Coyote Blog

For those who think marathoners are wimps:

Paul Keeley, a U.S. Marine at the South Carolina
Military School, wants to run the Boston Marathon unshod next year.
Last summer, he began training by pounding the streets of Charleston,
S.C., in combat boots, hoping to nurture some preliminary calluses. He
took off the boots this fall but soon landed on a surgeon's table for
an abscess in his middle toe that required draining. Mr. Keeley, 18,
says his calluses had hardened so well that he felt no pain when a pine
needle or some other sharp object penetrated his skin and worked its
way to the bone. He says he's still on track with his
barefoot-in-Boston plan.

"Barefoot running isn't for sissies," says Jonathan
Summers, a 37-year-old Boston horticulturist who took up the regimen
this summer after seeing a couple of unshod runners pass him by at a
local 10K race. "It's like running on sandpaper."...

Paul Keeley, a U.S. Marine at the South Carolina
Military School, wants to run the Boston Marathon unshod next year.
Last summer, he began training by pounding the streets of Charleston,
S.C., in combat boots, hoping to nurture some preliminary calluses. He
took off the boots this fall but soon landed on a surgeon's table for
an abscess in his middle toe that required draining. Mr. Keeley, 18,
says his calluses had hardened so well that he felt no pain when a pine
needle or some other sharp object penetrated his skin and worked its
way to the bone. He says he's still on track with his
barefoot-in-Boston plan.

"Barefoot running isn't for sissies," says Jonathan
Summers, a 37-year-old Boston horticulturist who took up the regimen
this summer after seeing a couple of unshod runners pass him by at a
local 10K race. "It's like running on sandpaper."

I am done with the Cardinals until they get an offensive line. I have written many times about the sad, failing strategy of drafting high-profile position players (particularly wide receivers) but paying no attention to the offensive line.  The Cardinals have one of the best receiving corps in the nation, have what looks to be a great young quarterback, has a top-notch running back, but did NOTHING over the winter to shore up what last year was a crappy O-line.  This is despite being $10 million under the cap!

And you saw it last night.  Commentators have criticized the coaches for getting too conservative in the second half of last night's debacle, and certainly that is true.  But a good team with a back like Edgerin James should be able to close out a game in the fourth quarter by pounding the ball on the ground.  And the Cardinals could not, with James averaging less than 1 yard per carry after the opening drive in the first quarter.

I give up.  I am tired of getting suckered onto the bandwagon.  Until the Bidwells crack open the wallet and focus some cap money on the O-line, I am back to rooting for the Broncos.

Update:  Greg Easterbrook piles on:

When my two football-crazed boys got up early this morning I said,
"Guys, Arizona was ahead by 20 and had the ball on the last play of the
third quarter." Immediately both said, "And the Cardinals lost." Not
only did Arizona blow a late 20-point lead at home in front of a
national television audience; the Bears committed six turnovers and the Cards still managed to lose. Arizona held Chicago to nine first downs and was plus-four
in turnovers, yet managed to lose. In the closing seconds, Arizona had
last year's Pro Bowl kicker lined up for a 41-yarder to win, and
trigger what would surely have been wild civic celebration, and still
lost. What's a stronger expression than "pitiful"? We must now twist an
old line and proclaim: Whom the football gods would destroy, they first
make Arizona Cardinals.

I wasn't too impressed with the movie Dodgeball, but I did enjoy the
niche sports spoofs associated with the mythical ESPN "the Ocho."
Today at lunch, I saw a crowd gathered around the TV, and went to see
what they were watching.  On ESPN - the main one, not the deuce - was the world sport stacking championships.
Basically, this is a timed race to stack drinking cups in fixed
patterns (pyramids and such).  I could not believe this was on TV.  It
was far more outrageous than any of the sports they came up with on the
Ocho.  Also, the kids doing it were fast -- a couple were such total
blurs with the cups I thought the tape was sped up.  There is no way
you can adequately picture this without seeing it - Click on one of the videos in the lower-center of this page.  The kid in the Comcast video on the right is pretty good too.  Oh, and get your gear here.

