Author and Thinker
Couple of things:
*I’m seeing an international pool-play game in the Little League World Series on ESPN while Major League Baseball, a game between two playoff contenders, is on ESPN2. Please don’t tell me the former outdraws the latter.
*The NFL Network is going to put its “Total Access” program on “My Network TV” Saturday nights starting in September. Which means it will now be on a “network” that as many people watch as the NFL Network reaches.
(In case you haven’t noticed, it’s the dog days of summer. Normally, I would hold off on this until closer to the actual start of the season, but college football is still several weeks away from being useful, if I were to do TV ratings reports I would want to hold off on them until mid-September, and no one’s voting on any of my polls. Basically, there’s nothing to do, but I haven’t had any hits all day, so…)
NBC’s Sunday Night Football package gives it flexible scheduling. For the last seven weeks of the season, the games are determined on 12-day notice, 6-day notice for Week 17.
Last year, no game was listed in the Sunday Night slot, only a notation that one game could move there. CBS and Fox were able to protect one game every week each but had to leave one week each unprotected and had to submit their protections after only four weeks.
Now, NBC lists the game it “tentatively” schedules for each night, and by all appearances, CBS and Fox can’t protect anything. However, the NFL is in charge of moving games to prime time.
Here are the rules from the NFL web site:
Throughout the season, I’m going to make predictions on what the NFL will do each week in the flexible scheduling scheme. Here are the current tentatively-scheduled games:
Week 11 (November 18): Chicago @ Seattle
Week 12 (November 25): Philadelphia @ New England
Week 13 (December 2): Cincinnati @ Pittsburgh
Week 14 (December 9): Indianapolis @ Baltimore
Week 15 (December 16): Washington @ NY Giants
Week 16 (December 23): Tampa Bay @ San Francisco
Week 17 (December 30): Kansas City @ NY Jets
I will start putting up watches every week starting after Week 3 or 4. The Week 17 spot will double as a playoff watch. I will be paying close attention to what you think; I could extend the playoff watch concept to other pro sports if you do.
On Friday night/Saturday morning, I gave you my college football rating system, which aims to bring some mathematical clarity to the world of college football. Well, now I have another idea, and I’m taking the “new method of determining champions” off the feature poll.
The idea is simple: The College Football Lineal Title. To pick up the title, beat the current title holder. To lose the title, lose a game; the team that beat you becomes the new titleholder. It’s a similar concept to that which exists for boxing and other combat sports.
It’s a very intuitive concept that applies well to college football, so much so that although I came up with the idea independently, I’m not the first to do so. David Wilson’s site links to two sites with the same idea: HeavyweightFootballChamps.com and CollegeFootballBelt.com.
I have elected to start the title with the famed “first college football game” between Rutgers and Princeton. Because Princeton, after winning the rematch of that 1869 game, went undefeated through 1876, I call this lineage “the Princeton Title” as a slang name. This is the same starting point used by HeavyweightFootballChamps.com.
I’ve done research on the subsequent history of the title using the scores of James Howell, sorted by date by Wilson here. Because I do not restrict who can hold the title, my records may be incomplete, because Howell’s scores only include games involving Division I-A or equivalent.
I have made two modifications to the basic concept:
The College Football Belt site starts its lineage with the 1971 Nebraska team, effective at the 1971-2 Orange Bowl; their later research shows that Nebraska did indeed come out of that season with the Princeton title (in fact Nebraska won the Princeton title off Alabama in that very Orange Bowl). The Belt site also considers starting with the first AP National Champions, the 1936 Minnesota team. However, although Minnesota came into the season coming off multiple unbeaten seasons and holding the Rose Bowl title, they did lose that season (their loss to Northwestern merged the Rose Bowl title with the Knute Rockne title), and not only did they never pick up another lineal title the rest of the year, the lineage the Belt site traces never overlaps with any similar title claim, right up to the point where they say it unified with the Princeton title, Halloween 1942, when Minnesota-holder Georgia picked up the lineal title off Alabama.
