Unverified Voracity Admires Punt Comment Count

Brian

Let's watch a punt. This is a Big Ten blog, after all. This is incoming freshman Brad Robbins:

And that's a 5.0 hangtime punt. I'm a little surprised Robbins was headed to Nevada before Michigan had a scholarship open on Signing Day. Seems like a potential Zoltan Mesko.

Rise of the nooners. Michigan/Air Force will be at noon on BTN, the fourth 2017 home game at which toe will meet leather at God's time. The only remaining home dates without times are Michigan State, which seems fated to be a night game despite everyone save TV thinking that's a bad idea, and Minnesota. Minnesota is November 4th. In the past that's meant both participants would have to sign off on a night game, and despite changes to the TV contracts that clause appears intact. Manuel:

“The only difference is, the Big Ten and television can assign us to a primetime game [before November] and it’s not our option. In November, we have the option if we choose to do so. I don’t anticipate that choice being made.”

I would anticipate Minnesota being noon or 3:30 as well.

As a person who likes to watch a lot of college football this is an excellent development. YMMV.

Ready to roll. Steve Lorenz has a piece on Michigan's incoming linebackers that features this piece of good news on Drew Singleton:

He is 100% healthy and ready to go for fall camp according to two sources I spoke with on Monday and Tuesday. Because of his lock status as a recruit and his knee injury, he may be the most under-talked about prospect the Wolverines signed in the 2017 cycle.

He also asserts that all three incoming LBs could be on the two-deep this fall, which is good news for them and maybe less than good news for the extant linebacker corps past the starters.

Good luck with that. College football twitter set a new record for most "that's a bold strategy, Cotton" references yesterday after Ole Miss responded to their latest NOA by saying 1) we're super guilty and 2) Hugh Freeze is not responsible.

Why is Ole Miss going to these incredible lengths to protect Hugh Freeze?

What the Rebels are going to the NCAA Committee on Infractions with later this year is the kind of defense a school might mount for Nick Saban or Urban Meyer or John Calipari. It is a full-fledged document of support for Ole Miss’ football coach, unequivocal in its admission that major violations occurred but unwavering in its denial of Freeze’s responsibility for any of them.

Ole Miss’ institutional decision to pursue this strategy is puzzling. While Freeze has had some shining moments in Oxford, he’s 19-21 in the SEC and is nobody’s definition of irreplaceable. Yet the school is taking the path of most resistance in defending him, and by doing so, potentially risking the total destruction of its football program for the foreseeable future.

Hugh Freeze draws a lot of water in this town, NCAA.

Poor ol' Barney looks set up to be the fall guy:

“It’s not right,” Loyd added. “It is a betrayal of him. Do I think Barney’s been made a scapegoat? Yes. Based on what I’ve seen and know, they set him up. ‘You are the most unsophisticated, the most expendable, and, tag, you’re it.’ But I have to say, I’m his advocate in this.

“Barney’s thinking is, ‘We were all in this together – what happened to me?’ They were a team, and a team doesn’t abandon their own on the field of play. It’s also not the Ole Miss way.”

Barney Farrar was the guy Laremy Tunsil was told to see in the text messages released on Tunsil's instagram on draft day last year. Told to see by Ole Miss's Assistant AD of Football Operations. Totally without Freeze's knowledge. Uh huh.

It remains a mystery why Ole Miss wouldn't throw Freeze overboard and try to mitigate the damage. His best skill is credulously accepting commitments from guys his boosters bought. Surely whoever's at Arkansas State can replicate that.

Grabbin' grad transfers. Brendan Quinn on Michigan's entry into the grad transfer market:

For a program like Ohio, this is an atomic loss. There is no replacement. There is no recruit that Ohio can discover in the forests of Neverland who will walk in and average 15.9 points and 6.5 assists per game. The roster is not built for attrition, let alone its best player picking up and leaving as a graduate transfer.

Phillips declined an interview for this story.

Beilen, meanwhile, told me he spoke to Phillips twice during the transfer process. At one point, he recalled telling Phillips: 'I just hate how this is happening." Beilein feels for Phillips because Beilein sees himself in Phillips. This is the little guy getting screwed.

It is also, though, the reality of college basketball in 2017.

Simmons was strongly considering attending Ohio State. Other Big Ten schools were circling. Beilein was faced with a dilemma.