Yes, that's what I said.  The pre-season college football rankings are absolutely the most important poll of the year, at least if you think your school has a chance to be #1 at the end of the year.  That can't be right, you say -- surely a poll taken before anyone has played a game is the least important. Here is my reasoning:

In theory, voters in the college football polls each week come up with their current ranking of teams, which in theory could be very different from how they ranked things the previous week.  In practice, however, voters start with their rankings of the previous week and then make adjustments up and down for individual teams based on that week's game results.  The result is as I described in the comment thread of this post at the Sports Economist:

In effect, the college football rankings are a bit like a tennis ladder. Each
week, losers drop down 3-8 spots and all the winners and no-plays move up to
fill in the vacated spots. Sometimes a team will leapfrog another, but that is
rare and it is extremely rare to leapfrog more than 1 or 2 spots. In this sense, the
initial football poll is the most critical, since only those in the top 10-15
have any chance of moving up the ladder to #1.

In effect, the pre-season poll is the baseline off which all future polls start.  I haven't done the research, but you could probably refine my statement in last sentence above to a set of rules such as:

• A three-loss team can never win the championship
• A two-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 5 of the pre-season poll
• A one-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 15
• An undefeated team can win even if they were left out of the initial top 25, but only if they play in a major conference.  A minor conference team, even undefeated, will not ever end up #1 unless they started the season in the top 25.

Again, the numbers in these rules may not be exactly right, but I think they are directionally correct.  This is what I call my theory of College Football Calvinism (the religion, not the cartoon character) since one's ultimate fate is in large part pre-ordained by the polls even before the season is born.  So, if your alma mater has any shot at the title, you should hope your AD is out there in the summer lobbying the writers like hell to up their pre-season poll standings. Every spot you gain in the pre-season poll is one you don't have to win on the playing field.

Well, yet another key international soccer match, this time the most important game of all, the World Cup Finals, was decided by penalty kicks.  Penalty kicks are the most absurd way to determine a championship that I can imagine.  They are barely one step removed from a coin toss in terms of their ability to really determine who the best team is.   Its like giving up on a baseball game in the 12th inning and settling it with a home run derby.

I understand that in regular matches and probably in pool play, logistics require that games not go on for hours and penalty kicks make sense.  But by the time you get to the quarterfinals, and certainly the finals, why can't they just play the freaking game until someone wins?  That's what they do in the Stanley Cup, and in US pro football -- each have ways of settling ties quickly for regular season games, but once crunch time comes, they play until there is a winner.  In Wimbledon, they settle sets with tie breakers but come the fifth set, they play until someone wins.  Its not like the stadium is booked for anything else the rest of the day.  And do they really think anyone in the stands is going to get tired and go home?  Pro hockey fans will tell you there is no more compelling time in their sport than overtime in a Stanley Cup Final.  How great would it have been to have just left the two teams on the field until one was a winner, even if that took two more hours?  I mean, they have waited four years for this moment, they can't put in a few more minutes on the field?

As an American non-soccer guy, I have really given this World Cup a chance.  I was in England for much of the tournament, so I not only watched but got to experience some of the excitement of the populous.  And I have, excluding the silly play-acting fake injury thing, mostly enjoyed the games.  But they lost me right at the end.  Settling their once-every-four-years world championships with ridiculous penalty kicks demonstrates to me that soccer types have no respect for their own game.  After just 30 minutes of overtime, they give up on their own game and have teams play a different game to determine a winner. So if they don't have respect for their own game, why should I have any?  Americans are never going to fall in love with a game that decides its championships with the moral equivalent of a coin flip.

Update:  First, though this post was applied to soccer, its not just a soccer rant.  I went on the same rant several years ago when the Olympic ice hockey gold was awarded with a shootout.

Second, I get it that the athletes are tired.  I'm not going to put my toe in the water on the "what sport requires the most athleticism" debate, except to say that soccer is right up there, with its 45 minutes of continuous play each half.  (But I will say that, having personally played rugby for years, rugby is right up there too -- one thing soccer aficionados don't acknowledge is how much physical contact and going down on the ground frequently -- for more than just a fake injury -- takes out of you above and beyond just continuous running.)

