play-of-the-year-from-j-j-watt

That's this week's, focusing on John Abraham and JJ Watt, and here's a link to all the previous stories:

http://www.grantland.com/search?query=Trenchie

With the addition of Rutgers and Maryland, it seems more or less inevitable that eventually the Big Ten will grow to 16 schools.  Given the NCAA's rule that championship game participants must come from separate divisions that play an internal round robin, dividing into two permanent divisions of eight teams each would ensure that a school plays schools in the other division almost never.

The answer that no one seems to be touting?

4 "pods."  2 non-permanent divisions.  Pods are B1G North, South, East, and West.

Let's assume for the sake of needing to pick two more teams for this discussion that Notre Dame finally sees what pretty much everyone else sees and finally decides to hitch its wagon to the Big Ten rather than the relative uncertainty of the ACC, and brings Georgia Tech with them.

We've then got 16 teams, which divide into four pods of four teams each.

We'll also assume that we're going to 9 conference games, because with 15 other teams to play on a somewhat regular basis, how could you really not?

Here's how the schedule works.  Every two years the pods rotate with each other to combine into divisions, like so:

• Years 1 and 2:  North/South vs. East/West
• Years 3 and 4:  North/East vs. South/West
• Years 5 and 6:  North/West vs. East/South

Like the current set up, each division sends its champion to the B1G championship game.  There's no four-team playoff... just the championship game.

Whom do you play?

Every year a team will play everyone in its own pod, everyone in its division partner pod, and a fixed opponent from each other pod in the other division.  So every year a team will have essentially 6 fixed annual opponents; the other 3 games are played against the non-fixed annual opponents in the division partner pod.  So as the pods rotate to combine with each other, the nine teams that are not annually fixed on a team's schedule will rotate onto the schedule for 2 games in every six-year division cycle.  That allows for the maximum protection of rivalries while also ensuring that you'll play everyone in the league on average once every three years... that's a far better rate than what proposals for fixed divisions are giving us.

So each team's nine conference games are scheduled thus:

• 3 games: play everyone in your own pod
• 4 games: play everyone in your pod's division partner pod (these first two bullets create the necessary divisional round robin)
• 2 games: play your fixed annual opponent in each of the other division's pods

The four pods are divided as follows, and numbered according to fixed annual opponents in each pod (1s play all other 1s each year, 2s play all 2s, etc.):

NORTH:

1. Michigan
2. Notre Dame
3. Michigan State
4. Purdue

SOUTH:

1. Ohio State
2. Northwestern
3. Rutgers
4. Illinois

EAST:

1. Maryland
2. Georgia Tech
3. Penn State
4. Indiana

WEST:

1. Minnesota
2. Nebraska
3. Iowa
4. Wisconsin

Fixed annual final week games:

• Michigan – Ohio State
• Michigan State – Penn State
• Maryland – Georgia Tech
• Notre Dame – Purdue
• Iowa – Nebraska
• Minnesota – Wisconsin
• Illinois – Indiana
• Northwestern – Rutgers

Traditional, renewed, or natural rivalries preserved on an annual basis:

• Michigan – Ohio State
• Michigan – Minnesota
• Michigan – Notre Dame
• Michigan – Michigan State
• Notre Dame – Northwestern
• Notre Dame – Georgia Tech
• Notre Dame – Michigan State
• Notre Dame – Purdue
• Michigan State – Penn State
• Purdue – Illinois
• Purdue – Indiana
• Ohio State – Illinois
• Northwestern – Illinois
• Illinois – Indiana
• Maryland – Georgia Tech
• Maryland – Penn State
• Rutgers – Penn State
• Penn State – Nebraska
• Minnesota – Iowa
• Minnesota – Wisconsin
• Iowa – Nebraska
• Iowa – Wisconsin

Unimportant or "fake" rivalries lost on an annual basis:

• Minnesota – Penn State
• Ohio State – Penn State
• Michigan State – Indiana

Initial reactions:

