NFL

My thoughts on the new Monday Night Football graphics package

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You can see some of ESPN’s new MNF package in action here:

And this video has a statistical graphic near the end, and a one-line statistic at about midway:

I think what may have been meant by “they’ll know it’s a better experience. But they won’t know why” was that even if people would notice the scoring bar was different, they’d only notice that most graphics were being kept out of sight if they were looking for it (perhaps because they noticed how the names of the announcers were displayed at the start of the broadcast). This would also seem to indicate an abandoning of the parallelogram in ESPN’s graphics package… were it not for the fact that some parallelograms were occasionally seen on some full-screen graphics. (Peripherally, ESPN also becomes the last NFL broadcaster to add an on-field down-and-distance indicator. ESPN also lagged in displaying the down and distance on their “dashboard”, apparently thinking the on-field graphic made it redundant, but I saw some complaints about having to wait too long to see the new down and distance.)

I would not be surprised if this never makes the leap outside Monday Night Football, at least on ESPN. ESPN seems to want to keep MNF special in some way, if the “orb” of previous years was any indication, and it would be difficult to fit college team names in there, at least if ESPN wanted to keep the team logos as well. ESPN’s wide team logos also seems best fit for the NFL; you would probably be looking at a very different look for baseball.

I can’t help but think the folks in the ESPN graphics department may be disappointed at this graphic’s revolutionary potential. Ironically, the centered score display, at least as refined by NFL Network, may be the next big evolution in score graphics, thanks to the intricities of widescreen vs. standard screen display.

A major change to the ad model

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After giving it some thought, I have made several important changes to the ad model. Two primary concerns are leading me to adopt an alternative strategy to the one I was considering. First, my sidebar is too narrow to accomodate a skyscraper ad, so the largest ad size the sidebar will accomodate is a square ad. Second, my plans for a square ad were originally to have four a page – but I’ve recently started wondering if that’s exactly the best approach for a site with basically no visitors.

Those concerns, plus the fact that my attempts to let people know they’re better off bidding on my premier ad have mostly resulted in depressing bidding on the Standard ad without increasing bidding on my Premier ad (which STILL isn’t topping the Standard ad’s rates), have led me to change my ad strategy for Da Blog as well. So on the right side, you will see space for two square ads. Those are NOT in the same ad box. One of them is an ad that also appears on the rest of the Morgan Wick sites, the other is technically the same ad box Da Blog has had since August, only it’s now a square box. If you have previously bid on the standard skyscraper box your bid is now null and void and you must bid again with a square ad. To get the best bang for your buck with your square ad, you should be bidding on the top Morgan Wick box, but if you have a lower budget and can’t afford the top box you can still reach most of the same people with the bottom Da Blog box (although the top Premier box will still be a better investment in most circumstances, and now it’s bigger!). I’ve also put advertisements for Sandsday in both of the Da Blog-specific boxes that will run if there are no bids otherwise.

If that’s a bit confusing, don’t worry. I’ve created an advertising FAQ on the Web site that aims to put the answers to any questions you may have – and links to every one of my ad boxes – in one place. That includes not only the ad that appears across the Web site, but a new ad I’ve created just for Sandsday. I’m still debating what to do with the rest of the site, including possibly committing the forbidden act of using Google Adsense.

While I’m at it, I’ve also added a new item to the Around the Horn Drinking Game, fixed some buggy links on Sandsday, and updated the NFL Lineal Title. I’m starting to think I should study Javascript more too… PHP doesn’t seem to work on Freehostia for files whose extensions aren’t .php, so I can’t use it to create a dynamic sidebar unless I rename all my files, and it seems to require the use of Javascript to obtain the user’s screen resolution, which would be nice for fixing one of Sandsday’s biggest problems, the inability to be viewed properly at 800×600 resolution.

OMG! It’s football season! Our lives have meaning!

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Who cares about those amateur college scrubs? THE league of record in America is the National Football League, and Da Blog and Morgan Wick’s football site is ready with complete team coverage there as well!

