Google's Blogger service provides surprisingly powerful analytic tools to see how much traffic your blog gets. To be clear, I write this thing as a hobby and don't particularly care about my page views – I never make it my Facebook status or promote it in any way. I tweet links to all my columns, but this is the equivalent of when I would pretend I was Michael Jordan as a little kid. "Simmons and Whitlock tweet column links too! I'M JUST LIKE THEM!!!!".
I dove into Fundamentally Soundd's traffic stats last week and found something that was absolutely hilarious. Most of the time, I give my columns snarky titles (like last week's "GalleryFurniture.com Seattle Home Game Bowl"). One week, I titled my column "America's Game of the Week". That week's column is the most viewed Fundamentally Soundd article by a factor of ten. Why? Because when you Google "America's Game of the Week", my article is the number four result! Even though I still don't care about traffic and will continue not promoting the site, I couldn't resist giving this column a truly horrific title in the hope that I'll see a hilarious spike in traffic.
To be fair, I already knew of the practice of giving things misleading names in order to get more traffic. In 9th grade, my friend used to post videos on YouTube with very raunchy titles that would end up just being something like 45 seconds of footage of him playing video games. They all had over 5,000 views because people are gross. "Cute Kittens" is the first and last time I will do something like this.
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Last week, I wrote a lot about how people attribute things in sports to luck far too frequently. My position is the exact opposite of what my friend Angelo believes, and I asked him if he would be interested in writing a retort to my rant. Here's what he came up with (it's very good):
The idea that the best team always prevails in sporting events is Fundamentally Flawedd. Empirically, the notion that there is no luck involved in sporting contests is simply not true. Football Outsiders (a website known for its application and creation of unique football statistics) have proven that recovering fumbles is luck. Forcing fumbles is a skill, but recovering them is luck. When the ball hits the ground, each team has a 50/50 shot at recovering it. In the Giants-Patriots Super Bowl, there were 3 fumbles…all recovered by the Giants. The probability of such good fortune for the Giants is a mere .125. When something that both heavily impacts the game (turnovers in football are game-changers) and is statistically proven to be random chance favors one team to a relatively high degree of unlikelihood, how can it be said that there was no luck involved?
Another instance of luck in sports is one-run baseball games. Despite pundits creating storylines about teams being "clutch" and "finding a way to win," Bill James and other baseball analysts have pretty much done away with the notion. The only conclusive thing that can be said about one-run games (and to a lesser extent two-run games) is that there is a huge amount of luck involved in the outcomes. If winning one-run games was a skill, we would expect the teams with better overall records to generally have more success in one-run games. But no such correlation exists. For instance, just last year the 89-win Red Sox (.458) and 85-win Blue Jays (.461) had worse Winning Percentages in 1-run games than the 67-win Kansas City Royals (.473).
Let's look at the 1960 World Series between the Yankees and Pirates. The Yankees won games by scores of 16-3, 10-0, and 12-0. The Pirates won games by scores of 6-4, 3-2, 5-2, and 10-9. The conventional argument is that the Pirates were more clutch and that the Yankees couldn't handle close games. Besides being facially untrue (the 1960 Yankees featured many future all of famers and players with multiple championship rings such as Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra), Bill James and others have shown that there is an element of luck at play in all 4 of the Pirates victories.
Even if one chooses to ignore Bill James and blindly cling to the falsehood that winning one-run games is a skill, let's take a closer look at Game 7 of that World Series. The Yankees lead 7-4 with Pittsburgh batting in the bottom of the eighth. The leadoff batter singled. The next better, Bill Virdon, hit a routine double play ball to shortstop Tony Kubek. As Kubek was about to field the ball, it struck a pebble and smashed into Kubek's throat. Kubek was badly injured, had to leave the game, and Virdon was credited with a single. Instead of two outs and no one on, there were two men on and no outs. A single, sacrifice bunt, fly-ball out, an infield single, and a 3 run home run followed, and the Pirates had a 9-7 lead. While someone can argue that the Yankees should have done a better job at mitigating damages, and that the Pirates deserve credit for taking full advantage of the situation, the simple fact remains that neither team would have been in that situation had it not been for pure, dumb luck. No rational person could argue that "If Tony Kubek were a better shortstop he would have known the exact location of a specific pebble in the infield and would have accounted for that when attempting to field the ball." Nor can one argue that Bill Virdon displayed superior skill to hit the ball with just the right direction and velocity so as to strike the pebble and injure Kubek. Both arguments are absurd.
