The new NFL overtime rule, see page 111 (introduced last season for playoff games only) finally became binding in the current playoff series two weeks ago, and then for a second time yesterday. Of most interest to economists about the rule change is its potential for teams to alter their overtime strategies in response to the element of the rule that both teams are now guaranteed a direct opportunity to score.
While it’s far too early to make firm inferences about this, it’s worth recounting that the primary intention of the rule was for the result of the coin toss determining which team gets to receive the kick-off (and consequently first possession) to have less power in determining the match winner (previously almost 60% of the nearly 500 overtime games since 1974). At the margin, we might also expect touchdowns to be the winning method of scoring slightly more often than previously, since it is now the only way that the team with first possession can effectively kill the game without the opposition getting the chance to equalize.
On the basis of these first two observations, it is interesting to note that the qualitative outcomes were very different - while winning the toss allowed Denver and Tim Tebow to end the contest on the first play via a touchdown, both NY Giants and San Fransisco each failed to score on their first possession, triggering reversion to sudden death as previously, which was won eventually by the former. [Disclaimer: I have only recently followed the sport, so feel free to critique this via comments.]
While this (admittedly premature) anecdotal evidence suggests that the coin toss is more influential than before, the reality is about as mixed as could have been expected. Someday – perhaps in a few decades or even within the decade should the rule be extended to the regular season, one of our esteemed TSE colleagues will no doubt crunch the numbers on this rule change when there is a sufficient (presuming due restraint exercised) sample size.
Brian Burke (admin of Advanced NFL Stats) posted a very insightful piece on Deadspin (and also Slate) regarding the slow evolution in the punt/go-for-it decision on 4th down. Readers might recall the outcry two season back across media-dom from Bill Simmons, Teddy Bruschi and others when the Patriots shunned punting from their own 30 late in a game against the Colts. (Belichick Understands Probability). Sacrilege. Insulting to the defense, *&%^& statheads, yada, yada, yada. Burke offers a very persuasive thought experiment:
There are many doubters when it comes to four-down football. If you’re in that camp, indulge me in a quick thought experiment. Let’s imagine a football world where the punt and field goal had never been invented. (Sorry, Ray Guy and Jan Stenerud.) In this universe, there would be no second-guessing: Teams would go for it on every fourth down. Then one day, some smart guy invents the punt and approaches a head coach with his new idea. “Hey coach,” he’d say, “instead of trying for a first down every time, let’s voluntarily give the ball to the other team.” Our coach would be incredulous at this suggestion. “You want me to give up 25 percent of our precious downs for just 35 yards of field position? Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for us to score?” And the coach would be right.
His experiment amplifies the critical cost of punting — voluntarily giving up valuable possession of the ball. Yes, going-for-it on 4th down and failing hurts, but so does handing over the football to a high-powered offense. The story is couched so that the typically explicit and implicit costs switch places, thereby highlighting the silliness of coaches who treat the 35 yard change of in expected field position as the only real cost while discounting the implicit cost of the lost possession. Moreover, this discounting of the implicit cost of possession seems closely tied to what is generally accepted practice that made more sense in an era of defensive dominance and low scoring. The 1974 Steelers gaining 35 yards in field position for their defense against almost anybody is much different than a than handing over possession to Brady, Manning, Brees, or Rodgers with time on the clock where they have already racked up 400 yards of offense or more.
A couple of articles, both related to scheduling, caught my attention recently. First, Bob Harig at ESPN ponders “Why the No Shows for the PGA Tour Opener?”. Eleven of the players eligible for the elite, winners-only kickoff to the PGA season skipped the event, including 3 of the 4 major winners from last year, Rory McIlroy, Charles Schwartzel, and Darren Clarke, along with big names like Phil Mickelson. That’s over 25% no shows for a no-cut, guaranteed payoff event (last place paid out $64,000). As Harig says,
No sport starts its season with as little fanfare, as little buzz, as the PGA Tour.