My point is that shoot-outs are a different game - they are not real soccer.  Yes they use the same equipment and have roughly the same goal (to get the ball in the net) but by that definition "horse" is real basketball.  Anyone up for settling an NBA finals after two overtimes with a game of horse?  The beauty of soccer is in the passing and the assists, in the clever footwork, in the wing trying to use his speed to turn the corner.  Where are those in a shootout?

If athletes are getting exhausted, it just increases the likelihood that someone will score and end the game, since it is as true in soccer as any other sport that fatigue hurts defense more than offense.  And this might stop teams that play a defensive game in overtime, who are clearly playing for the shootout.

And think of posterity.  No one is going to remember this World Cup final game except to say that Italy beat France on penalty kicks.  But what if the game went 3-1/2 hours in a grueling test of endurance before France finally punched it in, all the players too exhausted to celebrate.  People would talk about the match for years.  I'm not saying you play this way for every run of the mill international competition.  But wouldn't it be nice once every four years to actually decide the championship actually playing soccer, rather than horse?

Update #2: Per a couple of commenters, nothing in this post is meant to imply that sports that are more popular in the US are not without their flaws.  Silly set-piece fist fights in hockey and the unfairness of overtime rules in football (putting too much emphasis on winning the coin toss) come to mind immediately.

Not being much of a pro soccer fan, I have been surprised to find that the sport can be compelling, at least in stretches.  For example, the 30 minutes of overtime between Italy and Germany was quite exciting.

However, I think the sport should be ashamed at the state of affairs in its refereeing.  In any one game, you might see players rolling around on the ground faking injuries as many as 15 or 20 times.  It became a source of immense amusement for my son and I to see not only how much faking was going on, but how often the faking involved holding a body part that seemed unrelated to any contact  (e.g. holding their head as if they received a concussion when they were accidentally tripped).  If these were all real injuries, the field would look like Omaha beach by the end of the game.

Why do they do it?  Because the referees reward them for it, of course.  It was pretty clear that on many occasions acting and injury-faking turned accidental falls into penalties and minor penalties into yellow and red cards.  It's disgraceful.  I know refereeing is hard given the speed of today's athletes, but for god sakes soccer has got to be an order of magnitude easier to referee than say basketball or particularly American football. 

Even more, I wonder why fans tolerate the pretend injuries?  Can you imagine Pittsburgh Steelers fans fondly embracing a wide receiver that faked ankle injuries two or three times a game to try to get an interference call?

Most all the regulation goals in later games of the world cup have been
scored on penalty kicks.  It seems that the game has devolved into
lofting the ball into the box and then hoping to draw a penalty, sort
of like a hail Mary play at the end of a football game.  I would love
to see the game opened up a bit to allow more scoring of real goals in
regulation -- how about eliminating the offsides penalty?

Congratulations to Gene Wright, who won the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA bracket contest.  Gene only had one of the final four picked (UCLA) but did so well in the opening rounds he had the contest locked up even before last weekend.  Second place was Michael Gunter and third was Bob Houk.  Interestingly, no one out of 34 contestants had Florida in the finals or winning it all.  By the way, yours truly limped in at 24th, though my son helped uphold the family honor at 10th.  If you were not in the pool, you can still click here and enter email "coyote -at- coyoteblog -dot- com" and password "coyote" to see all the results.

By the way, I highly recommend the www.pickhoops.com site for your brackets.  It costs $9 to set up, but it has no ads, the registration is MUCH less intrusive for your players than free sites like Yahoo, they have great analysis options, and they are much faster at posting results.

Congratulations to Gene Wright, who has a strong lead in the pool with 151 points.  Michael Gunter is in second with 143, and Bob Houk in third at 138.  For those playing, make sure to check out this page, which takes all the various possible combinations of future wins and losses in the tournament and calculates probability of winning.  This analysis gives Gene a 60.9% chance of winning it all, followed by Bob at 23.4% and Michael at 12.5%.  Don't worry, your faithful author Warren Meyer, despite being at 21st right now, is just lurking to give everyone a false sense of confidence.  I have a 3.1% chance of victory which depends on Texas taking it all.  Hook 'em horns!

We had over thirty entries this year for our bracket pool.  Good luck.  After three games, your host Coyote is in.... Last!  Woohoo.

