NFL Week 16: At last, a true “must-win” game

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The NFC South’s playoff representative probably will finish the regular season with a 6-10 record, unless Carolina defies the odds and makes it in at 6-9-1. And while NFL analysts often are too ready to call a game a “must-win” game (week 4?), with two regular-season games left, the NFC South has gifted everyone a true must-win game, at least for one participant.

If the currently 5-9 Atlanta Falcons want to make it to the playoffs, they simply must beat the Saints in New Orleans on Sunday.

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New Orleans is just a win better than Atlanta at this point, but the Falcons beat the Saints in a fun overtime game back in week 1, and the Saints, which are the hosts of this weekend’s rematch, are just 3-4 at home. Of course, the Falcons, which are sort of weirdly 4-0 in the division, are just 2-5 on the road, so who knows. If Atlanta is going to win, as it must to keep its seemingly improbable postseason hopes alive, one has to think that it will need both of its star receivers, Roddy White and Julio Jones, on the field on Sunday.

On the Road Again: A study of NHL rink variation

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One of the important background dimensions to comparative baseball statistics is known as “park adjustments,” a set of corrective factors applied to account for the physical differences (e.g., outfield wall depth) between each park. Among American sports today, only Major League Baseball and NASCAR (and golf, I suppose) permit such structural variation between the competitive arenas themselves.

Professional hockey used to be in that group too. More than merely adjusting, adding, and subtracting lines on the ice to affect the flow of play, as the NHL continues to do (cf. the NBA three-point line), the rinks themselves used to be different sizes. League rules mandate a uniform rink size, but so-called “small rinks” persisted in the NHL as late as the 1980s and 1990s in Boston, Chicago, and Buffalo.

While hockey does not face the structural differences present in baseball, there still is a need to apply rink-by-rink statistical adjustments. That’s because the compiling of basic hockey statistics (e.g., shots, hits, turnovers) requires statisticians to make judgment calls to a more significant degree than in a discrete-event sport like baseball.

By way of limited background, the NHL collects basic gameplay statistics through a computer system known as the Real Time Scoring System (RTSS). A benefit of RTSS is that it aggregates and organizes data for analysis by teams, players, and fans. A vulnerability of RTSS is the subjectivity alluded to above that comes when human scorers track a fluid, dynamic sport like hockey.

While others have noted certain biases among the RTSS scorers at different rinks, a paper by Michael Schuckers and Brian Macdonald published earlier this month analyzes those discrepancies across a spread of core statistics and proposes a “Rink Effects” model that aims to do for subjective rink-to-rink differences in hockey scoring what park adjustments do for structural differences between baseball parks.    Continue reading →

The Lions could have the best rush defense in the NFL…

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…ever.

The award for the fewest rushing yards allowed by a team in a regular season goes to the 2000 Ravens* anchored by linebacker Ray Lewis. The Ravens allowed a paltry 970 yards on the ground to pick up an impressive 12-4 regular season record. Oh, and this same defense went on to win Super Bowl XXXV as well.

The Lions are nearly on track to break this record.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. Through 13 games, the Lions have allowed 817 yards on the ground. The three remaining regular season games are against repeat foes; in fact, they are against all of the other teams in the NFC North.

The last time the Lions played the Vikings, Bears, and Packers, Detroit’s defense gave up a meager 69, 13, and 76 yards respectively. If we can expect a repeat performance then the Lions are set for 975 allowed rushing yards on the season – just five more than the NFL-best 2000 Ravens.

Of course, teams change throughout the season. Let’s look at some trends. The Lions do better at home than away: about 25% better than average when home and 25% worse than average when away. This isn’t too surprising. We can also look at how the Lions defense has done lately. In the last three games (Patriots, Bears, Bucs) the Lions have done better than their average, even when accounting for the fact that two of those games were in Detroit. On the other hand, all three of the latest teams rank in the bottom half of the NFL in rushing production this year, coming in 21st, 26th, and 31st, respectively, so perhaps a slight boost in recent statistics shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

On the other side, Minnesota has been doing worse than average rushing the ball lately (7% off their season average in their last three games), Chicago has been doing much worse (in part due to the Lions of course) (47% off their season average in their last three games), and the Packers have been up lately (35% over their season average in their last three games).

