voluntaryXchange

A Backstory for Opening Week

There’s a single headline today "Pitcher's Widow Outraged As Killer Draws a Walk".

Not a very interesting story: career criminal does 17 years for murder and gets out 10 years early for good behavior.

But the backstory is interesting.

The pitcher was murdered outside of spring training. He would’ve made the team.

Another utility player found his killer because he’d networked with a loser while bombing out of spring training years before, then they went nosing around bad neighborhoods listening for gossip, and they got the tip they needed from a thug.

Read the whole thing from the April 17, 1995 issue of People.

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Pork Barrel

Why do we have a National Croquet Center??? Why is it in West Palm Beach?

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Linsanity and the Coach

What a riot: Jeremy Lin’s high school coach bought the rights to the URL linsanity.com a couple of years ago, because he thought it a good investment for when Lin made it big in the NBA.

FTNItK: Jeremy Lin is a point guard, who got no scholarship out of high school, went to Harvard (and majored in economics) where he was the best player they’d ever had, but still went undrafted, and has been a benchwarmer for most of his first 2 seasons in the NBA. He started getting a lot more playing time this month, and has burned up the courts. He is the first Chinese-American player in the NBA, and some think prejudice has worked against him.

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Super Bowl Reincarnation

It took me a few days to realize the similarities between Super Bowl XLVI and Super Bowl XXV.

• Team A goes up by a bit in the first half, including a safety.
• Team B end the half with a 85+ yard touchdown drive.
• Team B starts the second half with a 75+ yard touchdown drive, completing a 14 point swing where Team B runs over 20 plays for more than 160 yards without Team A having a meaningful possession.
• Team A makes it closer*, but is behind at the 2 minute warning.
• Team A can go ahead with a field goal, and win the game if it can run out the clock.

The difference? This time Team A scored the touchdown but left time on the board and had to defend against a drive with a low probability of success. Twenty-one years ago Team A ran the clock down (like the Giants wanted to do this time), but missed the field goal to win the game.†

Here’s the irony: the Giants won the first game as Team B and the second as Team A.

Curious for details: The New York Times article entitled “Giants Beat Patriots In Final Rally” has an interactive graphic of the drive charts from Super Bowl XLVI, and here are the drive charts for Super Bowl XXV.

* This time the Giants put up two field goals but didn’t retake the lead until the end. In Super Bowl XXV the Bills put up a touchdown to retake the lead, but the Giants answered with a field goal.

† Mercy smiled on Bills fans this time around. I never heard mention once that the Giants professed strategy of running out the clock and kicking the field goal to win had been tried and found wanting in another super bowl game.

Technorati Tags: super,bowl,xxv,xlvi,25,46,giants,bill,patriots

Aargh! Not Again

The Super Bowl has passed … but I was looking in Saturday’s issue of The Wall Street Journal, and there it was again:

This is a f***ing book review.

And yet … there it is … the mid-winter heartache of Buffalo Bills fans everywhere … the annual reminder of Scott Norwood missing the field goal to win Super Bowl XXV.

Better yet … the book being reviewed isn’t about football, and doesn’t mention Buffalo at all outside of the caption.

Instead, the book is about how important it is to people to lay blame, even when it is inappropriate.

And, in defense of the article, the caption to the photo points out (correctly) that Norwood probably shouldn’t be blamed too much by Bills fans:

In Super Bowl XXV, the Buffalo Bills—who had scored 95 points in their first two playoff games—were held to 19 by the New York Giants. Still, kicker Scott Norwood took the blame for the one-point loss when he missed a 47-yard field goal in the closing seconds.

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Oh Gosh … It’s Wide Right Time Again

It’s Super Bowl week, and time to rehash Scott Norwood’s miss of the game winning field goal in Super Bowl XXV.

As a recovering Buffalo Bills fan, it’s tough to see this replayed .. yet again .. 21 years later.

But, there is an interesting take on this in a piece entitled “The Plays That Decided the Playoffs”. In it, The Wall Street Journal rehashes the 10 plays that caused the biggest swings in the outcome of playoff games.

The methodology is a bit biased towards plays at the end of the game. It uses data from Prediction Machine to determine the probability of a team winning at every point of the game. By its nature, this statistic is going to be near 50% for most of the game, before diverging towards 0% or 100% closer to the end. So, any plays that cause big swings have got to take teams that were close to losing near the end, and turn them into near certain winners.

For example, most football fans consider the hook-and-ladder play used by Miami against San Diego in 1982 to be one of the biggest game-changers in NFL history, but using this methodology it isn’t that important because it came on the last play of the first half. That game was 24-10 at the time, so you’ve got to figure that moving to 24-17 changed the Dolphins win probability from something like 10% to 30%. The top plays in this methodology are always at the end of the game, and change the win probability by up to 90%.