Note: This post sticky through 3/16.  Look below for newest posts.

As promised, we are proud to announce the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA Bracket Challenge.  Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don't have an office pool to join or who just can't get enough of turning in brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.  In particular, I invite bloggers who are experiencing post-Weblog-Award depression to reignite the spirit of online competition.  I mean, why should NZ Bear have the monopoly on ranking bloggers? 

I don't know if we will get 1 or 100 entries, but all are welcome, so send the link to friends as well.  There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam.  The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/Coyote and sign up, then enter your bracket.

Scoring is as follows:

Round 1 correct picks:  2 points
Round 2:  4
Round 3:  6
Round 4:  8
Round 5:  10
Round 6:  20

In honor of the Blogfaddah, we have added the special "Army of Davids" bonus scoring:  If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team's seeds.  So don't be afraid to go for the long-shots!

OK, so what about the prizes?  Well, fame and recognition on this weblog should be enough, but, for those who enjoy recreation, my company will give the winner a choice of 3 nights free camping at one of the public campgrounds we run, or a half-day jet ski rental at Lake Havasu, or a half-day boat rental at Burney Falls State Park in California, Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, or Patagonia Lake in Arizona.

Disclaimer: I sincerely hope that there is something about this purely recreational activity that violates the ridiculous gambling laws we have in this country, because I feel the need to protest them at every turn.  For example, can any politician explain to me why gambling in many Midwestern states is moral on a boat but immoral and therefore illegal on dry land next to the boat?

Update:  We already had a number of entries in the first hour this was up, so it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun.  Go ahead, sign up, it just takes a few minutes.  You don't have to know that much about basketball -- last year our family's tournament was won by an 11-year-old girl.

In a previous post, I discussed decision anchoring in judged events.  This week I have a simpler question:  Whose idea was it to give out CD-ROM's this time instead of regular medals?

Is this some kind of weird prelude to a Microsoft takeover of the games?  Or maybe these are just remaindered "Glitter" DVD's.  By the way, this picture does not do her justice, but Tanith Belbin is pretty hot.  She came in third in ESPN's page 2 hottest female athlete survey.  Better pictures here.

I have an experiment I would love to run.  I would love to compare the actual winners of Olympic events with the pre-event favorites, in two categories:  Those events with objective standards (time, distance, etc) and those that are judged (e.g. skating).  My hypothesis is that in judged events, barring a disaster (e.g. falling in a skating jump) judges tend to give high marks to those who they come in expecting to win.  I would expect that for people deeply tied into a sport (which Olympic judges are) it is impossible to totally separate the contestant's past body of work from their current performance.  I therefore would guess that favorites fail to win at objectively measured events more often than in judged events (again barring Michelle-Kwan-like falls).

Update: In another great moment in Coyote's reinventing the wheel, a reader emails to say that this phenomenon is called "anchoring":

Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology
to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor,"
on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely,
on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that
value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once
the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.

This apparently occurs even when the number has nothing to do with the decision:

according to Daniel Kahneman if an audience is asked firstly to memorise the last 4 digits of their social security number and then to estimate the number of physicians in New York the correlation between the two numbers is around 0.4"”far
beyond what would be expected by chance. The simple act of thinking of
the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is
no logical connection between them.

I would presume that a number that was more related, like a figure skating pairs couple's world ranking upon entering the competition, would have an even greater impact on the decision.

You hear a lot of debate about what wins NFL Championships - is it offense, defense, the running game, the quarterback?

Well, if we look beyond what is probably the most important determination of success -- don't have any injuries -- I think the last few games have really proven the importance of having a great offensive and defensive line.  The Indianapolis Colts, the team that supposedly had everything, lost because the Steelers penetrated their O-line at will.  Both the winning teams yesterday won in large part because their lines pushed the other team's around the field. 

Good teams know this.  Bad teams, like our Arizona Cardinals, don't.  At the beginning of the year, the Cardinals were getting a lot of publicity because they had exciting new players at many of their skill positions.  I went to see their 3rd preseason game, and I knew then that they would suck this year, yet again, because their lines got pushed around by Denver's second team.  Denver, by the way, is a great case for building from the lines - for years they have turned no-name guys into thousand yard rushers because of their O-line.  Same this year in Pittsburgh.  The great Cowboys teams of the 90's had Aikman and E. Smith and M. Irvin, but it also had what may have been one of the great offensive lines the league has seen.