He identifies several contributors: injury, short offseason, many other opportunities to make money, competition with NFL playoffs. I want to single out the long season/number of events for scrutiny. The choice of more (or fewer) events presents a very difficult tradeoff. A long season provides many hours of TV exposure, and dedicated intermediaries like NBC’s Golf Channel like this. (Of course, the long schedule preceded the Golf Channel’s tour coverage). The down side is that it means more opportunities for players to cherry pick their favored events, with fewer times where the best play against the best which enhances the quality of watching for consumers. In addition, a longer season pits the tour on weekends in January against big NFL games. The tour made a shift in the Kapalua event this year to a Monday finish to try to mitigate this impact, but this loses the bigger Sunday audience. As I’ve written before on the NBA, leagues and or their TV-associates seem very reluctant to experiment with shorter seasons.
The second scheduling article appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal , where Jared Diamond details the small (or non-existent) number of true road games played by the big dogs among NCAA basketball teams (the same issue is also prevalent among football teams.) Kentucky, North Carolina, and Duke have played no non-conference road games, Kansas one. Louisville had also played no road games until its Dec. 31 rivalry game against Kentucky. Last night the Cards lost by 30 at Providence.
The financial incentives are obvious. The issue that I would raise is the lack of adjustment in things like RPI or polls for such home-cooking. The NCAA tournament selection committee often hides behind “quality wins” and records against top x (50, 70, …) teams to justify their selections and seedings. However, these matchups in non-conference games are heavily biased toward teams playing at home all of the time. That’s why games from prior year tournaments on neutral (or somewhat neutral) courts are really more informational than the selection committee seems to utilize. Of course, the same financial incentives at work in why the big dogs play at home so much are also at work, maybe more subtly, in the politics behind selection committee decisions.
Orange Bowl: 70-33; Rose Bowl: 45-38; Fiesta Bowl 41-38. All of these scores and, of course, the insane 67-56 scoring orgy in the Alamo Bowl 67-56 between Baylor and Washington make me contemplate Guns N’ Roses eternal question: where do we go from here?
In 2008, “Spreading the Wealth” mulled the points explosion with Longhorn coach Mack Brown’s remark
“I’m sure [defense will catch up], it always has. But we’re not sure how yet.”
I long subscribed to Brown’s default position — offense and defensive advantage ebbs and flows — but I’m beginning to doubt myself. The points-monster just keeps growing. From 1971-82, Rose bowl winners topped 30 points 2 times. From 2001-12, 9 winners scored more than 30. The total score stuns more than the winner. Over the past two seasons, teams combined for 378 points (63 points per game) in the Orange, Rose, and Sugar Bowls. In my junior and senior years of high school, 1977 and 78, they totaled 222 or 37 points per game. (Data available at Sports-reference.com’s Bowl Index).
These shifts appear in pro and high school football also. Over the last two years, the semi-final and final games in the top division of Texas high school playoffs (2011 and prior years) have put up 63 points per game versus 21 in 77 and 78. In the NFL, two teams with defenses ranked near the league bottom, New England and Green Bay, enter the playoffs as number 1 seeds.
In the NFL, the evolution of rules and their enforcement has inexorably led to more effective passing starting with the elimination of “bump and run” in the late 70s to crackdown on defensive holding in the early 2000s to the ever-greater protections extended to QBs. At all levels, strategic developments on offense have effectively expanded the square footage that defenses must defend on each play. While all of these developments have contributed, their long run impacts have been limited by labor supply — young QBs developed in high school and college as effective throwers. After a generation, there are now scads of HS and college quarterbacks running relatively sophisticated passing offenses, developing not only their arms but their minds and eyes. Some of these shifts may be countered by defensive strategy and development of defensive players, but I wonder if some of the rule and strategy changes permanently shift the relative balance between offense and defense.
From a league/consumer standpoint, are these developments “bad”? It’s easy for some middle-aged or older like myself to pine about some bygone golden era and bash the current state of play. What is the optimal amount of scoring? I don’t have reliable data on this question, but I do suspect that fans tire of no scoring (unless they like soccer) or pinball-like scoring. I disliked the heavily run-oriented styles of the 1970s, but I also enjoy seeing good defensive plays, of which there are few are none in a 67-56 game.
While these trends may end, it’s hard to see that happening very soon. In high school and college, teams with strong defenses and much better overall ability than an opponent (say LSU or Alabama) can shut down offenses relatively well. In the pros, with more equalized talent, the tipping point seems determined only by whether a team has a passing proficient QB or not. There’s no “stopping” Brady, Rodgers, or Brees — only hopes of intercepting a tipped pass or pushing them back with a penalty. Even the supposed defensive or run-oriented teams like Pittsburgh often resort to second half passing shootouts against stronger opponents with efficient offenses.
