Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The deciding game of college football’s Mythical National Championship, in which Northern power in the form of the Ohio State Buckeyes will put a serious hurt on Southern speed in the form of the Florida Gators, isn’t until next week. But yesterday we had the two important games of the season. One saw plucky Boise State finish an undefeated season by squeaking past perennial powerhouse Oklahoma, in a 43-42 overtime thriller that is guaranteed to go down as one of the best college football games of all time. 22 combined points in the last minute and a half of regulation, breathtaking trick-play laterals, gutsy two-point conversions, and a happy ending to boot. It’ll be hard to beat that.

The other important game was the Outback Bowl, since any game featuring Penn State is automatically important. The Nittany Lions smartly dispatched the favored Tennessee Volunteers, 20-10, adding to coach Joe Paterno’s all-time-best bowl victory total. But, as exciting as the game undoubtedly was (what would I know, I was on an airplane as usual), the only reason we mention it here on our ponderously serious blog is to point to this terrific animated summary of the game from Tennessee site Rocky Top Talk.

Click to get the full animation, which colorfully summarizes every drive of the game. (Dashed lines are punts, in case you were wondering.) Some day all sporting events will be virtual; those of us with basic subscriptions will only have access to animated summaries like this, while those who spring for the premium service will get to see artificial highlights generated by the best computer graphics available at the time.

Matthew Yglesias and Tyler Cowen both consider the eternal question of whether defense or offense is more important, especially in the context of new NBA rules that allow for more scoring. Apparently some folks are arguing that, since it’s now easier to score, a team’s priority should be to bring in offensive-minded players, rather than concentrating on defense. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify the logical flaw there.) Yglesias argues that offense and defense must both be important, since the goal is to end the game with more points than the other team:

I concede that the new rules have made it harder to play defense. I fail to see, though, how that makes defense less important. Two factors determine who wins a basketball game: how many points your team scores and how many points the other team scores. Since you have the ball roughly half the time and the other team has the ball roughly half the time, it stands to reason that offense and defense should have exactly the same importance.

Unfortunately, that last bit is just as logically flawed as the previous argument. The truth is that defense is (still) significantly more important than offense in winning games.

How can that be, if teams (basically) spend the same amount of time, or number of possessions, on offense and defense? To decide which skill is more important, we have to consider the variation in results obtained by being good at one vs. being good at the other. In other words, which has a bigger effect on wins: being one of the best offensive teams, or being one of the best defensive teams?

Yglesias looks at some individual playoff results, which are somewhat inconclusive. But we can just look at the season stats and compare the results of being good at offense vs. being good at defense. Of course, we’re faced with deciding how to measure those skills. Points scored is actually not a good measure, since that is affected more by the pace of the game than by true offensive or defensive prowess. Points per possession would be perfect, but I don’t know where to find that stat. So instead let’s just look at Team Offensive/Defensive Field Goal Percentage (FG%), which is a pretty good proxy for offensive/defensive aptitude.

What you should really do is to type in all the data and correlate with wins, but that sounds like work. Instead, let’s just define a “good offensive/defensive team” as one in the top 10 of the 30 teams in the NBA in offensive or defensive FG%, respectively, and “bad” as being in the bottom 10. We immediately see that there is a greater range in defensive aptitude than in offensive aptitude. The median good offensive team shoots at a .474 clip, whereas the median bad offensive team shoots .439, for a difference of .035. But while the median good defensive team holds their opponents to .439, the median bad defensive team only holds their opponents to .478, for a difference of .039. In other words, there is a slightly bigger difference between good and bad defensive teams than good and bad offensive teams. Concentrating on defense, it should follow, would potentially have a bigger outcome in the win/loss columns.

And it does. The winning percentage of the good offensive teams is .580, while that of the bad offensive teams is .413, for a difference of .167. But the winning percentage of the good defensive teams is .615, while that of the bad defensive teams is .358, for a difference of .257. That’s a substantial difference. A good defensive team is much more likely to be a winner than a good offensive team.

The simple ex post facto explanation is just that all NBA players are pretty good scorers, or at least that the players who do the bulk of the scoring are all pretty good. There’s not too much of a difference in overall efficiency between the very-good and the truly excellent. But defensive abilities are much more variable, and perhaps also more dependent on coaching and team dynamics. Putting your effort into defense has a larger marginal payoff than putting it into offense. Which most coaches would agree with. People these days like to blame Pat Riley for that, but I think Bill Russell figured it out long ago.

That is the sound of a celebratory bird call. Celebrating the newly crowned 2006 World Series Champions!!!

The St. Louis Cardinals have just won their 10th World Series title out of 17 World Series appearances since the beginning of the franchise in the late 19th century. That record is second only to the Yankees. Their last World Championship title was in 1982 (I remember doing Quantum Mechanics homework while watching the games), and before that ‘67 (I was too young to notice), and before that ‘64, and before that…was way way before my time. Of course, the whole “World Series” thing is a bit of a misnomer since it only involves teams from North America, but tonight I don’t think anyone from St. Louis notices or cares.