Unfortunately, the Cardinals, like many bad teams, feel the need to draft big-name position players that temporarily excite a lethargic fan base rather than really building unsexy offensive and defensive lines.  I mean, for god's sakes, we have drafted like 3 or 5 wide recievers in the first round of the last few drafts.  This team needs EVERYTHING and we are drafting recievers?

Today I ran my first half marathon, at the PF Chang's Rock and Roll Marathon here in Phoenix.  It was fun through about mile 9, and mostly sucked after that.  I am pretty excited that I got through it, though right now I am ready for Kurzweil's singularity because this body definitely needs to be replaced.  My sister runs full marathon's and I laughed when she told me she bandages her nipples and Vaselines her thighs for the race.  Now I wish I had done it too - beyond the joints and muscles those are the two spots that are chafed pretty raw right now.

My time?  Well it was 2:27:20 for 13.1 miles, which is pretty lame since it translates into a blazing 11 minutes per mile, but it does qualify as my personal best!  Update:  They have the stats up on the Internet, so I now know that I finished 10,345th place out of 18,536 finishers, so I seem to have finished just outside of the medals (lol).  By the way, my two sisters both ran the full marathon in Houston on the same day, so combined with my marathon-lite the coyote sibs ran 65.5 miles on Sunday.

I am not really a huge baseball fan, but we generally watch the World Series, and the Astros pitching decisions in the seventh inning had me yelling at my TV again.

In a previous post, I talked about my pet peeve of the closer position.  For non-baseball fans, here is the background:  Typically, starting pitchers make it about 6 innings on average, leaving a need for other pitchers to cover the last three innings.  Most relief pitchers who cover these later innings are not as good as the starting pitchers, or else they would be starting pitchers.  The exception is that most teams have a "closer", typically their best relief pitcher who is reserved for pitching the last inning (thus the name "closer").  I asked before why the closer always pitched the 9th, rather than whichever inning of the last three that the toughest batters were expected.  The answer I came up with was this:

the explanation must lie in metrics.  If a manager loses a game in the
7th, it is just a loss.  If a manager loses a game in the 9th, the game
was "blown".  Newspapers and talk shows keep and publish stats on games
blown in the 9th, but not games lost in the 7th and 8th.  Games lost in
the 9th are in a sense portrayed as more of a management failure than
games lost in the 7th, and this is made worse by the fact that a game
lost in the 9th is somehow more psychologically devastating for fans
and media.  Managers are not dumb - recognizing that they get dinged on
their performance rating more for a game lost in the 9th than the 8th,
they have invented the closer role.  General managers take a
disproportionately large part of their salary budget for relief
pitching and dedicate it to this closer role.

You can even see this effect today, as everyone talks about Brad Lidge giving up a 1-run homer in the 9th, rather than talking about the grand slam the bull pen gave up in the 7th.

So here is what specifically drove me nuts last night:  Bottom of the 7th, the White Sox trailing 4-2, the Sox had managed to load the bases with two outs and had Paul Konerko, one of their best sluggers, up to bat.  The Astros were clearly going to switch pitchers, since the current guy had just walked two batters in a row.  The question was, who to bring in?  One announcer suggested they bring in Brad Lidge, their closer and the best guy available (short of bringing in a starting pitcher). The other announcer said, no, you can't do that, he will never make it all the way to the 9th.  You can't, he said, bring your closer in this early.

Well why the hell not?  Are you really going to face a more dangerous situation than bases loaded with Paul Konerko up to bat later in the game?  Lidge, if he is their best guy, should have been in then, and pitched the 8th, and then they could have patched guys together for the 9th.  Instead, they sent in some other guy and boom, grand slam.

Now, I will admit that Lidge's giving up the game-winning home run in the 9th taints my argument a tad, if only to make the point that Lidge may have not been as hands down superior to the rest of the bullpen as we may have thought a few innings earlier.  But that does not change the facts of the 7th inning:  The Astros were facing the most dangerous possible situation, in the heart of the Sox order, one worse than anything they were likely to face in later innings, but they chose not to put the person they thought of as their best available pitcher out of homage to this weird baseball conventional wisdom called the closer.