Could the Lions do it? Maybe. It looks like they will be about right on track. I would probably estimate a little bit more than 970 yards allowed on the ground.

And who knows, maybe Rodgers takes a knee on the last play of the Lions regular season (hopefully because the Lions are already up by 28) and that takes Detroit to 969 rushing yards allowed.

*Other teams have allowed fewer rushing yards in a season, but since the move to a standard 14 game season in 1961, no team has done better per game than the 2000 Ravens.

Can technology rescue the NFL?

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A variety of well-publicized incidents have kept the focus of NFL leaders on the correction of off-field problems this season, but player safety on the field remains an ongoing challenge for the league, particularly in the area of head injuries. Fans likely would agree that the success of the NFL’s approach to addressing head injuries has been mixed, both in terms of prioritization and implementation. Some have criticized rule modifications ostensibly designed to protect vulnerable players as fundamentally (and detrimentally) changing the game by neutering defenses. Others have been dismayed by the fact that the much-lauded NFL concussion settlement appears designed to excludemany players who have and will suffer from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease found in those with histories of repetitive brain trauma.

One positive development on player-safety front that seems likely to satisfy all interested parties is the NFL’s XPRIZE-like initiative known as the Head Health Challenge. The NFL, together with some of its corporate partners, committed “up to $20 million to fund innovative solutions that will help” to “advance the development of technologies that can detect early stage mild traumatic brain injuries and improve brain protection.”

Earlier this month, the league announced seven new Head Health Challenge winners, each of which received $500,000 (and the opportunity to receive an additional $1,000,000) toward the further development of their proposed safety technology. The winners included a government agency, universities, and private companies. The winners’ proposals include new helmet technology, of course, but they go beyond that to address improvements in on-field concussion diagnostics and changes to the playing surface itself. Each winner created a short video to explain its project, and the videos from Emory University in Atlanta and Viconic Sporting, Inc., a Dearborn, Michigan-based company that draws technological inspiration from the automotive industry, are illustrative of the latter two proposals:

Links to all of the winners’ videos are available here.

One of the implicit promises of projects like these is that they offer a means to improving player safety without altering the way the game is played, something that is likely to satisfy players and fans alike.

It is apparent from the deaths and life-changing injuries of players such as Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, and Mike Utley that the NFL has plenty of ground to make up in this area. While it is not clear whether or how soon the NFL or other football organizations will adopt any of these safety technologies, one message of the Head Health Challenge seems clear: if the league is willing to invest in the development of safety technology, it is likely to be met with a ready supply of implementable solutions.

The BCS is dead they say: Long live the BCS

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When the BCS died a year ago, I wrote an introduction to the College Football Playoff that, in essence, contended that we were going to miss the BCS:

With the College Football Playoff ©, we will have one thing we asked for and one thing we did not. A semifinal playoff round will precede, and determine the participants in, the national championship game. That is good, and it was a structural shortcoming of the BCS. For some reason, though, the College Football Playoff © scrapped the BCS’s rankings system in favor of a Byzantine (Soviet? Orwellian?) black box: the PolitburoSelection Committee.

…

Participating in the BCS is like paying your income taxes: there’s a lot of math and fine print involved, you probably can’t quite find all of the information you need to calculate the precisely correct result, and there’s that guy down the block who hollers that the thing’s unconstitutional, but you generally have a pretty good idea of your expected outcome.

On the other hand, the new playoff’s Selection Committee recalls the Supreme Court: members deliberate behind closed doors, apply any criteria of their choosing in reaching decisions, and announce those decisions under their own terms.

On Sunday, the Selection Committee spoke for the last time in its inaugural season to announce the four playoff participants: Alabama, Oregon, Florida State, and Ohio State. Two days later, everyone outside of Texas generally seems to agree that this is the right result.

The only reason the results were or remain controversial has to do with what the Selection Committee did prior to Sunday. Their flipping and flopping of TCU, with seemingly connected treatments of Baylor and Minnesota, was the genesis of the confusion, surprise, and, in Fort Worth and Waco, disappointment, that arrived with the final playoff announcement. On one hand, those confused, surprised, and disappointed feelings were unwarranted: the Committee reached the correct result. On the other hand, however, they were unnecessary and likely would not have arisen absent the lack of transparency that now characterizes the college football ranking process.