Research done by both sites shows that this year’s BCS National Championship Game had the Princeton title on the line, and Florida is the current Princeton title holder. Boise State also holds a new lineal title by going undefeated. My own research shows that the 2004 Utah undefeated team has their title in the hands of BYU, and the 2004 Auburn title is currently held by LSU. 2000 Oklahoma’s title was merged with Princeton in the 2003 Rose Bowl, after being merged with 1998 Tulane. I haven’t done research further back than that (I have done 1999 Marshall and 1998 Tennessee), partly because since the BCS started, 1998, 2000 (when Miami (FL) got snubbed) and 2003 (when USC got snubbed) are the ONLY years where the BCS Title Game was not for the Princeton Title. However, I strongly doubt any other split titles have remained split long enough to remain extant today.
No sport has a more contentious championship structure, in all the world, than American college football. We give control over the championship to a complicated structure called the “BCS” which combines the result of two subjective polls with a bunch of complicated computer ratings which no one knows how they work and wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. This system eventually spits out two teams who are supposed to be “the best” and play each other, and we call the winner the champion.
It’s a lot better than the old system, where we just took a poll to determine the champion. USC-Texas in 2005-06 would never have happened under that system; USC would have played in the Rose Bowl and Texas in the Cotton or Fiesta bowls. Unfortunately, years like that are the exception and not the rule. When there are exactly two undefeated teams, the BCS’ job is easy. When there isn’t, controversy is basically unavoidable. Everyone thinks we should have a real playoff, but no one can get it done.
In the meantime, I have my own addition to the college football rating pantheon.
We can’t trust polls. Polls have short memories, are biased, are impressed by running up the score, are sentimental, and are often based on things other than what happens on the field. In the first few years of the BCS, people blamed computer polls for problems picking champions, in part because almost all computer poll formulae are proprietary. Often they shrugged off strength of schedule as though we should reward teams for playing a bunch of scrubs. Auburn’s inability to make the national title game in 2004-05, despite going undefeated, showed that polls can cause problems as well. A computer ranking can at least claim a modicum of objectivity by being based in fairly sound mathematical principles.
Of course, I don’t have enough grounding in mathematics to have a good grasp of sound mathematical principles, but I have read a number of resources. Many of them are here. Some articles on the thinking going into many of these systems are here. Soren Sorensen’s thinking on these matters, which has affected my own judgment, is here.
My rating is a three-part system that aims to unify and minimize the problem with various systems.
A Rating. This is a basic rating on a scale of 0 to 1. 0 means you’ve been shut out in all games, while 1 means you’ve been beaten in all games. When I was first formulating this I had the results effectively multiplied based on the team’s Coaches and AP Poll results. I would add 1/r (where r is the rank) times the A Rating. The result was a 0 to 3 scale. I dumped it due to increased disillusionment with the polls and the fact that a scrub team was actually helped in the B Rating by getting blown out by a team with an A Rating over 1.
The A Rating is calculated as a team’s winning percentage times a team’s modified average score ratio. According to Sorensen, a team’s score ratio in a given game is the margin of victory divided by the winning score. For the loser, score ratio is the negative margin of loss divided by the losing score. Since the score ratio for shutouts is always 1, and the score ratio for blowouts approaches 1, score ratio serves as a check to running up the score. (However, it also is somewhat biased towards defense. If you’re beating up your opponent 50-3 and your opponent kicks another field goal, you have to get to 100 points to make up the score ratio lost!)
For A Rating purposes, the average score ratio is modified to a 0-1 scale instead of a -1 to 1 scale. Under this system, ties would have score ratio of .5.
B Rating. B Rating is calculated by multipling a team’s A Rating by its total B Points. If the total B Points are negative, teams would be helped by lower A Ratings, so the A Rating is subtracted from 1 before multipling. Because having positive B Points results in a “purer” calculation, I give special recognition to all such teams on my report.
B Points are earned on a game-by-game basis and are supposed to be determined by the following game-by-game formula: MoV*AR+/-1
where MoV reflects the margin of victory or loss (negative for a loss), AR reflects the opponent’s A Rating (subtracted from 1 for a loss), and the +/- 1 factor is a home field modifier. It adds 1 to games played on the road and subtracts 1 from games played at home. For games played on a neutral site, B Points are simply MoV*AR. B Points are recalculated from scratch every week.