The thing is, the Bills are on the losing end of # 1 and # 5 on the list: they are the only team to appear twice on the list as losers. At the top of the list is the “Music City Miracle”: the lateral and touchdown on a kickoff return by Tennessee after Buffalo had “won” the game on its penultimate play.

But, there is also # 5: Scott Norwood’s miss of the field goal what would have won Super Bowl XXV. What was new and interesting to me was that the article gives the chance of the Bills winning the game on that play as 57%. It wasn’t a sure thing, but that’s 3:4 odds. In a horserace, you’d bet on that favorite.

I wonder if the Prediction Machine includes all the nuances that the Bills made sure were going their way before that kick. They kicked with time on the clock, so a penalty would not end the game. They kicked on 3rd down, so a bad snap could be retaken. They kicked a 47 yarder, longer than anyone would like, but inside the 53-4 yard range of their kicker (who’d been All-Pro the year before). And … Norwood has been hooking a bit to the left all day, so the Bills ran on 2nd down to position the ball on the right hash mark to give Norwood the best chance. And he kicked it 2 feet to the right of the post, in a line drive with no curvature at all.

It’s a pity, because collective memory of that game is not that great any more. Everyone remembers that the Bills lost 4 Super Bowls in a row. Few people remember that they were ahead of the Giants for most of the game, and dominating them for part of the first half. Then the Giants staged not one, but two comebacks. And yet at the end, the Bills moved 50 yards in 2 minutes, with one time-out, against the best defense in a window several years wide, converting a couple of third-down situations along the way.

Yep … still hurts …

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Egalitarianism as a Contrapositive Peltzman Effect

Bryan Caplan at EconLog has written a post that covers some ground I’ve covered in class (the original idea in my classes goes back to a student I had at the University of Alabama in Summer 1990).

But … I didn’t write it up, and I wish I had.

In short, if we morally pillory the rich, that lack of respect will make the investments required to get rich more undesirable, reducing the ranks of the potentially rich, and likely further increasing the per capita well-being of those that persevere in getting rich.

That’s right: not liking the rich will make inequality worse.

It gets worse: the people who are likely to persevere are those that are more thick-skinned and insensitive to the cares of others.

In sum, I think this is the income inequality version of the “acting white” problem that some smart minority students face.

Economically, I think this is a form of contrapositive Peltzman Effect. That’s usually thought of as the perverse outcome where making something desirable easier frees up extra resources and/or willingness to engage in something undesirable. It’s contrapositive is then that if we tie up resources and/or willingness to engage in something undesirable (i.e., getting rich) we’re going to make something (presumably) desirable (i.e., a more equal distribution of income) harder to achieve.

I actually think we’ve seen this in North American hockey. Two generations ago, most of the team was enforcers: the number of graceful Yvan Cournoyer’s was pretty small. But, hockey as a sport reduced the romance of enforcement to the individual player, and now it is concentrated in a handful of brutes whose pay easily outstrips their limited potential to actually promote scoring opportunities.

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Wow!

An expletive … a fake punch … an angry swat ... a smack with a microphone … an overhand slam with a cane … a right hook to the jaw and a knock down …

This is what happens when you get 73-year-old players from the Canadian Football League together.

This video is apparently copyrighted: illegal copies are all over the internet, but a legal one to link to doesn’t seem to be available. If you can’t see this, just go search Google News for “Joe Kapp”.

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Bioluminescent Surfing Video

Very cool:

Via bookofjoe.

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R.I.P. Kent Hull

Kent Hull, the All-Pro center for the great Buffalo Bills teams of a generation ago has died, of an apparent heart attack.

Hull was regarded as the best center in the league from 1989-1991. I think that underrated him.

Hull started for all of his 11 year career, including the 1988-1993 when the Bills won 80 games (1 shy of San Francisco), including the most playoff wins of any team in that period (10), and the most playoff games in that period (16), although admittedly they lost 4 Super Bowls in a row.

As a fan of those Bills, I think the best evidence of how outstanding the offensive line was, is that the second-string halfback (Kenneth Davis) averaged no less than 4.4 yards per carry for 4 seasons in a row.

Also, as a fan, I knew the Bills were really in trouble in Super Bowl XXVII, not when Jim Kelly was injured because Frank Reich was a good backup, and not when Thurman Thomas was injured because Kenneth Davis was a good backup, but when Kent Hull was knocked out the game. He couldn’t be replaced. That’s when the rout started.

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