"He was going to go to one of our competitors, probably, if he didn't come to us," Beilein said.

It's bad for the lower reaches of D-I but good for the players, and teams who have to fill unexpected holes annually. At this point the grad transfer rule is all but sacrosanct. These days trying to restrict a transfer in any way comes with it a media outcry and a hasty retraction; trying to do away with grad transfers would cause a huge blowup. It is what it is.

Hockey is too random. There's such a thing as too much unpredictability, and hockey has it.

Goalies and defensive systems got a lot better; goals plummeted; games turned into a bunch of coinflips. Hockey is now the most random major sport:

continuum

Shots and possession don't turn into goals enough. The only solution is to embiggen the nets; otherwise goalie dominance will continue and the NHL playoffs will remain almost totally random.

Etc.: Scouting Akrum Wadley. Jim Harbaugh has a fan. Midlevel Big Ten teams are about to be irritated by Cincinnati. Via Mike Rubin, more on Flin Flon. M players had a month off to be humans. Now that's over.

Comments

cheesheadwolverine

June 7th, 2017 at 1:27 PM ^

Hard to buy that baseball is more random than football.  The best baseball teams are .625 and the playoffs a crapshoot even with seven game series.  Football teams go 13-3 and the best teams usually end up in the Super Bowl even with single elimination format.  I mean at least on a game-by-game basis.  Maybe over the course of teh season because the sample size is so much larger.

CRISPed in the DIAG

June 7th, 2017 at 3:02 PM ^

I'm not sure if the picture is an precise representation of randomness, but a chunk of baseball is random. More to the point, success in baseball depends on limiting the randomness of events. Good pitchers will have higher strikeout rates because bad things are more likely to happen when balls are hit in play. It's possible for pitchers to have success while "pitching to contact" but the sabremetric goofs have been able to dispute that notion in the last few years.

Sleepy

June 7th, 2017 at 6:05 PM ^

YEAR - CHAMPION WINS (MLB WINS LEADER)

2016 - CHC 103 (103)
2015 - KC 95 (100)
2014 - SF 88 (98)
2013 - BOS 97 (97)
2012 - SF 94 (98)
2011 - STL 90 (102)
2010 - SF 92 (97)
2009 - NYY 103 (103)
2008 - PHI 92 (100)
2007 - BOS 96 (96)
2006 - STL 83 (97)
2005 - CHW 99 (100)
2004 - BOS 98 (105)
2003 - MIA 91 (101)
2002 - LAA 99 (103)
2001 - ARI 92 (116)
2000 - NYY 87 (97)
1999 - NYY 98 (103)
1998 - NYY 114 (114)
1997 - MIA 92 (101)
1996 - NYY 92 (99)
1995 - ATL 90 (100)

...the team with the most regular season wins has won the World Series five times. In 22 seasons.

kehnonymous

June 7th, 2017 at 1:39 PM ^

Not able to watch the video in the Vox article (and btw, I hate how the article basically says 'watch the vid' and not much more) but the graphic implies that baseball is *less* random than football, which overall doesn't seem right. The main arguments you can make for football being more random is that one play can net 7 points in football and there's only one game in a playoff NFL showdown vs seven for baseball.

MI Expat NY

June 7th, 2017 at 2:50 PM ^

Haven't clicked through to see how it is calculated, but I'd guess it's based less on how often the "better" team wins, but rather on how often the team that plays "better" in any individual game, wins that game.  You're right, the better team is more likely to win any football game.  But that's because it will almost always play better in any individual game against a lesser opponent.  In baseball, taking 2 of 3 against bad teams is still a good result because there's a chance that pitching matchups or simply the quality of play will favor the lesser team at least 1 out of 3 days.  

Luck changes an individual game more in football.  A team can significantly outgain an opponent, performing significantly better on a down-by-down basis only to see the game flip on key turnovers.  In baseball, te team that has a higher OPS for the game is probably going to win, with less chance that "luck" will change the outcome.  

Edit:  Ok, watched the video.  What the scale represents is the likelihood that regular season records accurately reflect the skill levels of the teams.  Football gets dragged down by the fact that it's regular season is only 16 games, so any luck (not sure if this would include uneven scheduling) plays a greater role in final record.  In baseball, 162 games helps negate the luck aspect.  

nogit

June 7th, 2017 at 4:00 PM ^

I only skimmed it for now but isn't it rolling quantity of league inequality in with the stratification capability of skill?

for example, if in soccer there was one pro team, one highschool team, and one third grade team, and that was the league, wouldn't it look like a highly skill dependant game according to this metric because the season records were always (X-0), (X/2,X/2), and (0,X)?

