In Defense of Cautious Football Coaches.

FiveThirtyEight is on a crusade. Well, I guess they're just one of many people on this particular crusade, but since I'm not a football fan they're most of where I encounter it. Specifically it's the crusade to get football coaches to be less conservative in their decision-making about things like punting or going for it on 4th down. Or about two-point conversations. They've got another piece today, arguing that a couple of NFL coaches who made ill-fated decisions in this weekend's playoff games had committed "crimes against middle-school math." This is basically because, in certain situations, you can show using simple math that going for two-point conversations after touchdowns is the correct call by win expectancy, even when failing to convert would mean falling one point short. Roughly speaking that's because you often lose in overtime; to a first approximation it's a 50/50 shot, and if you're on the road it's a lot worse than that. So if you're a road team with something approaching a 50% chance of making your two-point conversion when it would win you the game outright, it's better to go for it.

But I feel like this is missing something: maybe the goal isn't always to maximize win expectancy. This is perhaps the most radical idea in all of sports. Maybe it's even more radical than the whole "maybe we shouldn't really be playing football at all, guys" thing. It's close, anyway. Well, there's a category of things called "sportsmanship," I guess, where it's routine not to maximize win expectancy. But I'm talking more broadly than that. Maybe we care about things other than just the end-of-the-day result. My hypothesized other value in this context is that losing now and losing later are different things. The 538 calculations implicitly treat them as the same, and indeed, one week later they have awfully similar consequences. But it's possible, isn't it, that they're not really the same. And if losing later is better than losing now, then you get something out of the cautious, "wrong" decisions the 538 people inveigh against in exchange for those points of Win Expectancy. You get to keep playing. You get hope, at least a few more minutes of it. Maybe, sometimes, that's worth it.

Now, I don't know anything about football, really, but I do know baseball, and I know that I always breathe an immense sigh of relief whenever the Mets tie up a game. The difference between one run down and a tie is, to me, the most emotionally significant one there is late in games, because it means you're not losing. It means something has to go wrong in order for the game to end with a bad result. Of course, something might go wrong, and if you're not leading then you need something to go right before something goes wrong. (Against the Royals in the World Series, for instance, that felt juts about impossible.) But, phew, not losing is a wonderful feeling. It's the feeling of, okay, we were down 8-1, maybe, but we've just put up a six-run inning--but that seventh run, that's what makes it mean something. That's a multitude of sins washed away; that's a fresh start to the ballgame. The go-ahead run can seem almost unimportant in comparison, even though it's not, really.

Now, baseball isn't football. There's rarely a situation that calls for a genuine strategic choice here, although for what it's worth, in the late innings, if I'm down a run and have a chance to sacrifice-bunt a runner over to third base with one out, I'm gonna do that more often than not, even though it's at best a neutral move from a win probability standpoint, because I'd rather attain that wonderful status of not losing now and worry about the actual winning part later than go for broke now and fail. But maybe similar concerns aren't really felt by football fans. And maybe the immense awesomeness of winning now by going for that two-point conversion with seconds left in the fourth quarter would outweigh them, if ever anyone would try to do it. But the point, really, is just that it's a little too simple to do the win probability analysis and call it a day. There might be things besides just who wins and who loses at the end of the day that matters.

The Mets lost the World Series. They lost it despite having led in the late innings of four of five games; they could almost as easily have won the series in five games. And in Game 5, Matt Harvey was pitching the game of his life. For eight innings. Eight glorious, shut-out, five-hit innings. With nine strikeouts. But then came the ninth inning. The team was up 2-0, Harvey had thrown 102 pitches, and the Mets had Jeurys Familia, ace closer, waiting in the bullpen. Terry Collins brought Harvey back out to start the ninth. He walked Lorenzo Cain, I believe after a few close calls that he maybe should've had. Then Cain stole second and Eric Hosmer doubled. Familia came in and got three ground-ball outs, and indeed, had Lucas Duda made a routine throw home on the second of them, the game would've ended. But he missed, and Hosmer scored, and the Royals went on to beat up Addison Reed and Bartolo Colon in the 12th to claim the Series.

It's easy to criticize Terry Collins there for making the wrong move. And maybe, in a pure win-maximization sense, he did. But Mike Francesa did a segment about it the next day, plus or minus a weekend or two, and said, look. Collins chose to trust his player. He put his faith in Matt Harvey, who had pitched lights-out with all his heart that day. And it backfired. But isn't that what sports is all about? We're here to see great players do incredible things, are we not? Matt Harvey completing that game would have been legendary. (To my mind, the first eight innings still deserve to be legendary; they sure were amazing to watch.) Isn't it a better world where managers will put their faith in their greatest players and give them the chance to do incredible things, even when that doesn't make the most sense, then where they meticulously hew to what some probability chart tells them about optimal strategy?