I discussed why I like the Football Outsider rankings of NFL teams and players here.  Typically defenses and offenses are ranked by total yards (given up and gained, respectively).  This is a really poor metric, as evidenced in part by the fact that Arizona is something like 3rd in the NFC in offense and 5th in defense by these traditional rankings.  The better football outsiders team rankings are here. 

A couple of observations

• Cincinnati #1 after five weeks.  Wow!  Both offense and defense in the top 6.  I know it is early, but the Outsider's way of ranking teams tends to be more reliable than traditional statistical approaches.  For example, last season after week 5 they had Philadelphia and New England ranked #1 and #2, and these two teams eventually met in the Super Bowl.  Cincinnati has had a pretty easy schedule to date, which will get harder as the season continues
• San Diego is by far the best 2-3 team out there.  They have had a brutal schedule, which gets better going forward.  They still should be considered a good playoff bet.
• Washington is easily the worst 3-1 team out there.  Expect them to start losing soon, particularly as their schedule remains tough.
• Philadelphia may continue to struggle.  The rankings show that their 3-2 record is no fluke, and they have perhaps the toughest schedule left to play of any team in the NFL
• San Francisco and Houston are really, really bad.  Historically bad.  I had been hoping that Arizona had a chance in the Matt Leinart / Reggie Bush sweepstakes, but SF and Houston will be tough to beat.
• Chicago is working on the Baltimore Ravens award, with the #1 defense to date in the NFL and the third to last offense.  Chicago has also been one of the least consistent teams (highest variance), but has one of the easiest schedules for the rest of the year, so still may have a chance if it can just to anything on offense.
• NY Giants and Indianapolis are solid #2 and #3, though you have to worry about the Giant's high special teams score pulling them up - these scores tend to regress to the mean over the season.  Is there anyone who wouldn't love to see a Manning-Manning Superbowl?

I will pat myself on the back and say that I called it, way back in week 4 of the preseason and again after week 1:  The Cards, as usual, suck.  The only reason that this is news is that some national sportscasters were drinking the kool-aid and had predicted that this will be a turnaround year for the Cards.  One quarter of watching the Cards get manhandled by Denver's second team in pre-season convinced me that while the Cards had some interesting skill position players, they had no Offensive or Defensive line.  And now, their top player on each line has gone down with an injury. 

This is a team that has never given a crap about its lines, as illustrated by the brilliant trade a couple of years ago of the draft rights to Terrell Suggs (despite his being a hometown ASU hero), perhaps the best young DL in the game, for two mediocre receivers.  Here is Coyote's draft rule number one:  Teams like the Cards that draft receivers in the first round several years in a row are going to suck (hear that, Detroit?)

I said previously this is maybe a 5 win team.  Did I overestimate?  It looks like the Cards have a shot at the Matt Leinert sweepstakes, otherwise known as the first draft choice.  Of course, the Cards being the Cards, they will probably pull out some last second win in the last second of the game to drop out of the first pick, like they did two years ago against the Vikings.  If they do get the first pick, they should trade the pick for linemen or more picks to draft lineman.  Here's why:

• There is no point in having a good QB and a bad O-line (see Houston Texans in their first year)
• You can get more value by trading the top 3 picks for lower picks
• Matt Leinert is going to be uniquely valuable.  Some team will see him as a once in a generation type player and will give up many goodies for him (see Mike Ditka and Ricky Williams)
• Like Eli Manning and San Diego, Leinert will probably refuse to come play in Arizona anyway

I enjoy many professional sports casually, attending an event or two every year, but the NFL is by far my favorite.  In the pre-season, there was a lot of hype that maybe the long-time hapless Cardinals would be decent this year.  I knew better, even from the pre-season.   Heck, my 8-year-old daughter knew better.

We went to see the last pre-season game against Denver.  In that game, the Arizona starters played for quite a while against the Denver 2nd team, and got beaten up.  Specifically, they could not run the ball and in turn their defense could not stop the run.  So it was no surprise to see them get blasted in their first regular season game against the Giants. 