Obviously that league wouldn't be more skill dependant than a soccer league where the teams were roughly equal in skill and the records were more random, but this would say it was.

Alton

June 8th, 2017 at 1:28 PM ^

So, the best way to measure a sport's randomness is to see how large a random sample is needed to correlate a certain amount with another random sample of the same team.

In major league baseball, it's 69 games to get an r = .50.  In other words, if you pick 69 MLB games at random played by a team in a given season, then you pick another 69 MLB games played by the same team in the same season, you would get a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.5.

How many major league games does it take to hit the .50 coefficient in the 4 major North American sports?  MLB - 69.  NHL - 36.  NBA - 14.  NFL - 12.

So MLB and NHL seasons both last about 2.3 times as long as needed to get a .50 correlation with what is (presumably) the true talent.  The NFL season is only 1.3 times as long.  And the NBA season is 5.7 times as long as needed.

Anybody who wishes to pursue the mathematical ideas here should consult this page:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/true_talent_lev…

 

stephenrjking

June 7th, 2017 at 1:30 PM ^

I'm assuming that the complete absence of commentary regarding the legal news out of East Lansing indicates that there will be a separate column about it, no?

Pepto Bismol

June 7th, 2017 at 3:34 PM ^

Are you implying that discussing the MSU fallout would be in bad taste?  If so, you should know that Brian went on a Twitter tirade yesterday blasting Dantonio and MSU after their press conference.  He's definitely not above it.

stephenrjking

June 8th, 2017 at 12:30 AM ^

A huge story that has a massive effect on our archrival? You can't not mention it. If he wanted to say "this is a big deal and it's tragic, and three players are off the team, but I don't think its appropriate to comment beyond that," then he puts that in this UV. 

But I don't think that's his opinion, and further while I think it's important to deal in facts and not speculation, this is something worth discussing. 

There's no way Brian doesn't at least express the thoughts he expressed on twitter, which were (for his twitter presence) quite strong.

Kevin13

June 7th, 2017 at 1:43 PM ^

is part of what makes the NHL playoffs the greatest and most exciting sports event out there. It is the most demanding and just about any team can knock off any other team in a series. Get a hot goalie and he could carry you to the cup. Tons of parity in the league.

Pepto Bismol

June 7th, 2017 at 3:31 PM ^

In my opinion (obviously), the bigger factor is the change in rules.  You get 82 games of ticky-tack power play festivals where if you touch another guy with your stick you get a called for hooking, complete with 3-v-3 gong show overtime and nonsensical shootouts. 

Then when it comes time to determine a tournament champion you throw all of that out the window and allow a return to the clutch and grab of yesteryear. 

It's like if you all of a sudden allowed body checking in the NBA playoffs.  Hard to tell which team would excel in that type of environment, but regular season standings wouldn't mean much.

TrueBlue2003

June 8th, 2017 at 12:13 AM ^

I was so annoyed by stupid Giguere (who wasn't even good) getting "hot" against the Wings in 02-03 for a freaking sweep despite getting mostly bombed by a superior team that I just can't even do the NHL playoffs anymore.

I want the better team to win the vast majority of the time and I want the team that played better to win every time.   I want a heavy underdog to have to come up with a truly epic performance to win. In hockey, the puck just has to bounce right for you.

Sports should be about skill and skill should be rewarded.  Hockey just feels too much like coin flips and I get more excitement out of participating in virtual coin flips at the casino.

 

DairyQueen

June 8th, 2017 at 11:27 AM ^

it's not that it's random, it's that there are much more variables that are statistically much more difficult to measure.

-the difference between playoff than regular season hockey maybe more different than any of the 4 major sports

-82 games is a LOT of overall wear and tear, what with the hitting people into walls, hockey players can coast at speeds higher than most NFL players can run.

