Letters to the Editor
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Quibble
I am quibbling with King quibble about football. Measuring exactly 10 yards from an approximate starting point is exactly correct. The rules don't say you have to get to the 25 yard line, they say you have to gain 10 yards from the point you started from. The starting point, while mildly arbitrary, is fixed, and precisely defines the immediate goal.
In any event, the spotting of the ball has some inherent limits on accuracy, even on plays where it is critical.
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And another quibble
Ah, yes, the old "Kansas always loses early" line. It's fun, it's fashionable, it's... not exactly grounded in fact.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed teams last week on performance in the tournament versus seed and found that, since 1985, Kansas actually performed above average by that measure.
You can check it out here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-launch.html?project=NCAABball0803&w=980&h=530
Back-to-back losses to Bucknell and Bradley have obscured the fact that Kansas has one of the best records in the tournament in first round games.
And by the WSJ metric, it has performed better than schools like UConn and Georgetown, which never seem to get saddled with the "choker" label.
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First and ten-ish
It reminds me of a pet sports peeve of mine, the measurement for the first down in football. Officials use the chains to measure, down to the millimeter, whether the offense has gained exactly 10 yards from ... the spot where they eyeballed where to put the stick following the last first down. It's exactly 10 yards from, "Eh, right about here."
I am right there with you, King. Not to mention the ultra-scientific method of having the refs run out with the chains exactly perpendicular to the sideline. I mean, they'd never get that wrong, would they?
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resetting the clock
I think the way the clock is handled actually makes sense. Only in the last minute or so of the 2nd half does the clock stop on a made field goal. All other times it runs freely. So in this regard there's no reason to check the clock settings during the rest of the game. Furthermore, the possibility of inbounding shenanigans increases greatly during the endgame phase. Maybe a ball takes a funny hop after going through the bucket, requiring extra time to get it to the inbounder. Or winning teams might filibuster before inbounding. In the other 39 minutes these things probably balance out, but at the very end, a team might get screwed by a bad break without recourse, or another might use a little too much gamesmanship.
And 0.3 s matter -- the difference between only a tip-in counting or a catch and shoot, by rule.
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UConn
just lost its first, 1st round game under Calhoun when their top scorer and ball handler got injured in the first half. Getting to the second and third rounds every tourney gives you a litlle slack, but losing to George Mason last year was bad.
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Geographically Challenged
Did anyone else notice how often commentators stated that Stanford had a “home court” advantage because they were playing in California? Anaheim and Palo Alto are, what, 300-400 miles apart? Not even to mention how different they are culturally. Of course, if that is my biggest pet peeve then it was a pretty good weekend of basketball.
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How Far
Is Marquette from Anaheim?
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Marquette to Anaheim
Is about the same distance between a 3 and 6 seed.
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technology saves the day
If it's so important to make sure we capture that 0.3 second, put a sensor on the basket that is connected to the clock so as to turn it off when it's supposed to turn off. I'm sure some clever engineer could come up with something that doesn't interfere with play or give off false baskets. Maybe they can adapt something from those Pop-a-shot arcade games. I know they're supposed to be able to connect referee whistles to the clock now in some sports.
Of course, that introduces more problems, such as how the clock starts again. I'd imagine that the same clock manager who was 0.3 seconds late in stopping the clock has a good chance of being 0.3 seconds late in starting it back up again, as I believe that happens when someone on the court touches the ball. Sure, anticipating a touch where you start the clock is a bit different than anticipating a basket, since on the basket a timekeeper has to process if the basket actually happened (did it go right through, bounce around on the rim for a bit, or miss?). But there is going to be human error on both starting and stopping the clock, all through the game. It's likely to be somewhat consistent if the same person is keeping the clock the entire time, so it seems silly to adjust for it at one point of the game and not another.
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It Looked to me the difference between a 3 and a 6 seed
Was one basket barely rolling in after 44 minutes and 59 seconds of trading baskets.