The problem with the Cards is this:  They have spent the last several years drafting high-profile position players, including spending a jillion 1st round picks on receivers.  Great teams got that way because they invested in their lines - both O and D, even when such picks might be less popular with the fans on draft day.  The Cards have instead focused on drafting "names" who might help sell season tickets in the new stadium.  This neglect is very apparent today.  It doesn't matter how good your position players are if there are no holes for the backs and the QB is getting plowed to the turf on every play.  This is a 5-11 team that is fortunately playing in the NFL's worst division, so they may eek out 7 wins.  You heard it here first.

By the way, if you are an avid football fan, I recommend two sites to you.  The first is Football Outsiders, who have taken a Bill-James-like approach to football stats, rethinking metrics to provide a better insight into what teams really are good.  Make sure to check out their DVOA rankings - basically they compare every teams performance on every play against other teams in the same situation (e.g. 3rd and 8 on their own 45).  The other site is Greg Easterbrook's always entertaining Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, providing large doses of football clear thinking and haiku.

Having grown up in Texas, I love this:  Their city underwater and possibly joining Atlantis for eternity, the Superdome looking like the Kingdome, the newspapers flooded out of their offices, with no power and no printing presses, probably operating out of a Motel 6 somewhere, the New Orleans Times-Picayune still has time to address life's essentials -- How ARE the Saints going to stop the run this year? (posted at 8:50 PM Tuesday)

One of the major on-field concerns for the Saints is to figure out how
to stop the run. Off the field reports of major flooding back home
occupied the thoughts of many of the Saints players Tuesday in the
second day of practice at San Jose State.

Going into Thursday's preseason finale against the Oakland Raiders, the
Saints have allowed a whopping 535 yards on the ground in the first
three exhibitions with a staggering 6.7 yards per carry for opponents.

You may have to scroll down a few posts, I am not sure their permalinks are working right.

Larry Krueger, a radio personality for the San Francisco (baseball) Giants, recently ignited a firestorm by saying that he was frustrated by the Giants'

brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly.

In response, Giants manager Felipe Alou has demanded Krueger's firing, asserting that this statement represents the worst sort of racism, and that he refused to accept Krueger's apology because "There's no way to
apologize for such a sin."

OK, at the risk that Krueger turns out to be a serial idiot with a long history of racism, I will deal with this statement solely on its face.  And in context, the reaction to his statement strikes me as extremely exaggerated.

Some background:  Typically, hitters can be thought of in two classes:

1. Picky hitters, that sort through pitches like my wife shopping for vegetables, carefully picking out only the best to swing at, and gladly accepting walks when they come.  These hitters are often considered more "thoughtful" hitters
2. Aggressive hitters, who swing more indiscriminately at pitches, and who often consider a walk to be a failed at-bat.  These hitters often described as "intuitive" or "natural" hitters, rather than thoughtful.

Some managers prefer the first type, some the second (for example, Miguel Tejada's being indiscriminate at the plate drove A's GM Billy Beane crazy, while other managers are happy to let him hack away for their team, given his huge numbers).  Which brings us back to the Caribbean.  What's interesting to me is that the Caribbean is not actually a race, but a location.  And in that location, it is very clear that hitters are schooled to be type #2 aggressive hitters.  Players in the Dominican Republic, Filipe Alou's home country by the way, have a saying:  "You don't walk off the island".  In other words, to get the attention of the US scouts and come to the majors from the Caribbean, a hitter is trained to be an aggressive type 2 player. They are taught that going down hacking is better than a walk.

In a sense, the Caribbean is a big (and very very successful) baseball school for training players to play in the US.  And it turns out that this "school" tends to teach players be more indiscriminate hackers at the plate.  Ask any manager in the majors if Caribbean hitters on average are less picky, more aggressive hitters at the plate and they will say "of course".