This uses “pure” MoV, but it still mitigates the effect of RUTS by multipling it by the A Rating. Who you have a given result against matters. I believe ratings should relate MoV to quality of teams beaten. If you beat up on a terrible team, the B Points you receive for it will be negligible. If you RUTS on a one-loss team with fantastic score ratio, just the fact you were able to run up the score on a terrific team says volumes about the quality of your team. (Most computer rankings, in their zeal to curb RUTS, will give most of this game’s impact to the quality of win.)
However, in practice, this is not the actual formula. I use Access 2003 to calculate the ratings and for some unknown reason, it highballs the ratings to a ridiculous extent. I have isolated the problem to the summation of the B Points, to prepare them for calculation in the B Rating. At this point, an unknown factor will cause the summation to be far higher than the individual games’ B Points would indicate. (It is related to the existence of multiple games, as the B Points sum correctly when there’s only one of them, but skyrocket immediately after a second game appears.) I would like to believe the results scale to what they should be but I am concerned about undervaluing the A Rating in calculating B Rating. As an example, consider the B Points earned by Ohio State in the 2006 season. I have manually sorted the results by date and rounded B Points to the hundredths place.
OSU def. Northern Illinois 35-12: 5.81 points
OSU def. Texas 24-7: 9.69 points
OSU def. Cincinatti 37-7: 9.44 points (Cincinnati had a rather strong season and Texas, while clearly better, wasn’t at championship form without Vince Young)
OSU def. Penn State 28-6: 8.37 points
OSU def. Iowa 38-17: 6.14 points
OSU def. Bowling Green 35-7: 2.46 points (the value of B Points in curbing RUTS against weak opposition should be obvious)
OSU def. Michigan State 38-7: 5.54 points
OSU def. Indiana 44-3: 5.48 points
OSU def. Minnesota 44-0: 9.33 points
OSU def. Illinois 17-10: 1.42 points (that’s what you get for keeping an absolutely atrocious team within a touchdown)
OSU def. Northwestern 54-10: 6.94 points
OSU def. Michigan 42-39: .86 points (yes, Michigan was undefeated at the time, but thumbs down to letting them get within a field goal at home – B Points are capped at MoV)
Florida def. Ohio State 41-14: -8.92 points (for destroying what was to that point the best team in the land, Florida received nearly 20 points for this game)
These B Points should add up to 62.57 points. But Access records OSU’s total B Points as 94162.35. (The final B Rating was 69160.71. After Week 3, OSU’s B Rating was 4237.39.) The only thing I tell Access to do in the query in question is sum up the B Points. For reference, OSU’s A Rating was .735, and their opponents received the following B Points for their OSU games: Northern Illinois -5.10, Texas -5.51, Cincinnati -6.95, Penn State -4.83, Iowa -6.57, Bowling Green -6.42, Michigan State -9.22, Indiana -9.87, Minnesota -10.66 (OSU shutting out Minnesota hurt the Gophers more than it helped the Buckeyes), Illinois -2.86, Northwestern -12.66, Michigan .20 (it is possible to earn positive B Points for losing, but it has to be on the road), Florida 19.84. If anyone can point out what I can do differently to get Access to calculate total B Points correctly, let me know. (My query that calculates individual game B Points has one field for the team itself, and to aid Access in association, two fields for the opponent, one of which is taken from the base list of Division I-A teams. I am willing to e-mail my Access file to anyone interested in tackling the problem. A link to my e-mail should be available from the profile link at right.)
C Rating. B Points do not take into account the unbalanced college football schedule. A team in a non-BCS conference can crush a bunch of scrubs and have its B Rating artificially inflated because the scrubs win more than they deserve by playing other scrubs in conference. This reduces the RUTS-mitigating effect of B Points. C Rating is a simple modification of B Rating that takes into account conference strength.
Each conference has a conference rating, which is simply the average of its component teams’ B Ratings. Independents are considered their own individual conferences, except Army and Navy, which are considered to comprise a “military” conference. (For clarification, the other two independents, Notre Dame and Western Kentucky, are their own one-team conferences, named after themselves.)
To calculate C Rating, take the difference between a team’s B Rating and its conference’s rating. Multiply that number by n/120, where n is the number of teams in conference. (The significance of 120 is that 120 is the total number of teams in Division I-A. Thus the fraction represents the portion of Division I-A that the conference takes up.) Drag the B Rating towards the conference rating by that amount. (If the B Rating is bigger, subtract. If the conference rating is bigger, add.)