I found that segment incredibly moving, and it helped me find a real sense of peace about the fact that the Mets lost the Series. Now, I still don't think I agree with Collins' managing: I would absolutely have brought Harvey back out for the ninth, but the leash would have been precisely one baserunner. After that first walk I would absolutely have brought Familia in, no questions asked. That, to me, would have struck the right balance between putting your faith in your player and still also doing what's necessary to win. But Francesa helped me remember that it isn't, it shouldn't be, all about winning. That way lies becoming the Yankees. Sports, ultimately, is entertainment, and we should play the game in a way that's fun, even if that sometimes means losing when we could have won. There are worse fates.

I don't know if this is what's going on in these football contexts, but I wish the public discourse on the issue would at least consider the possibility.

It Isn't, or Shouldn't Be, the NFL's Job to Punish Crimes

So apparently the official talking point in the Boston sports world about the four-game suspension of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for what seems to have been his role in actually seriously cheating, at least in the AFC championship game last year right before the Patriots' Super Bowl win (and possibly, like, for many years prior) is that it's an outrage that Brady was suspended for twice as long as Ray Rice was for his domestic abuse. And like, so, the thing is, my instinct about Brady is that the suspension is an outrage, in that it should've been for a whole season. And so the Ray Rice comparison line annoys me, because I basically agree that the Ray Rice thing was handled disgracefully and that he got off awfully light. Certainly the point that, y'know, abusing footballs shouldn't be seen as worse than abusing women or whatever is an accurate one. But like, I dunno... I kind of feel like it isn't, or shouldn't be, the NFL's job to punish crimes? Like, domestic abuse is an offense against the victim and an offense against the state; it's not an offense against the National Football League, and cheating at football in the semifinal game of the NFL playoffs is. We wouldn't want the U.S. government, or the government of Massachusetts, to punish Brady for his cheating at football, I don't think, because it's not that kind of offense.

In my Criminal Law class we discussed at one point the idea of "shaming penalties," where instead of directly, like, punishing the (typically low-level) offender, e.g. by imprisoning or even fining them, but rather just basically publicizes their offense. There's a sense that these punishments manage to be less cruel than, say, incarceration, while still being unpleasant enough to be a deterrent (indeed, perhaps more of one) and maybe even, if done right, having some rehabilitative effects. One line of criticism is that they're humiliating, to which the defenders rather powerfully respond, have you seen our prisons? But another line of attack is that there's something a bit disturbing about where exactly the punishment comes from in these shaming punishments. It comes from everyone in the community. In the most troubling cases, the government seems pretty explicitly to be trying to foster a mob mentality that will enlist the public to carry out the sentence, basically, by basically making the offender persona non grata in that community. And this is kind of troubling. It's almost, like, an embrace of the lynch mob by the government, or at least it can approximate that. Obviously imprisonment often leads to that same kind of informal social sanction afterward, but I kind of think that it shouldn't, or at least not insofar as those sanctions are meant as sanctions rather than as sensible precautions against a potentially dangerous or untrustworthy person. I tend to think that we should let the state punish people, and then once it's had its say, we should welcome people back into society as full citizens, though without turning a blind eye to any dangers they may represent.

Which brings us back to Brady and Ray Rice. Like, it really, really shouldn't be the NFL's job to punish Ray Rice. And people who do bad things, including beat their girlfriends which is a very bad thing, shouldn't just stop being able to be part of society. The idea that sports leagues should have the policy that people who've committed crimes of a certain level should never be allowed to participate in them strikes me as a terrible one. The problem is that this all takes place in the shadow of the well-known fact that the state isn't doing it's effing job with regard to domestic violence, so basically if the NFL doesn't punish Ray Rice, no one will. And in certain ways the NFL is even in a better position to punish him than the state is, because it doesn't need to hear the victim testify, it doesn't need to get proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it can just say, hey, we saw the video, we know what we think went down, we're gonna suspend his ass. But that's a huge problem! For those of us who believe in the ideals of the criminal justice system, and of innocent until proven guilty and the like, the idea that when someone is known to have done a bad thing, this should be handled by having anyone in society who has power over them and who isn't bound by the Bill of Rights should just punish them any way they can, it's, like, it's really problematic, and it really does kind of feel like mob justice.

Now, that doesn't really point to a solution, since it's not like the general unenforcement of domestic violence laws is gonna change any time soon, and I'm not really saying that I think the NFL shouldn't be allowed to discipline its players for their off-field misdeeds. But it's wrong, I think, to reason from the fact that domestic violence is worse than cheating at football to the conclusion that the relative lengths of the Brady and Rice suspensions say something so terrible about the NFL's priorities. The NFL isn't in the business of outlawing domestic violence. It is in the business of making sure dudes don't cheat at football.* One of these things is much, much more its responsibility than the other, and that's not something wrong with the world. That's something right with the world! The NFL shouldn't just decide that, because domestic violence is so bad, it's going to assume as much responsibility for punishing and deterring it as it does for cheating at football, no more than any one of us has the right to go out and become a vigilante.