Further to an earlier post one year ago to the day, the same result occurred upon conclusion of the 2011 NFL season as in EVERY previous season since the re-alignment to 32 teams in 2002 – that the NFL is even more competitively balanced when the standings are adjusted for strength of schedule (than on the basis of raw standings) .
Even though this season was noticeably less balanced than (the recent) average without adjustment, the difference from the adjustment was even more pronounced than any other season during this period (with the exception of 2003), making adjusted competitive balance about average over the same period.
On this occasion, the actual-to-idealized standard deviation ratios are 1.611 (unadjusted) and 1.462 (adjusted); the Gini coefficients are 0.292 (unadjusted) and 0.260 (adjusted); and the Herfindahl indexes of CB are 1.162 (unadjusted) and 1.134 (adjusted).
Ultimately, this result reinforces further the need to account for strength of schedule in producing standard competitive balance metrics for various empirical studies!
“I talked to that whole staff. I said this is my city. I’m cut from a different cloth. None of them guys on their team is like me. I let the whole staff know none of them was like me,”… “We got a whole bunch of gangsters in the locker room. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court.”… “You don’t let people disrespect you. That’s what I’m about. I don’t regret anything that happened,”
These are excerpts of the post-game comments by Xavier’s star, Tu Holloway, following the brawl between Cincinnati and Xavier players earlier in December. The melee generated a huge amount of attention for its ferocity and length, rivaling the infamous “Palace” incident in Detroit (YouTube replay). Paul Daugherty at Cincinnati.com provides details of the fight and post-game comments, referring to one of the coach’s descriptions of a “‘complete embarrassment’ as an understatement.” Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports describes Holloway’s comments and a teammates as “sheer idiocy.”
After playing football in high school in a highly competitive environment, I don’t react much to the “miked-up” sideline woofing among teammates that may sound outrageous, or to on-the-field out-of-view trash talk. Although mostly unrepeatable, these hidden-from-view verbal jousts were often hilarious. It’s the “language of competition” to borrow a federal judge’s phrase, referring to the (un)importance of the government’s evidence regarding internal memos about a rival in an antitrust case.
But Holloway’s POSTgame, public comments, after a historically ugly fight — that isn’t just the language of competition. Moreover, it explicitly references the origin of the tensions — the “gangsters” mentality — or, at least, the silly faux-gangsta imitations seen in sports.
The incident draws attention to deep-seated issues and problems for decision makers in sports leagues. Whitlock calls out coaches who won’t take a stand because of their greed, a theme repeated in many articles after short suspensions were handed out to the players. I’m not absolving coaches and admire the Oregon football coach who suspended LaGarrette Blount for the entire season after sucker-punching a Boise State player. However, coaches respond to incentives, and taking a unilateral stance that leads to fewer wins self-inflicts wounds far beyond the ethical threshold of most coaches, like it or not.
Higher level decision makers face similar, if not stickier dilemmas. Brian Phillips at Grantland.com explores these issues in an unrelated article focused on David Stern’s leadership of the NBA.
In the past 15 years or so, the NBA has been haunted by a specter, one that began to coalesce around the advent of Allen Iverson before fully emerging in the wake of the Palace brawl. what he wanted by handing down a lot of petty decrees that — whatever the intention — came off as an attempt to make the NBA more palatable to white fans. … The problem is that you can’t run a sports league on the premise that the players are the fans’ natural enemies without undermining the compact that holds the sports league together in the first place. It’s hard to reduce all the overlapping messages of the NBA’s self-presentation over the past few years to one line, but if you tried, it would look something like: “Carmelo Anthony is spectacular! Buy a ticket and we’ll put him in his place.