The St. Louis fans did their part to support and bring good luck to their team:

As for me, I’ve been glued to the TV and sported a different t-shirt from my collection each day this week. I also dusted off my lucky hat which I’ve had since high school.

Time for some champagne for a toast to the Redbirds!

If anybody doesn’t understand the title of this post, just consider (i) it’s October, (ii) I’m American, (iii) I’m essentially from St. Louis. And I’m ready to go to DeTroit and maul some Tigers. Revenge for 1968!

In all honesty, the game tonight (baseball in case you don’t get it yet) (7th and final game of the National League Championship Series) was a complete nailbiter. I think I popped a blood vessel or two and it took alot of wine to calm me down. Anybody who thinks baseball is dull should have seen the game tonight.

More on the Fall Classic later after I have regained my senses….

I’ve been looking for this for years online — Monty Python’s classic International Philosophy football match, Greeks vs. the Germans.

“This is Nietzsche’s third booking in four games.”

We’ve finished with the World Cup and the big bike race across France. We’re in anticipation for the Fall season of baseball with the playoffs and world series. But, in between, is a lessor known sporting event – the World Series of Poker. The final game will be played Thursday 10 August, and one of the 9 finalists in that game is a genuine particle theorist! It’s Michael Binger who was a graduate student here at SLAC, studying under Stan Brodsky, and defended his thesis just a couple months ago. I was on his committe and can say that he did a fine job. And on Thursday he is playing at the final table at the World Series of Poker. He is coming into the final table ranked 8 out of 9 (apparently 9 people sit at the final table) with a pile of chips worth over $3 million.

This is the World Series of Poker, No-Limit Texas Hold-em Championship. Within poker circles, this is the big event. About 8700 people entered the contest, buying in with $10,000 of tournament chips, each. These 8700 card-playing studs battled it out several weeks until 9 super-players were left. Those 9 will battle it out for the championship on Thursday. And a particle theorist – from Stanford – has amassed over $3 million in chips and thus cracked the top poker playing circle. Eat your heart out Sean!

Michael Binger worked on physical renormalization schemes with applications to grand unification and split supersymmetry here at SLAC under the guidance of Stan Brodsky. Essentially, they have a unique method of describing the running of the strong coupling constant (i.e., how it changes with the energy scale it is being measured at) and found a number of qualitative differences and improvements in precision over conventional approaches when applied to calculations within grand unification theories. It’s interesting work and I’m glad somebody took a look at it.

It seems that Michael is somewhat of a novelty in the poker circles due to his physics PhD. He’s been interviewed and quoted as saying:

Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would definitely give him the freedom to do pretty much anything he wants.

I’ve never followed the world series of poker before, but now I’m rooting for a rising star and a genuinely nice person. GO, BINGER GO!!!

Update: Michael Binger finished in third place! His winnings totalled $4.123 million. He was eliminated in hand #229 at 3 AM PDT, after more than 12 hours of play. He had an Ace-10 suited pair in his hand and with a hand like that he understandably bet the store. For more details on the hand, please see Sean’s comment below (#20). All of us here at SLAC give him our heartiest congratulations!! Rumor has it he will be stopping by on Monday!

Warren Moon always wanted to be a quarterback. He had all the physical tools, as well as tremendous leadership abilities and a fierce determination to win. Only one problem: he was black. As stupid as it may sound, not too long ago conventional wisdom held that black people couldn’t be quarterbacks — they were athletes, not thinkers.

Moon was a successful high school football player in LA, despite playing in the kind of atmosphere where you received death threats from gang members playing for the opposing team. But he couldn’t get a scholarship offer from a major college. Well, that’s not exactly right — he did get offers, but only under the condition that he switch positions to running back or defensive back. One school, Arizona State, recruited him as a quarterback, but rescinded their scholarship offer after they signed two other (white) quarterbacks.

Determined to play the position he wanted to play, Moon went to junior college for a year, where he personally sent game films to major programs throughout the country. He was finally offered a scholarship by the University of Washington, where the team had been plagued by racial tensions. At UW he was the target of relentless taunting from fans, and his own teammates expressed skepticism of his ability. Nevertheless, in his senior year Moon led the Huskies to their first Rose Bowl in fifteen years, where they beat Michigan in a stunning upset.

Moon was named MVP of the Rose Bowl, but when the NFL draft came around, nobody was interested. He wasn’t invited to any combines or private workouts for teams. Word was out that he refused to convert to defensive back or tight end, which were the only positions at which NFL teams would consider him. As Moon put it, “The quarterback is the face of the organization, and white owners still weren’t ready for that face to be a black man. The owners wanted somebody to take to the country club, and they weren’t ready for that to be a black man.”

Undaunted, he signed with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. In six years in the CFL, he led the Eskimos to five Grey Cup championships, winning two championship-game MVP awards, and set a league record for passing yards in 1983. He was inducted into the CFL Hall of Fame in 2001.

The NFL finally caught on, and Moon was signed by the Houston Oilers in 1984. He and his family were again the subject of death threats, and his wife and children were eventually forced to watch the games from a private stadium box. After one game in 1991, on the verge of signing a new contract, he had to explain to his nine-year-old son what it meant when a fan in the stands had yelled “I can’t believe they gave that f—— n—– $14.3 million.”