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One Of The TV Panelists
Yesterday said that Stanford over Marquette and Wash. St. over Notre Dame settles the Pac-10, Big East strength debate.
One 40 minute game doesn't say anything conclusive in comparison about the two teams involved, much less dragging 20 other teams in to it. It's just moronic.
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Another One
Announced West Virginia over Duke as "stunning."........You gotta be kidding me. Is it the stupidity of the pundit, or is it just playing to an audience of morons? You make the call.
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A few quibbles with quibbles
jrootham Measuring exactly 10 yards from an approximate starting point is exactly correct.
Why be accurate to the millimeter on one end of the calculation but not on the other?
The rules don't say you have to get to the 25 yard line, they say you have to gain 10 yards from the point you started from.
Right. But they don't measure 10 yards from the point you start from. They measure 10 yards -- exactly -- from somewhere in the neighborhood of where you started from. Everything else in football, especially the NFL, they parse down to the molecule. In super-slo-mo, can we see if the peach fuzz on the ballcarrier's arm grazed the grass before he fumbled? But on this one: Eh, anywhere around there's fine.
The starting point, while mildly arbitrary, is fixed
Why do they need a starting point? Why do they need the chains? Just eyeball a spot about 10 yards down field and put the stick down.
Pesky details The Wall Street Journal analyzed teams last week on performance in the tournament versus seed and found that, since 1985, Kansas actually performed above average by that measure.
I acknowledge that any starting point for such a study, other than 1939, is arbitrary. But how is what happened in 1985 relevant to what's going on today? I know the WSJ went back to '85 because that's when the Tournament expanded to 64 teams, but if you're going to look at an arbitrarily recent period of history, it seems to me that in a sport where the players have a life span of four years max, and usually fewer, looking at the last five years is more relevant to the personality of the team.
Though of course: Still almost totally irrelevant. I did pick Kansas to win, after all.
JRoth95 am right there with you, King. Not to mention the ultra-scientific method of having the refs run out with the chains exactly perpendicular to the sideline. I mean, they'd never get that wrong, would they?
Well, it doesn't matter how they run. They have a little marker on the chain that sits on the painted yard line (the 30 or 35 or 40 or whatever falls in the middle of the 10 yards) and when they run out, they place that on the stripe. That part's accurate.
uwes98 I think the way the clock is handled actually makes sense. Only in the last minute or so of the 2nd half does the clock stop on a made field goal. All other times it runs freely. So in this regard there's no reason to check the clock settings during the rest of the game.
It does not run freely at all other times. It stops several times a minute. Every violation, every timeout, every out of bounds, every foul. I don't know how many whistles there are in the average game, but in the Texas-Miami game there were 38 fouls and 15 non-steal turnovers. I don't know offhand but let's assume both teams used all seven timeouts. Plus eight media timeouts. So we're at 75 and we haven't counted the times the ball went out of bounds and stayed with the offensive team, but that's probably a wash with the fact that most timeouts coincide with a whistle. Maybe not quite. So let's say 65 or 70. Times 0.3 seconds. That's abouut 20 seconds.
Or, in college basketball: A half hour.
hairyfred Did anyone else notice how often commentators stated that Stanford had a “home court” advantage because they were playing in California? Anaheim and Palo Alto are, what, 300-400 miles apart? Not even to mention how different they are culturally.
They're not that far apart culturally. A lot of L.A. kids go to Stanford, and a lot of Stanford grads move to L.A. And I would posit that Palo Alto and environs and various L.A. suburbs are indistinguishable from each other. And while Stanford and Anaheim are about 400 miles apart, it's an easy 400 miles, with tons of flights, or a straight-shot drive down I-5. Anaheim's not as much of a home-court advantage for Bay Area schools as San Jose or Oakland would be, but it's pretty home-courtish as long as they're not playing an L.A. school. Would we not say that Texas has something of a home-court advantage playing in El Paso, or even in Oklahoma City, against an opponent from 2,000 miles away?