-The playoffs is much more about your 3rd and 4th line 

-Hockey is the most fluid/dynamic game by far (very difficult to measure)

-There are many more players seeing the field (than say the NBA), and the players are in less specialized positions (than MLB, NBA, and NFL)

This in my opinion is why Hockey is less watched (and of course because ESPN refuses to cover them due to lack of TV deals), because it is less linear than the 4 major sports, and the players have less variation (NBA and NFL weights and heights) it does not lend itself to easy casual viewership as "good/bad" plays/events are not as easily discernible.

so bored at work

June 7th, 2017 at 1:47 PM ^

The highlight of the linked post about Cincinnati was definitely the repeated subtle trolling of State.

 

You know the teams Ohio State typically battles with on the recruiting trail, especially for players in the Midwest: Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State. Even sometimes Michigan State.

That would open up spots for a Cincinnati, or a Kentucky, or a Michigan State, to make up ground.

 

Cosmic Blue

June 7th, 2017 at 2:02 PM ^

And while that might be kinda bad news for Ohio State, it’s really bad news for programs like Michigan State, Northwestern, Iowa and Indiana, schools that really need to be able to come to Ohio and recruit very good kids that don’t end up in Columbus. The more of those that leave the conference, the worst their depth gets.

DonAZ

June 7th, 2017 at 1:58 PM ^

I have a soft spot in my heart for punters.

That's a player position you don't need ... until you need him.  Like a good long snapper.

A good, consistent punter is a beautiful thing.  Mesko was a freakin' machine.

If Robbins is even only a fractional-Mesko, then I'm a happy dude.

EDIT -- I would be only a happy "guy."  Don Brown has not dubbed me a "dude."  

dragonchild

June 7th, 2017 at 2:33 PM ^

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

no.

Freeze may not be a hot commodity but I can see why Ole Miss is taking this route; the NCAA is totally in bed with the SEC so taking "the path of most resistance" is basically making the most of the NCAA's utmost effort to punish SEC programs as little as possible.  With this culture in place they don't expect to give up any more than the wrist slap they'll be giving themselves, so any further concessions would just be self-flagellation.  It doesn't matter if the HC is a poodle wearing a hoodie; if the NCAA is your bitch, why the hell not?

MI Expat NY

June 7th, 2017 at 2:53 PM ^

It really isn't.  Playoff upsets rarely happen, and any team below the 3 seed (equivalent of a wild-card in any other league) almost never advances to the finals.  The number of possessions in a game and the ability of a team to highlight the best players mean that the team with more aggregate skill is most often going to win.  

Pepto Bismol

June 7th, 2017 at 4:03 PM ^

Here's a link to an October article where all 15 NBA writers predicted the Warriors and Cavaliers to win their respective division, and 13 of those 15 correctly predicted the final match-up (though all 15 correctly had the Cavs).

http://www.nba.com/article/2016/10/17/2016-17-season-preview-nba-tv-nbacom-expert-predictions

Cleveland and Golden State were a combined 24-1 through the first three playoff rounds this year.

That feels un-random.

MGoGoGo

June 7th, 2017 at 2:53 PM ^

It's at least as likely that the decision to provide a full-throated defense of Freeze is driven not because of his value to the organization, but by his danger to it. He may well have information that implicates the administration and therefore they need to defend him, not throw him under the bus.

taut

June 7th, 2017 at 4:01 PM ^

Regarding embiggening the net in hockey, I'd rather see a reduction in the size of the goalie's equipment. Even the skinny goalies look like the Michelin Man out there. Reduce the size of the pads, the glove, the blocker and the chest protector and that would make some difference.



An impractical solution would be to use Olympic-sized ice (100' x 200') instead of the current format (85' x 200'). The extra 15' of width really opens up the game, resulting is a lessening of the logjam in the neutral zone and at the blue line when a team is breaking out. But I don't see across-the-board arena modifications happening any time soon.

MadMatt

June 7th, 2017 at 4:07 PM ^

I didn't watch the video, but the graphic makes intuitive sense to me as a subjective estimation of how likely one of the best teams will win a championship at the start of the regular season.  Consider,