Note that, to take my comment on the OSU-Minnesota game above, this serves as another curb on RUTS. RUTS too much in conference and you are liable to hurt the conference rating by punishing your opponent’s B Rating, and thus hurt your own C Rating.
All three of these algorithms have their faults. A Rating does not factor in SoS at all, B Points theoretically give some non-diminishing reward for RUTS, and the C Rating algorithm only makes sense as part of a larger system. But taken together, I believe they make a rather strong rating system that aims to crown a champion by C Rating at the end of the season. Last season, it crowned Louisville, with all the warts on the B Rating system, thanks to a woefully underrated Big East that had the highest conference rating. OSU had the best pure B Rating even after losing to Florida. Florida was third and Boise State fourth, separated by only ten points in the C Ratings – 51169.57 to 51159.34.
I won’t release my ratings for the 2007 season until Week 4, the soonest any team can be linked to any other team by connecting a series of games (Team A played Team B played Team C played Team D…). It’s a little arbitrary for my system compared to other systems for which this sort of thing matters, but let’s face it, the ratings are positively meaningless after Week 1 and only slowly coalesce into place. Last year the Week 3 ratings, which occurred after the cutoff point, were almost random, and the Week 4 ratings were more sensical but still a little wild near the bottom. Ratings will be posted on the Web site when they’re ready.
Versus will televise Big 12 and Pac-10 football games as part of a new agreement with FSN, a rehash of FSN’s prior deal with TBS. I’d be more impressed if FSN hadn’t already let Pac-10 games go to ESPN and made another agreement with ESPN for Big 12 games.
This is great news for Versus and terrible news for fans of those conferences who have longed for them to get off FSN. TBS to Versus is a big step down. On the other hand, while Versus isn’t likely to get The Game That Will Determine The National Championship (between ABC and FSN), this is exactly what Versus needs to do to establish its bona fides as a major sports power before the Big Three contracts come up for renewal again in the mid-2010’s. Versus’ limited distribution and the fact that it counted on major sports to establish its reputation, instead of making sure they had one going in, helped kill their shots at NFL and MLB rights (though Versus’ best shot at the mighty NFL, especially considering their distribution, was probably always the package the NFL relegated to the NFL Network for reasons not concerning the individual drawbacks of any network).
Getting the sort of sports that characterized the early days of ESPN and ESPN2 is also a must. Versus has already gotten a head start on that with NLL and MISL coverage, and dipped its toe into Arena Football coverage last season. Jumping into more mid-major sports, like MLS and the WNBA, would seem to be a logical next step, but MLS and AFL rights are locked up into the next decade, and WNBA (and NBA) rights are pretty much too far into negotiations at this point, with the pens practically already sitting by the contract.
The Big 12 has already re-upped with ABC and FSN, a deal that starts in 2008. Versus might be able to interject itself in SEC negotiations, which are up for renegotiation soon for a new deal starting 2009. Both football and basketball are shown on CBS and ESPN, but ESPN’s coverage of the SEC is rather limited, with lesser games (including the basketball semifinals, a bit of notoriety shared by no other Big Six conference) relegated to regional syndication.
Versus probably overestimated the cache of the NHL today in trying to line up deals for better sports. Now they have to hope that even mid-level Big 12 and Pac-10 games will draw enough eyeballs to stop itself from being a joke for any league over the NHL line. I can’t exactly say the battle of Iowa is a good sign of what’s to come, but at least now they might edge just a little bit higher.
All times PDT.
Saturday
9-5 PM: NFL Football, NFL Draft Rounds 1-2 (ESPN). Which will it be this year? Will the second round be actually treated with a little respect, or at the same level as the second-day rounds?
5-7:30 PM: NBA Basketball, San Antonio @ Denver (ESPN). Carmelo Anthony’s best chance of making it out of the first round is probably to have Joey Crawford officiating.
7:30-10 PM: NBA Basketball, Utah @ Houston (ESPN). What do you want, personalities, or good basketball? If the latter, this game is for you.