Phillips both “gets it” and doesn’t. He makes very insightful observations about Stern’s dilemma (Roger Goodell and college conference commissioners and ADs face similar issues). The problem for them is that players with the “gangster” ethic make up a portion of their player pool. Trying to root it out with “petty” rules draws howls from the media who don’t see the bigger picture. In addition, these efforts and incentives have not stemmed the tide very much — embedded behaviors trump small incentives. In the end, the brand the league is trying to develop and (some) of its workforce don’t mesh. Would “gangsters” really work well as floor clerks at Bath and Body Works even if very skilled at running the register? I don’t see any easy solutions to the problem. Very strong punishment for major incidents has not worked very well either. It suffers from the “broken windows fallacy” — ignoring bad behavior because it isn’t murder doesn’t lead to nice, happy neighborhoods. In fact, evidence from non-violent drug policy experiments indicates that regular monitoring and (smaller) punishment for all offenses works best, even if it may seem “petty.”
Phillips also deserves credit for at least mentioning that the fundamentals behind these issues are more complex than race. Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, and many others past and present in the NBA and NFL were/are highly competitive players, are black, but in no way embodied or embraced the gangster silliness. It defines a sub-culture not an entire race.
Nonetheless, Phillips still casts the problem in terms of hip-hop players relative to “Red State” fans and leaves the impression that the cultural impasse really rests at the feet of “Red State” (aka bigoted) fans. He’s dismissive of Stern’s attempts at “petty” rules to reign in player behavior or appearance without really seeming to understand the “broken windows fallacy.”
The Xavier-Cincy brawl appalled more than “Red State” fans (Whitlock is no “Red Stater”). Yet, it comes from somewhere. The berating of the Cincy bench by Holloway and his post-game comments show that this didn’t just emerge out of thin air. Yes, there have always been some fans put off by showy celebrations of some black players back to Billy “White Shoes” Johnson or to Dr. J’s big afro. Holloway’s comments speak to a different worldview, a different ethic, something not merely about good-natured exuberance or innocuous bits of self or cultural expression. They speak to neighborhood thugs as role model.
What about thuggish behavior in the NHL, does it get a pass? I’ve written about that before on TSE. It’s a little different in that some fans want to see the fighting, but some of the issues overlap. Space limits a thorough discussion.
Nick Watanabe over at the International Journal of Sport Finance Blog alerts us to a match fixing scandal in the Italian soccer league, Serie B, which may involve fixing of matches in the top league, Serie A.
Former Atalanta captain Cristiano Doni and 16 other people have been arrested across Italy in an ongoing investigation into soccer match-fixing and illegal betting.
The inquiry is focused on several matches in Serie B over the past two seasons, with Atalanta involved in three matches. Three Serie A matches from last season are also under investigation: Brescia vs. Bari, Brescia vs. Lecce and Napoli vs. Sampdoria.
“This is not the end, but just a starting point,” Cremona prosecutor Roberto Di Martino said Monday. “Let’s hope it’s a starting point in cleaning up the beautiful game that is football. One of the suspects has admitted that these operations have been going on for over 10 years.
It’s not uncommon to hear about game-fixing and point-shaving scandals in American college sports, but in recent history, there have been no scandals involving fixing or shaving by professional players. For example, here is one list of gambling scandals involving US sports. Only one of the scandals happened in recent years, the NBA game-fixing scandal from 2007. But this scandal did not involve fixing by players. It involved game fixing by NBA referee Ted Donaghy, a scandal that was an isolated incident. The remaining 4 include 3 college scandals and the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal in which members of the Chicago White Sox intentionally lost the World Series that year.
Here is another take, a top 10 list, at ESPN’s Page 2. This list is a more general list that includes not only fixing and gaming scandals, but also scandals where players or coaches were simply gambling. For example, the list includes the Pete Rose scandal where Rose gambled on baseball games, including the Reds for whom he played and managed. But to my knowledge, there is no evidence that Rose actually fixed a game or shaved runs.
The decision to fix/shave depends on the benefit the person will get and the cost. The cost is a function of the probability that the person will be caught and the penalties if caught. Ignoring such costs as lawyer fees, time spent in jail, and the penalties someone will “pay” for violating cultural norms and losing his reputation, if a person is caught fixing or shaving in sports, that person loses his job, for life. Gambling in sports works to destroy the very integrity of the game, and thus fan willingness to pay. So sports leagues do not mess around when gambling rears its head. They act quickly and decisively. So why in professional sports do we see no instances of point shaving or match-fixing by players in the modern day here in the States?