The NBA and NHL start high on the randomness scale because even though they play a LOT of regular season games, half the teams in the league make the playoffs.  Sure, the best teams are reliably high seeds, but that just means one extra home game in a playoff series.  Where they diverge is that in pro basketball a substantially better team NEVER loses a best of seven series.  I could riff for a while on this, but seriously, we all know it's true.  Thus, overall the NBA is high on the predictability scale.  In hockey, however, any single game is almost a coin flip (same as a single game of baseball).  Given that goals are a low frequency event, a single goal lead probably is more significant that a difference between two teams or home ice advantage.  Thus, a seven game hockey series is very random.  (In contrast to basketball, how many times can you name a President's Trophy winning team losing to a #8 seed in the first round?  I can think of three, including this year, off the top of my head.)  Thus, hockey ends up as the most random of professional sports.  And, if the choice is the NBA or the NHL, I'd take hockey hands down.  College basketball is amazing because only low 30s regular season games, 40 minute games and single elimination tournaments make each game, hell each half, significant  The NBA is BORING!  The season is 11 months long (I exagerate, but not much), and we could all make a good guess of who will play in the leage finals before the preseason begins.  No, don't bother waking me for the fourth quarter.

MLB and the NFL score moderate on the predictability scale through totally opposite approaches.  A baseball game is almost a coin flip, so they play twice as many regular season games as any other sport to magnify tiny differences, AND less than one third of the teams make the playoffs.  In baseball getting in takes sustained effort and perseverance.  Once you win your ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes, however, a best of seven series is still pretty much a coin flip a la hockey.  Also, the game changes.  Pitching depth becomes less important; having 1-3 Cy Young level studs becomes critical, and bench offense matters as you struggle to find some offense (...any offense for the love of Pete!).

In the NFL the regular season is 16 games, less than 1/10 of baseball.  But, an individual game is a long struggle of attrition and the better team is very likely to prevail.  Sure, we holler about "any given Sunday..."  That's because competitive parity is enforced with the most severe collectivist measures of any sport: exactly the same revenue for each team, a hard salary cap, draft position AND schedules that help the teams that played poorly.  You can play fewer games and do single elimination playoffs because, because coaching and scouting make it highly likely small differences will tell.

Bigger nets in hockey?  I could live with that.  I've always felt top level soccer desparately needs bigger nets.  The goals are the same size as they were over 100 years ago, but people in general, and professional goalies in particular have grown enormously.  The net needs to be bigger just to restore scoring opportunities to what they were when the sport was young.

Detroit Dan

June 7th, 2017 at 6:20 PM ^

That was absolutely perfect, MadMatt.  I agree the NBA is boring.  Occasionally, there are a couple of evenly matched teams in the finals and that is great theater, but otherwise it's too predictable.  

Both college and pro basketball offset predictability with absurd home court advantage, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in the end.

umichjenks

June 7th, 2017 at 4:34 PM ^

everyone think having the State game at night is such a bad thing?  Don't give me that garbage about arrests, too much drinking, etc.  We had night games with ND and Ann Arbor didn't implode.  The SEC, PAC 12, ACC all do marquee night games and it seems to work out ok.

Honk if Ufer M…

June 7th, 2017 at 8:26 PM ^

You clearly have been spared personal encounters with packs of North American All Day Drunken Feral Spartimoran Landfill escapee's to A2 on game day. Literally 10,000 extra of the untamed & rabid little beasts who come to town without tickets or intention of going to the game and make their game to provoke, instigate, be as obnoxious and intolerable and odious as possible, tear shit up, threaten, and start fights.

There are virtually never any fan bases of any other team that ever visits here, definitively including the buckeye fans that visit here, (as opposed to the ones down there when we go into the pit) that cause any trouble at all as any sort of tendency or pattern. Most of them love how they are treated here and are generally fun and fine or great to deal with.

In my business I've been threatened, attacked, harassed so many times by invading green animals, and had to even call the police to deal with them several times. It's their job to start shit, to be as loud, confrontational and aggressive as possible and just general scumbags. 

There is a demented & cancerous virus of the sparty spirit in some huge slice of their fan base, at least the ones that come to town for football partying. It's not normal. 

I have no idea how the fans behave on the streets and around town in other rivalry games, outside of Truckeyeville, and I don't give a shit, I just know what I've seen consistently over decades of Michigan football Saturdays, which is that they appear to emulate the worst traits of the Columbus Mother Buckeye guarding it's nest. 

Under the cover of night & the extra hours under the influence, yes indeed it should be noticeably worse.

We oughtta build a wall! :)

 

 

Honk if Ufer M…

June 7th, 2017 at 8:36 PM ^

If you actually count, or watch the time counter on the video, that's only a 4 second hang time on the punt.