If the BCS could speak from the grave, what would it say about the CFP Selection Committee’s final result? The answer, Continue reading →

Jam Faces

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While he and his bands– he was a member of both Small Faces and Faces, and he played in numerous other groups, such as the Rolling Stones and his own solo band– deserve their own posts, Ian McLagan is honored and remembered in this week’s Friday Jam space. McLagan, an English keyboard player from the Booker T. Jones school, died this week. Here he is, in a YouTube greatest hit, with Faces, which, in case you didn’t recognize them, also included Rod Stewart and Ron Wood up front:

The Department of NFL Justice

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David Post writes:

The public clamor for the NFL to “do more” when confronted by evidence of serious wrongdoing in the cases of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy, and an unfortunately large number of other cases strikes me as very troubling, and reflective of this view, apparently pretty widespread, that we can’t count on the legal system to mete out appropriate punishment in a reasonable way. We have a criminal law, one would think, to define behavior that we cannot accept as a society, and to identify and punish those who violate those norms. Many people, though, seem to want the NFL, and/or the individual NFL teams, to take over that function. It’s a kind of privatization of a public function, and, extended more broadly, its costs might be much higher than we think. Do we really think it would be a such a good idea if Microsoft, say, or General Electric, or Wal-Mart, or Amazon, or other large private employers started instituting “codes of conduct” governing employee behavior outside of work time? And if they started firing people because they received a video showing them behaving unlawfully, even heinously? And let’s see, whose interests do we think the NFL’s process for determining punishment is going to serve – the public’s? Or the NFL’s?

His full post is available here.

Red Wings Prospectus

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More like Gustav Nyquist Prospectus. The generous folks at Hockey Prospectus have offered up the Red Wings chapter from their annual season preview free of charge. Despite laudatory language sure to please any Detroit fan, HP projects the Wings to be worse this season than they were last season, and one of the worst teams in the league overall. Chapter author Adam Gretz‘s thesis is that the Datsyuk-Zetterberg era is coming to a close (just as I’d learned how to spell their names!), and, with next-gen’er Nyquist’s meteoric scoring rate due for a regression, the depth and readiness of Detroit’s prospects will be tested.

As for the individual players, HP projects notable improvement over last season’s performance for Justin Abdelkader, Datsyuk(!), and (EGR’s own) Luke Glendening. On the downside, they see regression for Johan Franzen, who already was facing criticism for a perceived lack of production at the end of last season.

To date, the Red Wings sit in fourth place in their division. They have the eleventh-most points overall, suggesting that, at least for the first quarter of the season, they’ve outplayed their expectations.

Hockeytown, Hockey home

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joelouisoustideOn Saturday, January 18, 2014, the Detroit Red Wings beat the visiting Los Angeles Kings 3-2 in a shootout. It was the best hockey game I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched innumerable Red Wings games over the years, including playoff wins over rivals and Stanley Cup wins. I’ve seen them in person before too, watching them lose to their rivals in Denver, Nashville, and Chicago. (I even saw an intra-squad scrimmage.) This was my favorite game.

It was my first trip to Joe Louis Arena, the historic home of hockey in Detroit for only a little while longer, and everything went perfectly. We stayed in Greektown, where we enjoyed an authentic Greek lunch prior to the game. When we were ready to head to the arena, we took the accurately named People Mover and were there before we knew it.

Once inside, we had time to enjoy the statues of great Red Wings past on a full lap around before finding our great seats, where we watched the team warm up and tried to read all of the banners hanging from the rafters. The experience was extremely satisfying and fulfilling, as was the Little Caesar’s pizza, which is better there than it is anywhere else in the world.

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Hockey games are subject to all kinds of random variation, so it was especially wonderful when the game itself matched and then elevated the tenor of the evening. After a scoreless first period, the Red Wings could not kill off successive minor penalties, and the Kings’ power-play goal gave them a 1-0 lead. Less than a minute later, however, Detroit’s Henrik Zetterberg tied the game with an even-strength goal. That sequence essentially repeated itself in the third period, when the Kings scored a power-play goal with just 2:15 to go in the game. Detroit’s Niklas Kronwall tied the score at two with just twenty-seven seconds to go in the game, sending it to overtime.    Continue reading →