To that we can look to our friend, free agency. Before the era of free agency, the four major professional sports leagues each had some version of the reserve clause which effectively eliminated competition between teams for players. Without this competition, players would be compensated at a level below their marginal contribution to their teams. With free agency, player compensation, on average, will be higher and closer to player marginal contribution. So giving players the right to free agency, all else equal, should result in there being fewer incidences of fixing and shaving. History suggests that this is, indeed, the case.
This is also why fixing and shaving have essentially been relegated to the supposedly amateur ranks. These players are not compensated monetarily so, all else equal, they have less to lose than if they earned some sort of financial compensation. Thankfully, though, fixing and shaving don’t happen very often even if they happen at a greater rate than in the pros.
So the question is, what is going on in Italian soccer? Are these just isolated incidents involving just a few players? The article says that this may have been going on for 10 years, so is there something more going on? The article notes that one suspect says this has been going on for ten years. Why would people risk their careers and their personal reputations by fixing matches in Italian soccer.?
The bloggers here at The Sports Economist will all know Professor Steve Walters of Loyola University here in Maryland. Steve has signed on to advise new Orioles GM Dan Duquette “to help quantify players’ financial values to the team.” He had a similar role when Duquette was with the Red Sox.
To learn a bit more, read here. My favorite tidbit from the article is: “He has already provided financial valuations — based on an undisclosed formula“. Does anyone think it might be related to marginal revenue product?
Congratulations to Steve. As a long suffering Orioles’ fan, I deeply hope the team takes his advice.
Our East Carolina University Pirate football team had an exciting season but fell one game short of qualifying for the program’s sixth straight bowl game. The Pirate football team is in goods hands with Coach Ruffin McNeill and his staff. There is a tremendous amount of young talent and our program has a bright future.
East Carolina University Athletics wants to show the college football world the passion of the Pirate Nation, even in a “bowless” year for the university. The Pirate Club is excited to announce the 2011 Virtual Bowl. Our challenge will be to sell more tickets than our bowl-bound Conference USA opponents and bowl-bound teams from the Big East. The Virtual Bowl appeal will go through December 23.
Tickets for the Virtual Bowl are $50 a piece and can be purchase by calling the Pirate Club Offices at 252-737-4540 or by going online at ecupirateclub.com. Virtual Bowl tickets purchased will be tax deductable and donors will receive one priority point for every ticket purchased. All proceeds from the Virtual Bowl will go towards the “Step-Up To The Highest Level Campaign”. Go Pirates!
Story here. OK, so it’s a donation and not a purchase, and maybe this doesn’t do Tyler Cowen’s “Markets in Everything” tag justice. But I must admit this is a creative way to drum up donations, even if it does seem pathetic.
This accusation astounded me when I read it.
Bears wide receiver Sam Hurd, who was arrested Wednesday on federal drug charges, was a top drug dealer in Chicago and police have a list of NFL players who were supplied drugs by the receiver, a law enforcement source told 670 The Score.
The article says that Hurd and another person were allegedly distributing around 4 kilograms of coke per week in Chicago, but they wanted to get as much as five to ten kilos and about a thousand pounds of marijuana to sell. According to the article, Hurd was willing to pay upwards of $700,000 per week for the higher haul.
We might be tempted to say that this sort of behavior can’t be rational. Why would an NFL millionaire, playing out his dream, be willing to risk it all to deal drugs? The answer is that, assuming Hurd is motivated by cash, if the chances of getting caught are sufficiently low and the net cash generated by the dealing is sufficiently high, it is a very rational decision.
A quick back-of-the-envelop calculation shows how lucrative the coke sales alone can be. A gram of coke can fetch between $80 and $100 per gram on the street, so a kilo would bring about $80,000 – $100,000 in gross revenue. Each kilo, according to the article costs the dealer about $25,000 which would bring the net income (ignoring other costs) to $55,000 – $75,000 per kilo. At 4 kilos per week, that is $220,000 – $300,000 off the coke alone. At 10 kilos a week, the net income would then be $550,000 to $750,000 per week.
Hurd earned $1.5 million playing for the Cowboys in 2009, so even after including other costs in the net income calculation, it’s almost certain that his take from dealing was more, maybe far more, lucrative than what he earned on the field.
Link via Douglass Bass.