• The North and West pods appear to be complete no-brainers... ND's traditional rivalries with U-M, MSU, and Purdue, and the U-M & MSU rivalry make the North a pretty natural fit.  The West is the traditional triangle of hate, plus Nebraska.  That leaves the South and East to be sorted out.
• Michigan's fixed opponents each year would be Michigan State, Notre Dame, Purdue, Ohio State, Maryland, and Minnesota.  In years 1 and 2 we'd also see Northwestern, Rutgers, and Illinois.  In years 3 and 4 we'd get Georgia Tech, Penn State, and Indiana.  In years 5 and 6 we'd get Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin (for a murderer's row schedule, but come on, deal with it).
• Impermanence of divisions is a concern, though a minor one; would be tough to remember on a year-to-year basis who's in what division.
• There'd be no more "Legends" champ or "Leaders" champ.  A team would simply claim a "Division" championship each year, due to the rotating natures of the divisions.
• Luckily for rivalry maintenance and flexibility, Rutgers seems to have no natural football rivals.  I've lumped them with Penn State for a start.  The three "lost" rivalry games listed above could potentially be annually preserved by tweaking the membership of the South and East, or the numbers assigned in them.
• Schedule strength?  Each team's fixed annual opponents include some tough games and some cake walks.  And as the pods pair up to form divisions, teams will gain tough games and easy games.  As we've seen the past few years, strength of schedule is very fickle anyways as teams rise and fall in quality; in the end it's probably all a crapshoot, but the two years in which the South/East team up against the North/West will likely be the most unbalanced.
• Rivalries?  As I've said above, all important rivalries are preserved.  And ND would start getting GT and Northwestern again.  Penn State would start playing teams from the east coast again.  And the old ACC teams play each other.
• ND, GT: Yes, I know.  Who knows if this will happen?  But I needed to pick another two teams to get us to 16.  Chill out.

Is it just me, or does this make too much sense?  I think rotating pods is the only way to see every team in the conference on a somewhat regular basis without going to an eleventy-billion-game conference schedule.

[Edited to clean up some formatting.]

In the last installment, I investigated one case of what sports commentators refer to as “momentum” (where a team that makes a successful play will continue making to be successful): outcomes in overtime games. Looking through the CFBStats data from 2005-2011, I found that not only did teams that came from behind to force overtime fail to come out on top at an unusual rate, their outcomes were not affected by other factors such as being the home team or coming back from large deficits. However, I was not entirely exhaustive in my analysis, and two commenters, SpyinColumbus and cgnost, pointed out that it might be interesting to see what, if any role, rankings might play in determining outcomes in overtime.

As it turned out, integrating Sagarin rankings into the CFBStats data was fairly straightforward, and I created a table that matches the CFBStats ID codes (which are the same as used in the NCAA data that CFBStats is built from) with the names that Sagarin uses in his published data. So if you are working with these two data sets and want to put them together, here is the file to integrate these data sources, which is covered by an ODC PDDL (public domain).

With this in mind, the first order of business was to address the issue of what, if any, differences emerge in terms of Sagarin rankings in determining overtime outcomes compared to whether or not teams come from behind. In essence, do teams that come from behind beat their Sagarin predictions? If so, this might suggest that teams coming from behind are bringing some momentum into overtime.

Again, I am considering the set of 230 overtime games from 2005-2011 (dropping the 2005 Arkansas State-Florida Atlantic 0-0 EOR game). I will focus on Sagarin’s “PREDICTOR” model as he regards this as the most useful predictor of game outcomes, though I will also present some analysis using “RATING” and “ELO_CHESS.” PREDICTOR accounts for margin of victory, while ELO_CHESS only considers game outcomes (Sagarin describes it as more “politically correct”). RATING is a synthesis of the two. I also used the year-by-year home advantage values to adjust these ratings, including the 2011 addition of separate values for home advantage for each of the ranking systems. Neutral site games are not adjusted.

One important limitation of this analysis is that, because historical week-by-week Sagarin rankings are not available to my knowledge, all of this analysis is based on his year-end rankings. Because end-of-year rankings are determined by performance in-season, this brings up considerable endogeneity issues that cannot be easily dismissed. The best way to address this would be with the week-by-week rankings, and so if anyone knows of historical data, please let me know and I will see if this changes the results in any meaningful way.

To characterize the results, the first analysis I considered with regard to the ranking was general prediction of overtime outcomes. Sagarin’s rankings use scales with higher values indicating a higher ranked team, and, at least with PREDICTOR, the expected margin of victory. To predict outcomes based on Sagarin’s rankings, I subtracted the PREDICTOR, RATING and ELO_CHESS values of the losing team from the winning team. Thus, positive values indicate that the higher ranked team won (a “normal” outcome) and negative values indicate an “upset.” Based on this, we see the following results for overtime games:

Sagarin’s hit rate for overtime games is about 57% at best and 54% at worst, depending on which of his models is being used. It is worth noting that among non-overtime games, his hit rate is much better (between 78.4% and 80.2% in games between 2005-2011), but this is not surprising because overtime games represent a small sample of games between more closely matched teams (average difference between teams for the ranking systems in non-overtime games is between 10.0 and 10.2 while for overtime games it is between .3 and 1.1). How do Sagarin’s rankings look when considering the way in which overtime is forced?