I could go on and discuss the half-court heave in basketball, the field goal blown astray by a sudden, unexpected gust of wind, or many other things, but I've already exceeded my word limit. Game 7 of the 1960 World Series is the perfect embodiment of the metaphorical "way the ball bounces." As much as we'd like to rationalize sports and believe in the feel-good notion that on every given day the better team won, this is simply not true…and it is because of this that we love sports so much. On any given day the best team in the world can lose to the worst, no matter how statistically unlikely it may be. Let's just not confuse this notion with the idea that they were necessarily the better team on that day.
I thought Angelo made a lot of great points. I'm a big fan of Football Outsiders and I have a ton of respect for the research they do. I think my main point is that we too frequently say that an upset occurred because of luck instead of attributing it to the solid execution of a good game plan.
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Adam and I are betting one beer per football game this week. I fully expect to owe him four beers by Sunday night. Home teams in bold, wish me luck:
Pittsburgh (-3) over Baltimore
I was going to pick Baltimore until I read the Football Outsiders preview of the game. It turns out that the Steelers are easily the second best team in the league, and that by some metrics they are actually more consistent than the Patriots.
For most of the decade, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning were so much better than everyone that every conversation about the best QB started and ended with them. Last year, people added Drew Brees to the conversation. I think that our brains are wired to keeping these debates as small as possible (Bird/Magic, Ali/Frazier, Kobe/LeBron, etc.) just to keep the arguments neat and compartmentalized. The problem is that the level of quarterbacking in the NFL has become so good that what used to be a tidy two person debate is now far messier.
This year, we all agree that Brady was by far the best quarterback. But I think that Ben Roethlisberger and Aaron Rodgers have elevated their respective games to the level of Manning and Brees. Manning and Brees are far better historically, obviously, but the 2010 versions of these four are basically indistinguishable. I once wrote that the glut of awesome QBs is similar to the point guard boom in the NBA. The conversation used to just be Chris Paul vs. Derron Williams but had to be expanded because Rondo, Rose and others are so good that the differences between any of them are negligible.
I think a fun debate would be the following: If you had one game to win, would you pick Manning or Roethlisberger to be your quarterback? What if it was a playoff game? Remember, during his 2006 title run, Manning threw three touchdowns and seven interceptions over four games en route to a Super Bowl win. That pretty much cancels out Roethlisberger's awful play during the Steelers' 2005 championship run.
Green Bay over Atlanta (-2.5)
The Falcons remind me of the 2001 Chicago Bears – won a lot of close games, finished 13-3 with a bye, and got destroyed at home by a much better Eagles team.
New England (-8.5) over New York
The problem for New York is that the Patriots have 52 good football players whereas the Jets have 51 good football players and Mark Sanchez.
Chicago (-10) over Seattle
My coach of the year pick would be Bill Belichick, followed closely by Raheem Morris and Todd Haley. Spags is close, but Haley's team had more success.
I dislike Pete Carroll's antics more than anything else in the NFL. All that ridiculous fist-pumping and whatnot even though he beat the Saints 2nd string secondary and 12h string running back in an undeserved home game. I remain a huge fan of the city of Seattle due to Microsoft, Frasier and Shawn Kemp.
Last Week: 1-3
Playoff Record: 1-3
Regular Season Record: 113-143
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