Start with the NFL Lineal Title; as I said last week, it’s analogous to the college football lineal titles, but because of the NFL’s schedule structure there’s rarely more than one at a time, and never more than two. I need to explain something that I forgot to make clear last week: Split titles in the college football lineal title arise from teams going undefeated, or winning the BCS Title Game (which is why LSU gets a new lineal title this year despite not going undefeated). Obviously, it’s exceedingly rare for an NFL team to go undefeated, so what happens instead is that split titles are created when the title holder doesn’t make the playoffs. Obviously, that’s rather rare as well, and the Patriots nabbed the lineal title on their march to an almost-perfect season, so the Giants start the season with the title this year and will defend it against Washington tonight on NBC.

Speaking of which, starting Week 3 or 4, I’ll start my weekly SNF Flex Schedule Watch, which was perhaps the prime contributor of traffic to Da Blog last year, before it was taken over by webcomics. I correctly predicted the Week 12, 14, 15, and 17 games that were moved to primetime as part of NBC’s flexible scheduling, only missing Weeks 11, 13, and 16. I had thought I did the Flex Schedule Watch on Tuesdays last year, but it was actually a Wednesday feature last year so it’s a Wednesday feature this year.

There is a third concept that I used last year: the “SuperPower Rankings”, my experiment in creating a set of “super-power rankings” from the power rankings produced by the eight leading sports sites (ESPN, CBS, Fox, NBC, SI, Yahoo, USA Today, and Sporting News – Yahoo produced two rankings). It proved to be way too much work, so I’m not doing it this year, but I leave the concept open for someone else to pick up the gauntlet.

The one (well, two) NFL games I know I’ll be watching… and why

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(Hat tip to Sports Media Watch for tipping me off to this one.)

Most of the innovations in sports graphics have been made by Fox. It was Fox who, if not invented, at least popularized the modern score box, and Fox led the way in the transition to the modern score banners used in every non-tennis sport by every major sports operation in some form except on CBS’ football coverage. But a transition more profound than the one to banners, and possibly as profound as the introduction of boxes, may be being spearheaded not by Fox, but by ESPN.

When the new Monday Night Football regular season starts on, well, Monday, ESPN will introduce the “Monday Night Football Dashboard“, which will consolidate the information presented by a box or banner with statistics and player information and that sort of thing. It sounds like ESPN will attempt to condense the banner (although for the past two seasons and this year’s preseason MNF has used something better described as an “orb”, a centered design since modified by NFL Network but not seeing wide use elsewhere) with the line of statistics that has been obvious on college football broadcasts and which recently saw a semi-notorious application on MLB broadcasts with pitch-count-by-pitch-count statistics for each batter.

The graphics designer at ESPN interviewed by the Sports Video Group web site says “I think [viewers will] know it’s a better experience. But they won’t know why.” I know few people obsess as much over graphics as I do, but even if the “dashboard” contains a preservation of the “orb” I find that somewhat hard to believe. At any rate, I sure as hell hope I’m able to catch the MNF opener and see it in action, see just how different it is, and see if it’s something other networks might copy, or if it’s worth copying.

(And might this have something to do with ESPN’s move to only showing college football starting lineups at the top of the screen, above the banner, and only spotlighting “impact players”?)

Can you feel the excitement?

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Can you feel the excitement? College football season is about to start! Football season – pro and college – is always momentous here on Da Blog. Before my recent webcomics-driven popularity (well, sort of), quite a few people were attracted to Da Blog by my Sunday Night Football predictions. Soon, Da Blog will be taken over by football, especially on Mondays, as my various football-related projects kick into gear. As such, my football hub is all set up for the new season.

The College Football Lineal Title – won by any team that defeated the last champion – will soon take over Da Blog. I made some changes: the Princeton Title is now the Princeton-Yale Title (and I could call it the Walter Camp Memorial Title), reflecting their shared dominance over the early days of college football, and while the 2004 Auburn and Utah titles were unified in last year’s Sugar Bowl, we got a new split title as none of last year’s title holders made the BCS Title Game. Also, every title now has a field listing each team’s next title defense. Missouri and USC are the only two teams with any real shot at losing their titles in Week 1, as Georgia and LSU play 1-AA (oops, “Championship Subdivision”) teams, but the 2004 Auburn-Utah and 2008 BCS titles are most likely to be unified – unless Missouri loses to Illinois and USC loses to Ohio State. (And I said that about the Princeton and Auburn titles last year, because of the same conference.) There’s an NFL analog as well, but it’s never had more than one dissenting title at a time, and there’s no split title this year.