Moon persevered, setting the Oilers club record for passing yards in his first year, but didn’t really come into his own until his third year in the NFL. He led the league in passing in 1990 and 1991, joining Dan Fouts and Dan Marino as the only quarterbacks to ever post consecutive 4,000-yard seasons. He went to the Pro Bowl nine times. By the time he retired in 2001, he was third all-time in NFL passing yardage behind Marino and John Elway, despite having played his first six years in the CFL. If he had played in the NFL for those six years, throwing for 2,500 yard per year (an extremely conservative estimate), he would have finished his career as the league’s all-time leading passer by a substantial margin.

Warren Moon wasn’t the first black quarterback in the NFL, but he set an example that made it enormously easier for others to follow in his footsteps. There are now several African-Americans starring at quarterback in the NFL; sufficient evidence, in the eyes of some, to say “See? Racism doesn’t exist!” Ignoring decades of history, they will tell you with a straight face that the competitive pressures of running a professional sports franchise make it impossible to be racist, since any non-racist organization will be able to scoop up all the undervalued players. (Somehow that sounds familiar.) This from the same folks who, not too long ago, argued that “the White community” was entitled to disenfranchise blacks because Whites were “the advanced race.”

Today, Warren Moon is being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, becoming the first player ever to be in both the CFL and NFL Halls — oh yes, and the first black quarterback to be inducted. Congratulations, Warren; thanks to the example you set, you won’t be alone for long.

In an exciting game, marred by one bizarre incident, Italy won the World Cup yesterday, beating France on penalties (not PKs), after the score was tied at 1-1 at full time and again after extra time (not overtime).

France had gone ahead early in the game, through a (heart-stoppingly close) penalty taken by retiring star Zinédine Zidane, but Italy came back strongly and Marco Materazzi scored a wonderfully headed goal (not an offensive strike) within the next ten minutes.

The two goal scorers were involved in a ridiculous incident about twenty minutes before full time, when Zidane headbutted Materazzi in the chest after exchanging some words. It is unclear what was said, and there have been some claims that a racist remark was made. But the most compelling story I’ve heard so far (apparently backed up by lip-readers) is that, after some shirt pulling, Zidane asked Materazzi if he’d like his shirt, and Materazzi told Zidane that he should keep it for his sister and then called her a prostitute. I guess we’ll find out eventually. In any case, Zidane was sent off and left in disgrace.

For the third World Cup in a row I held a party to watch the game. I’ve mentioned before how international physics is. Combine this with the international appeal of football (not soccer) and you get quite a mixed crowd for a party like that. Unless I’m missing someone, my party was attended by people from (in no particular order)

• The United States.
• England
• Italy
• Brazil
• Argentina
• New Zealand
• Mexico
• Romania
• Japan

There would have been even more nationalities if it wasn’t the summer, when a lot of people travel. It truly is a wonderful perk of being a physicist, to work in such an international community, and we should definitely advertise it to young people considering a career in physics.

We had a great time, celebrated with the six Italians present, drank a lot of wine and beer and ate well.

Almost as importantly, we indulged in another World-Cup related pastime; complaining about the ABC commentators. Just so you don’t feel left out, I’ve involved you in this little game with my italicized comments throughout the text.

Only four years to wait until the next one!

I haven’t had the time to type up the answer to yesterday’s quiz, so instead why not a World Cup open thread? It was pretty easy to discern the pattern in the quarterfinals, where Portugal beat England, Italy beat the Ukraine, France beat Brazil, and Germany beat Argentina — all of the Eurozone squads were victorious, while those nations still puttering along with their local currencies were left to go home and lick their wounds. Hooray for globalization!

But what is it that separates Les Bleus and the Azzurri, victorious in the semifinals, from their opponents? I mean, besides a bluish tinge, a strong wine tradition, almost identical flags, and amazing goals? (And being picked by me to lose?) Eventually it hit me: these were the countries that have been home to Popes! Sometimes simultaneously!

So what will happen in Sunday’s final? Italy has had more Popes, but France has been more of a leader in unifying Europe. A titanic struggle between the temporal and spiritual realms awaits. Allez les Bleus! Forza Italia! (I will, at the time, actually be in Italy, so I’m leaning slightly Forza over Allez, but I wouldn’t bet against that Zizou guy in his last professional game.)

Well, it seems that World Cup fever is everywhere – even with me a hardcore baseball adict. For the first time, I find myself checking the schedules and the progress. I haven’t graduated to watching the games yet, but I am still following it. Partly because I’m in Germany this week (yet another committee meeting). Today was my day off and I went to Cologne to photograph the cathedral. (It rained. All day. Persistently. All my photos show dreay dull grey skies with a rather dark pollution stained cathedral in the foreground. Ho hum…) But, first thing I noticed upon walking out of the train station is that Brasil was in town! Go Brasil!!! They must have been on their way from Dortmund to Frankfurt. They gotta win – they’ve got the most outrageous fans! (And my pixels didn’t even catch the people with the yellow green & blue hair!)