So, I'm sorry Boston, but pointing at Ray Rice doesn't give you a great argument for why Tom Brady is being treated unfairly.



*Well, arguably it is. Or at least it should be.

Baseball Is The Best Sport: Statistically Proved

(Disclaimer: only four sports are included, so at most I'm claiming that baseball is the best of the four. A game like golf, where you're not really counting up from zero and trying to get as high as possible, is really impossible to analyze using the technique of this post.)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that a basketball team was losing by about sixty points. Well, okay, he appears to have misplaced the tens column by one; he said they were losing by 66 points, but it was actually 56 points. It was the Philadelphia 76ers, losing very badly to the Los Angeles Clippers, on February 9th. They ended up losing 123-78, a margin of a meager 45 points. He was shocked, though, that a professional basketball team could be losing by that kind of margin. (Note that this particular friend is really into sports, all sports actually, and is very knowledgeable about every sport, so his shock and disbelief is pretty meaningful.)

Responding to those comments, I began a statistical analysis of the relationship between average score and variance of score in the four major American team sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. I completed that analysis a few minutes ago. (In between I was doing other things.) There are a number of interesting findings, but I shan't bury the lede: my initial intuition was very much correct that basketball scores vary a lot less in comparison to their average value than those of the other sports. Especially baseball. Baseball has the highest ratio of variance to average. Thus the title. You can see if you think I'm right.

Don't Ever Judge Me By Your Standards, Collectivist Football Edition

(Because the Doctor is relevant to absolutely everything.)

George Will apparently wrote a column in the past couple of days arguing that football, and college football in particular, is part of an effort by progressives to turn higher education into a cauldron of collectivism. There's a lot about it that's really silly, but since I'm not a football guy I'd just like to focus on this line in particular:

"Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity."

That segues into something about how much attention (and money!) gets paid to the coaches of college football teams. Whatever. "The progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity"? What? That's, um, not a progressive virtue. So, is Mr. Will just making stuff up here? Is he just delusional? No, I think there's a pretty specific effect at work here, and it's basically projection, or, as the Doctor would put it, judging us by his own side's standards.

Because, you see, when conservatives do collectivism--and yes, conservatives do collectivism!--it is about subordinating the individual to the collectivity. We can see this in a lot of areas, but I think the best example is war. The military, of course, is about subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Hell, "insubordination" is practically a criminal offense. And while there are certainly lots of military persons who are left-wing and lots of left-wingers who like to talk about how awesome the military is, I think it's fair to say that the American conservative movement is much more devoted to the militaristic worldview and way of thinking than American liberalism is. One can see a similar sort of subordinating collectivism in various other things, again, not things that are the exclusive province of conservatives but that are disproportionately conservative. Things like patriotism, and other hierarchical social structures, for example, and to various extents religion.

So, why does that matter? Because that military ethos, which is, again, very much about subordinating the individual to the collectivity, informs a conservative's view of what collectivism is, and must be. So when liberals extol the virtues of collective enterprise, and community, and so on and so forth, conservatives assume they mean something like the spirit of the military. But it's not that at all. It's really the other way around: liberals believe that the collectivity can be harnessed to do good things for the sake of its constituent individuals, in ways that those individuals acting individually could not. That's very different from the team-sport mentality where the welfare of individual team members only matters insofar as it contributes to the team's future success. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any issue where modern American liberalism favors such "subordination," although certainly liberalism is not just hedonism and often thinks that people need to be prevented from doing exactly what they want in every way at every time to advance some commonly-beneficial goal.

And note the difference in how Democrats and Republicans treat the military. Republicans love to attack Democrats for not supporting the troops, but then don't give those troops sufficient battle armor while they're abroad "fighting for our freedom," and don't provide much in the way of veterans' benefits. It's Democrats who want to do that stuff. Republicans like to talk about how "freedom isn't free," i.e., a whole bunch of individuals must sacrifice so that the nation (a collectivity!) can enjoy freedom. Democrats want to do everything they can to enhance the well-being of those individuals who have made those sacrifices, during their active duty and thereafter.

So the "progressive value" Will describes is anything but. He's describing the Republican approach to collectivism, and then assuming that when Democrats promote various collectivist ideas they have the same sort of thing in mind. And then attacking them for it. I'm not sure why; I'm sure he's written columns over the years about how much better everything would be if the world had a more militaristic ethos, or if those damn kids would just learn some respect for authority. Maybe he's just saying it because it sounds scary.

Another interpretation, of course, is that he really does just mean that Democrats want people, especially rich ones, to pay somewhat more in taxes than Republicans do, and that this constitutes a desire to "subordinate" the individual to the collectivity. In which case, we just have the same old philosophical overreaching on taxes. Ho hum.