Then there’s my College Football Rankings, my personal, non-proprietary computer rankings that aim to strip out all the bias and distrust and bring some clarity to the world of college football. The ranking formula is unchanged since last year, despite my being tempted to change the C Rating calculation from being based on conference ratings to being based on B Ratings of opponents (a change you’ll probably see next year). The conference layout of college football is also unchanged from last year, as is the fact that you won’t see any rankings until after Week 4, so the only thing different from this description is that OT games are considered to have a margin of victory of 0; the only difference between the winner and loser is being recorded as a winner and loser. That is also equivalent to a score ratio (described at the link) of 0, which gets averaged in A Rating as .5, and OT games give B Points similar to a I-AA game: only the home field modifier regardless of outcome. As exciting as college football OT is, it’s a joke and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual play of the game. It’s more of a skills competition, akin to penalty kicks in soccer. If drives occurred the way they do in actual play, as opposed to starting within field goal range, I might give it more weight.

Next week I’ll talk about the NFL Lineal Title and talk more about the SuperPower ranking concept and why I’m not doing it this year. And tomorrow I’ve got another new college football feature.

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 8/2-3

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All times PDT.

Saturday
11-1:30 PM: Little League Baseball, Big League World Series (ESPN). Yep, it’s Little League World Series season again! And August is only now starting…

3-6 PM: NFL Football, Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony (ESPN/NFL Network). Art Monk is the only interesting guy in the class and he should have gone in a few years ago. Wasn’t Cris Carter supposed to be a lock this year back in 2004? And now, a brief acknowledgement of the X Games…

6-8 PM: Action Sports, X Games 14 (ESPN). …that was it.

Sunday
10-12 PM: LPGA Golf, Women’s British Open, final round (ABC). Gets the nod over the PGA event below because it’s a major and the Bridgestone isn’t (ditto for valuing the US Senior Open over the Bridgestone). Would get the nod over the US Senior Open, if there were an actual conflict, because I actually consider the LPGA the top level of competion for its gender-sport combination. Golf Channel covering the final round of the McDonald’s LPGA notwithstanding. Grr. (Incidentially, I was amazed to find out this only became a major in 2001. What was the fourth major before then? The event now known as the Canadian Women’s Open. Canada was once important enough to hold a major? And back then it had the rather dense name of “du Maurier Classic”…)

12-3 PM: Champions Tour Golf, US Senior Open (NBC). Wait, the senior tour has two majors in a row?

Honorable Mention: 11-3 PM: PGA Golf, WGC Bridgestone Invitational, final round (CBS). Jesus Christ, all three original major networks have huge golf tournaments on this weekend! They have an event this big right before a major? Well, at least it’s not two majors in a row like the senior tour. And the PGA Championship isn’t the only big event next week, even with the Olympics starting…

5-8 PM: MLB Baseball, Philadelphia @ St. Louis (ESPN). Because I haven’t had my Recommended Daily Allowance of major sports yet. And I’m not even mentioning the NFL Hall of Fame Game. I have a moratorium on NFL preseason games.

Getting the house in order when the visitors are already here

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So it seems we have a few more readers now than we did a week ago, especially with a second LiveJournal linking to us. Yesterday and the day before, Da Blog had nine times more visitors than it did the day before that, so it seems some housekeeping is in order.

First: RSS feeds. The-zaniak has created a LiveJournal feed for Da Blog, and my response is: Um… you do know Blogger comes with its own RSS feed, right? If you have IE 7 or Firefox, you should see an RSS icon light up when you see the page. (I can only speak to IE there; I don’t know how it works for Firefox.) Unless I get something else cool from having an LJ feed, it seems a bit unnecessary. This has prompted me to add feed links to the sidebar. (If you wanted to create an LJ feed, you’d have done better to create one for Sandsday. I’d create one myself if I knew how to create an RSS feed from a pre-existing MySQL database.)

I’ve also posted in the past on the idea of Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs, and as such I’ve also added a list of all of Da Blog’s labels to the sidebar. They come complete with their own feeds; this post explains how you can form them. Both those new sidebar items are right below the larger blog archive, which makes them, and Da Blog Poll, less visible.