So, to some extent, Krueger is getting flamed for saying what everyone already knows.  Saying that Caribbean hitters can be indiscriminate hackers is like saying that PAC 10 quarterbacks tend to be more NFL-ready and polished than Big 12 quarterbacks -- its just a fact that is not always true, but is true on average given how they were trained.  Krueger's real mistake was probably using the term "brain dead", which can be a dangerous term when it has racial overtones, but in context probably refers to hitting style rather than absolute IQ.  I think Alou is reaching to say that Krueger was referring to Caribbean hitters poor English skills, but I will admit that he has more history with Krueger and may have reason to make this interpretation from past events.

Since Instapundit has been fitness blogging and my post on weight and mortality stirred up some comment, I thought I would put in a plug for my new exercise class.  My wife talked me into signing up for a 1-hour class called cardio-tennis.  Basically its a group tennis lesson, but with very little instruction.  Instead, the instructor hits three or four balls to me, typically running me all over the court.  Then I jog around to the other side, pick up my 3-4 balls and put them in his basket, and go back to the other side to wait my turn.  With the right sized group, I am jogging constantly and I get a fair amount of practice on my tennis strokes.  Its exhausting but it beats the hell out of jogging.

Forget the UN and judge nominations and other trivial matters.  This weekend is the NFL draft.  Via Marginal Revolution comes this cool article about the economics of the NFL Draft.

The article is pretty long, so let me summarize the couple of things I thought were pretty interesting.  The first was the relative value of draft picks.  They did a lot of work quantifying the performance of players selected at different positions in the draft (i.e first pick, second pick, etc).  You'll have to see the detailed study as to their methodology, but it struck me as pretty reasonable.  They also looked at the cost or salary by draft pick.  Combining the two got this curve:

The "surplus" line is the difference of the curves, ie performance value minus compensation cost.  Since compensation costs fall faster in the late first round (the first round is 30 picks) and into the second round than does performance, the surplus value peaks in the second round.  This does not mean the best players can be found in picks 25-75, but it does mean that the best values can be found there.  Since the NFL works under a salary cap that equalizes total compensation, the best team should be the one that consistently picks these value players (this is different than the baseball / NY Yankees model, where there is no cap, and maximum performance presumably comes from getting the top players, irregardless of salary).

If this is correct, teams should be willing to straight-up trade a pick in the top 15 for a pick around 35.  However, in reality, they can usually trade a pick in the top 15 for two or more picks in the 25-75 ranges, which should make the trade a no-brainer.  Interestingly, the market for picks is actually going the other way:

The researches studied hundreds of past draft day trades of picks to generate these curves.  It basically says that early picks are valued exponentially higher than even late first round picks, and this preference for very early picks has actually increased in the past few years.  This curve says that a #5 pick might be worth at least 3 and possibly many more picks in the 25-75 band.

Given these two curves, if they are correct, why don't more teams trade their top picks into the 25-75 band.  There are at least 3 answers to this:

1. Read Moneyball.  Once you read it, you will understand that sports GM's do not understand these concepts of value.
2. There may be other values, other than player performance, that teams get from top picks.  For example, most fans will have heard of the top ten people drafted, but will know few from the 25-75 band.  The top, well-known picks generate a disproportionate amount of fan excitement and "hope" which can translate into more paying butts in seats, which this study does not take into account
3. Some teams are getting it.  In listening to several mock drafts lately, it is clear many teams want to trade down from the top picks this year - no one wants to pay the signing bonuses commanded at these levels.  By the way team that has traded for the most picks in this band is ... Philadelphia.  Who has been in the NFC championship game 4 years in a row, so maybe someone out there does get it.

The Suns are the best in the West, and for the first time since Charles Barkley wore a Suns uniform, the town is excited about the team´s chances.  My wife was commissioned to design a handbag for the wife of one of the Suns owners (in Suns' colors, of course) for her to display during the playoffs.  It was finished just in time:

Today I am going to the the Phoenix Mardi Gras, which happens to take place at a golf tournament.  The Phoenix Open is unique among PGA Tour events, with about twice the attendance as the next-most-attended tournament, and with a huge party atmosphere.

Below is the famous 16th hole, ringed all the way around with grandstands and tents.  Absolutely the loudest and rowdiest hole on the PGA tour:

By the way, here is the weather forecast today (he he):

Windy with a mix of clouds and sun. High 69F. Winds E at 15 to 25 mph.

Boy, did you luck out.