Sunday
10:30-3 PM: NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Racing, Aaron’s 499 (FOX). Better than nothing.
5-7:30 PM: NHL Hockey, Anaheim @ Vancouver (VS.). Actually, if I had chosen the NHL game yesterday I would still have the other NBA game that day and the NBA doubleheaders today. But today’s NBA games, well, suck.
I noticed something interesting about Year 2 of NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
Not the introduction of Keith Olbermann to the studio show, but rather, something about the schedule.
It still consists of the first ten weeks being pre-assigned, while Weeks 11-17 are “flex schedule” weeks, with games being chosen two weeks in advance (one week in the case of Week 17). But last season, the primetime spot on the schedule was simply left blank for the flex weeks.
This year, the primetime spot actually has a game listed, even though it could still be moved to an afternoon spot to make room for a better game.
As I intend on prognosticating on what games will be shown in prime time in this space, that brings up a bevy of questions that I’m not finding the answers to. Will CBS and Fox be able to “protect” the game listed in late night and keep it in the afternoon, or indeed, will they still be able to protect games at all? How closely will NBC hew to the game chosen for late night? Will a game have to be a complete dud for NBC to move away from it, or is the game just a placeholder for something close to the status quo last season, when NBC chose the games it thought best given the restrictions they had to work with (though they seemed to have certain perplexing biases, and choosing Packers-Bears Week 17 seemed to defeat the purpose of moving games only one week prior)?
All of a sudden, I’m dazed and confused and don’t know where to go.
This is an experiment that, should the topic of Da Blog ultimately fit it (and maybe even if it doesn’t), will become a regular feature every Friday. I’ll hand out my picks for the go-to sports to watch for the weekend. I choose only one game between competing games, and choose as many sports as possible within those parameters. All times PST.
Saturday
12:30-3 AM: Tennis, Australian Open, 3rd round play (ESPN). Assuming you don’t need too much sleep, of course.
9-11 AM: College Basketball, Louisville @ DePaul (ESPN). Combine for a 5-4 conference record. Really just a warmup for the next two parts of the tripleheader.
11 AM-1 PM: College Basketball, Wisconsin @ Illinois (ESPN). What the hell is Wisconsin doing with a power basketball program? This is their best record in over ninety years.
1-3 PM: College Basketball, Arizona @ UCLA (FSN). Arizona’s Marcus Williams not only is a Seattle product, he went to my high school. I never saw a game, only heard of him secondhand before last year, don’t like the idea of being a fan of whatever school you went to, and loathe many of my old high school traditions with a passion, yet I still find myself following the Wildcats. (Did I mention that this is a matchup of the top two RPI teams in the country?)
4-7 PM: College Football, East-West Shrine Game (ESPN2). One of college football’s many all-star games. What exactly is it? I don’t have a clue.
7-10 PM: Tennis, Australian Open, octofinal play (ESPN2). If tennis was as huge in this country as it is in some others, networks would be falling over themselves to put this in primetime. Especially with the new and improved Andy Roddick and Serena Williams likely to show up either here or in the insomniac session.
Sunday
12:30-3:30 AM: Tennis, Australian Open, octofinal play (ESPN2). Insomniac Special time!
10-11:30 AM: PBA Bowling, Dick Weber Open (ESPN). The football just barely overlaps with the basketball, so why not watch people roll really heavy balls around? Here’s one thing I might say about the PBA: When 9-spare is considered heartbreaking, maybe the competition is too good. That’s the problem with the pro versions of stuff a significant number of ordinary people do.
12-3:30 PM: NFL Football, New Orleans @ Chicago (FOX). Clearly the same teams go to the Super Bowl year after year in the NFL. Sure, 3 of the last 4 NFC champions were going into their first Super Bowls ever, but these two teams combine for a whopping 1 Super Bowl appearances. Yeah, I know, but that one appearance was only, oh, 20 years ago.
3:30-7 PM: NFL Football, New England at Indianapolis (CBS). Yes, the Colts under Manning have never been to the Super Bowl, yes, they’ve never beaten the Patriots in the playoffs, and yes, Peyton Manning is not the Manning we’re used to in these playoffs. But they’re at home!
After Football: Let two weeks of unending Super Bowl hype begin…