I’m also re-opening and extending by one week one of Da Blog Poll questions, removing the Random Internet Discovery from the list of options and replacing it with the fairly self-explanatory “Explorations into History”, which could include such things as my opinion on the presidents. Although I have saved the other results to a personal file, if you are one of the three people that have voted on the poll before, I strongly urge doing so again. If you vote “other” I expect you to specify what you have in mind on this post (where you can also learn more about the options) or this one. This is probably the last time I’m going to re-open this particular poll, which has existed in some form almost since Da Blog was founded. I’m also giving you until the end of August 16 to tell me whether you think I should post every time I put up a new strip. You can vote on any or all of the poll questions. I also encourage you to contribute to the poll on the front page of the web site.

Also, after nearly a year since the Web site was put up, I’ve finally deleted the long-dormant Da Blog Poll from the days when Blogger didn’t have its own poll element.

Finally, I’m offering you the chance to have your name in lights, as long as you won’t get paid for it, at least not right away. If you’re a movie buff – and not just the “Spiderman” kind, but one with a real grasp of film history – I invite you to join my 100 Greatest Movies Project, my seemingly endless quest to create the definitive list of greatest movies from all the ones that have come before, to sing the praises of the movies that make the list. E-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you’re interested and I’ll show you a sample write-up and a list of movies that are either on the list or close enough to make it on when I retabulate the list (or at some point in the future when new lists come out). I used the same principle in creating the NFL SuperPower Rankings, and released lists for last year, but it proved to be too much work. If you’re an NFL buff, and you’re willing to put in the work, you can have it for your own website as long as you credit me with the idea, and I’ll link to you on Da Blog.

And if you have any other ideas for what the web site or Da Blog could use, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

UPDATE 7/25: Okay, this is why I have long thought about leaving Blogger, because of unnecessary bullshit. Evidently for the last 24 hours the reposted poll and the two new features were at the top of the sidebar even though I had THOUGHT I had saved their moves. Then when I was told I had changes I hadn’t saved, it wouldn’t save, and then it would tell me “an error occured” no matter what I did after that. lk asfdasilnbg grlkldoe m,x bjfk dsndihtsgugvwbgjwhidxdyf

Thoughts on the Super Bowl of the Ultimate Answer

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I was going to write a post that explored what might have happened if Brett Favre hadn’t thrown an INT in OT of the NFC Championship Game, which would have basically resulted in the greatest Super Bowl in history no contest, but I came under the weather in the middle of last week, and I can’t really concentrate on much of anything under such circumstances.

As it is, this game is definitely one of the greatest Super Bowls in history, but I’m not sure it’s the hands-down greatest. Part of it is also part of the reason I didn’t want to coronate Super Bowl XXXVIII, which XLII is definitely greater than: the slowness of scoring in the first quarter, in this case the entire first half and third quarter, during which most of the scoring effectively came in the first quarter.

But another part of it? No one (well, maybe except people in the Big Apple) is going to remember this Giants team as Super Bowl champions, unless maybe they turn it into a dynasty of their own. They’re going to remember them as the team that dethroned the perfect Patriots.

The story writes itself fairly well, but I just can’t shake the feeling that the better team did not win this game – that the Giants are champions more by dint of their role in a fantastic story, one that really stretches out over the whole season, than by any actual achievement. Part of it is the rather nondescript nature of the Giants. There’s a definite story surrounding Eli Manning but he needs to show that he really does have his brother’s genes in subsequent seasons. It’s nice that Michael Strahan, Plaxico Burress, and company get rings, but none of them are stars the way the quarterbacks and, sometimes, backs and receivers are. Green Bay would have had a better story: Brett Favre winning a Super Bowl in the twilight of his career and almost certainly pulling a Jerome Bettis afterwards. (Which is why I have less of an issue with the Steelers’ Super Bowl XL win than the Giants’ win here, despite the officiating controversies in the former game and the fact that I myself am a Seattlite.) The Cowboys… well, if this were a youth league or even college, a Cowboys-Patriots Super Bowl would basically have been a ready-written sports movie. But the Giants… the Giants are boring. Let’s face it.

About today’s strip: I did, of course, make the strip before the game, but it did cross my mind that the Giants could win the game. I decided I would keep the first panel regardless of the outcome because… well, you’ll see when you see it.