Posts Tagged football
Analytics explain why the NFL stiffs running backs
My Minnesota Vikings are on a roll this year due to unexpectedly stellar play from their quarterback Sam Darnold. After being drafted very highly, Darnold turned out to be a dud. But suddenly he blossomed—no doubt helped greatly by our superstar wide receiver Justin Jefferson. This Sunday the Vikings play in London against the New York Jets and their future hall-of-fame QB Aaron Rodgers.
There’s no doubt that quarterbacks are the most important factors for success in the NFL, so it’s no surprise that there’s a positive correlation of 0.7 between annual passing yards and annual revenue according to Harvard economist Roland Fryer.* But it’s quite shocking that he finds a negative correlation of 0.01 for the value of running backs. I agree with Fryer that its delightful to “see analytics put to good use but sad to see football’s best position taking a back seat.”
Go Darnold, go Vikes!
P.S. As reported earlier this year by SI, The NFL Treats Elite Wide Receivers Very Differently From Top Running Backs. As a case in point, they highlight the huge contract just signed by Jefferson. “Show me the money”—the demand given by the wide receiver to his agent Jerry McGuire played by Tom Cruise—isn’t working for running backs, though they do make a lot more money than kickers or punters as seen in this ESPN ranking of pay by position.
*Comments on “The Economics of Running Backs,” Wall Street Journal, September 4.
Boo Yahoo for breaking bad on my MAD
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on November 20, 2013
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action!”
— Ian Fleming
, Goldfinger
A simple, yet effective, measure of forecasting prowess is the mean absolute deviation (MAD). Yahoo’s computer projections for fantasy football do poorly on this measure. For example, one of my teams is thus far, through the first 11 weeks of this season, at 16 points MAD from an average projection of 70 per game. That’s an error exceeding 20%! But to make matters far worse, their forecast on this team is terribly biased. Given my indignation you can guess which way Yahoo has been erring (yes, I am a loser)—consistently over-estimating how points my players actually accumulate. Enough data has come in to make this statistically significant as indicated by the confidence interval on the margin of error (MOE) being below zero. Between my fantasy team and the Vikings it’s hard to say which is doing worse at underachieving. Thank goodness for the Minnesota Gopher gridioners exceeding all expectations. That is a ray of sunshine in a gloomy Fall for a football fanatic like me.
Close encounters with improbable events (‘Goofers’) and implausible beliefs (Martians)
On my flight home yesterday from vacation in Arizona and New Mexico, a lady from Santa Fe asked about my screen saver showing photographic evidence from NASA that water flows freely on the surface of Mars. She told me that this is just a cover up by the US Government of Martians living under the surface of their planet. “The truth will come out soon,” this New Mexican said, “They cannot suppress the bloggers who know that aliens really do exist.”
Photo by H. P. Anderson
I suspect this woman scoffed at NASA’s high resolution photos taken in July of the Face on Mars showing it to be only a geological mesa — not an artificial monument by extraterrestials. The diehard believers in Martians, represented by a caller to the Art Bell “Coast to Coast” radio show, say that NASA dropped a nuclear bomb this structure to de-face it!
My trip last week featured a few other improbabilities. Its purpose was to see the Minnesota Gopher football team play in the Insight Bowl at Arizona State University’s stadium in the Phoenix area. Us Minnesotans cheered wildly as our team went up by 31 points past the halfway point of the game. Sadly, the ‘Goofers’ blew their seemingly insurmountable lead and let the Red Raiders of Texas Tech win in overtime. This reportedly was the biggest comeback in a Division 1A bowl. Cursory research on the history of bowl games shows them going back over a century with accelerating frequency in recent years — perhaps a few thousand games in all. I suppose I should feel lucky to see this unlikely event, but what really pleases me is that the coach got fired immediately afterwards.
The other unusual event experienced by me and my traveling companions was a record 16 inch snowfall in Albuquerque where I’d booked our flights to save on airfare. Fortunately the weather cleared just in time for takeoff. En route to the airport we stopped at Meteor Crater where NASA astronauts train for extraterrestial missions. Some people, like my fellow traveler from Santa Fe, believe that this was where the NASA perpetrated the hoax of man traveling to the moon. After seeing the Minnesota team implode at the Insight Bowl and then on my trip home almost getting stuck in over a foot of snow in supposedly sunny New Mexico, I am ready to believe that just about anything can happen. Come on NASA — quit covering up: Bring on those eight-fingered aliens! By the way, how are they at handling oblate spheroids?