To do this analysis, I modified my measures somewhat to make the results more interpretable. Since I was focused on teams coming from behind, I subtracted the PREDICTOR rating of the leading team from that of the team that came from behind. This difference therefore represents Sagarin’s predicted outcome for the team coming from behind – if it is less than zero, then the team coming from behind would be predicted to lose the game, while if it is greater than zero, they would be predicted to win.

The overall average for the from behind PREDICTOR difference score is -1.44, which is significantly different from zero (t(229) = -2.19, p < .05), indicating that, on average, teams coming from behind were predicted to lose. A logistic regression with the from-behind PREDICTOR difference score as the independent variable and the game’s outcome as the dependent variable revealed that these differences in PREDICTOR scores did not predict the games’ outcome (Exp(β) = 1.002, p > .85). To further clarify this relationship, I split the data into games where the team coming from behind was predicted to lose (that is, had a PREDICTOR score less than zero) and where these teams were predicted to win (PREDICTOR>0), and compared this to the games’ overall outcome:

(χ²(1) = .49, p >.48)

What this tells us is that rankings and game outcomes are independent of one another. More directly, while teams coming from behind to tie the game up are more likely to have been predicted to lose, these predictions did not affect how they performed in overtime.

In the context of momentum, this provides further evidence that coming from behind has no effect on game outcomes. Overall, Sagarin rankings are a barely weighted coin flip in overtime games, and how the teams became deadlocked in regulation does not affect this coin in any way.

Thanks, again, for reading, and to cgnost for prompting this analysis. In the next installment, I’ll continue the search for evidence of momentum in traditional defensive stops (those not ending in fumbles, interceptions or safeties), with a special focus on my favorite play in all of football: the goal line stand. Go blue.

I don't think I like what college football is becoming. I know the chaos of last year proved that the system is broken. But having 8-5 Wiscy at the Rose Bowl proves to me that the new way we're doing things (and trying to do more of in the future) isn't any better. Yes, I know Ohio is ineligible and so this season is an exception, but looking across the country and through history this isn't the first time undeserving teams win the little playoff game at the end of the season. The Big XII had it happen all the time. Georgia Tech nearly did it. UCLA had a chance to do it last season. And rematches are stupid, anyway, which is another reason I hate these expanded conferences and their title games.

Even worse to me was what SI's "mock" committee selected for the playoffs. The committee would have selected an Oregon team that didn't win its division, and they were flirting with the idea of sending three SEC teams. That makes very little sense to me - the whole point of playoffs is so we can take teams who've been isolated from each other but were the best in their isolated conferences, and match them up to see who's the best of the best. You don't think Stanford is deserving because they lost to the #1 team in the nation on a questionabl goal line stand? Fine - then send K-State, not an Oregon team who had a cakewalk of a non-conference schedule. But the morons who run college football are going screw up this playoff or expand it (which is also screwing it up).

I'll always love Michigan football and always watch them. But I used to love the "chase" for the national title, whether or not we were a part of it. I loved seeing who won what conference and who played in which bowl games and how the BCS filled their slots. But these last two seasons, that has been so unsatisfying. I almost wanted to see 6-6 GT win the ACC just so everyone can see how ridiculous this new system of super conferences and divisions are, with the de facto playoffs at the end that next year lead into the "national" playoffs.

For years we all clamored, begged, and wanted playoffs. I'm regretting what that has led to. We've ripped apart and thrown away traditional rivalries that made these conferences seems like families. I am beginning to wish Penn State had joined the Big East in 1982. I don't think it's crazy to say that none of this super conference bullshit would have happened with that being the case. Sure, maybe the SEC and Big 12 would have formed. But the 14 team Big Ten, the ACC and the Pac 12? Maybe, it was inevitable, I don't know.

Maybe I'll get used to it - Michigan at High Point Solutions Stadium to play Rutgers. Every conference having a title game, the champions meeting in the bowl game playoffs. Maybe the powers that be will figure out the kinks in the next few years and actually make it so 8-5
Wiscy doesn't head to the Rose. And it is a good thing that we'll no longer have our arguments about "who is better?" But is that worth what we've given up? Conferences felt like families, rivalries that built this sport? With Wiscy in the Rose  and Maryland in the Big Ten the answer for me is no. And even if this season proves to be an anomaly, we would still have lost something with forsaking tradition and embracing a system that leaves no doubt who's "the champ." And college football is becoming a little bit less special as each of these moves happens.

Oh well. Sorry if this rant clutters up the board without adding anything, feel free to send me to Bolivia if neccessary.

couple of recent posts, one very applicable to the football season (turf toe) , and part 1 of a two-part post on patellar dislocations. Thanks again for reading, and I'll continue to take into consideration any suggestions for topics people might be interested in.

http://joelvanderlugt.wordpress.com/

Go Blue!