this is the guy I was referencing

his exact day to day is a closely guarded state secret, but his title is "Director of Football Research". from the linked article you can tell a large part of his job is quant analysis and implications thereof...

doubt this will require much thought

This is overstated. The upside is not winning the game. The upside is (from the math calculations I have seen) a 3% or so better chance at winning the game. So for it to be worth that extra 3%, then you would have to say that the distractions are a total non-factor to the team going forward.

And as I stated in my post, he is the master at this so he may be able to make it a non factor. But just remember when he let Lawyer Milloy go right before the first game of the season with Buffalo. He eventually made that controversial move a non factor but the team was clearly distracted that first game after the firestorm. In that situation it was definitely worth sacrificing one game because of the long term implications, but in the present case, there are no long term benefits of his call. Only a short term gain of a 3% better chance of winning the game they were playing.

Here's the decision with all variables:

MAKE > 1 - LONG/SHORT

MAKE = Prob of making the 4th down conversion
LONG = Prob of other team driving for TD after a punt
SHORT = Prob of other team driving for TD after failed 4th down conversion

So if left side is greater than right side, go for the first down.

http://waynewinston.com/wordpress/

:slowclap:


edit: this is an expected value calc

lol

And the expected value needs to consider averages that are the result of the choices of offensive play and defensive response, which you can obviously apply game theory to. All in all it's a silly thing to nitpick about that seems like it was chosen to give some sort of purchase for arguing with Phone Booth.

The Peter Kings of the world are numerous and we're lucky to have them at our poker tables. "I don't care about your mathematical theories or long-term statistics. I've been hitting my draws all night. I call!".

that freddie clown needs to meet a grease fire. i will admit he is good at stringing together big words in a coherent fashion that is utterly ******ed.

There has been some research into this imo

my grandfather drives me nuts with the result oriented thinking
i was bitching about some of girdardis post season pitching changes and he defends them if they yankees won the game with "they won so it was the right move"

i then asked him if a manager pinch hits for pujols in the ninth inning with the pitcher and the pitcher hits a home run was it the right move- he says yes i smash my head into the wall

This could be something that runs in your family. Your grandfather was probably in a similar situation as a young man and his grandfather said something he disagreed with and he smashed his head against the wall. You need to stop doing that so you can break the cycle.

bull****
when i have a grandson he better be smashing his head into a wall too

No no! If you stop smashing your head into the wall, you will stay coherent and then your grandson won't have to get frustrated and feel the need to smash his head. Break the cycle.

hell smash his head from hearing tim mcarvers head floating in a jar analyzing baseball

The whole "it didn't work so it was the wrong decision" has got to be the most frustrating angle anyone is taking in regards to this.

Oh noes, a kicker missed a 50 yard FG as time expired while down 2, should have thrown a hail mary instead. Just a ridiculous argument.

Quote:
peter king says:
Why use the historical average net punt of 38 yards when Hanson's average net for the night, for four punts, was 44 yards?


Well, I think he may have accidently hit on something here, I would imagine his net punting average is higher in domes when wind/weather is not a factor (return man gets a faster track to counterbalance but so do the gunners/punting team).

I'd like to see a list compiled for which media types have come out for and against BB's decision.

The specific case here is Bill Belichick, who's a highly regarded coach and Robert Kraft, who hired him and let him do "unconventional" things seemingly without any negative feedback.


This is possible. But what I'm saying isn't that it's wrong to reject authority - it's just that to be intellectually honest, you need fairly strong evidence to have any sort of certainty that a given decision made by someone with more information was wrong.


I'm not sure what you mean here. Nobel prize winners are also people like you and me. There are tons of incompetent executives and tons of misguided Nobel laureates. It's just that we're predisposed to think that others are incompetent when we don't understand what they do and you need rather strong evidence for one to be meaningfully bothered by someone else's perceived incompetence for reasons other than the need to feed the ego.


Correct. More specifically, most of twoplustwo posters. Mathematically, I was thinking something like posting-volume weighted 75th percentile.


"Game theory" was Thremp's phrase in his attempt to generalize the situation - its relevance depends on the degree of specificity you want for this conversation. In any case, we don't know for sure, but the general mathematical ability on this forum is low. Last thread I participated in SE, I was describing obvious notions (in baseball, mariginal run value of a batting event (or its linear weight) > the event's average run value due to hyperlinearity of the run created function) and how to use them correctly (it's incorrect to use the average run value of batting events when you're evaluating players) that people had trouble understanding here - and as far as I can tell, I'm talking to many of the same people in this thread. Business people who can't see things like this instinctively and correctly estimate #'s in his head don't get too far. And Robert Kraft isn't just a successful businessman - he went to a random public school, rode an academic scholarship to get gradute from Columbia (History and Economics) and eventually Harvard (MBA). He's succeeded in multiple ventures to become a self-made billionaire. We have strong evidence that he excelled academically - certainly quite a bit more so than most twoplustwo posters - and had to be good at most aspects of business decision making.

Furthermore, it's likely that Robert Kraft is far more emotionally stable - there are likely far fewer gaps and holes that cause him to refuse to think about certain possibilities because they are uncomfortable. This matters a ton, when it comes to applying math correctly to high pressure situations. This is the sort of thing that TomCollins was talking about - there's no reason why his lawyer friend shouldn't be able to understand the reasoning here. My experience is that twoplustwo posters as a group aren't very good in this department - they have such a strong need to validate their ego that much of their belief system works strongly to reject certain thoughts. They may not be any worse than average people - I have no idea - but top business people are a high target - the business world very strongly rewards people with few ego-driven emotional glitches that affect thought processes.

This is true but I don't think it matters a whole lot. Most posters here, as far as I can tell are below the level of "smart high school kids" and there's a ton of room between that and mathematicians.


This is highly relevant, given that we're talking about his propensity to make good hiring/firing decisions. We're talking about using math to evaluate performance here. If he's been hiring and firing people based on bad math - there are tons of opportunities to do so in business - he wouldn't be where he is.


We're not talking about skills per se, but instinctive ability to apply and ability to learn what's necessary. Furthermore, a typical forum poster here is not a typical 12th grade math teacher either.


Then stop interjecting. I'm not sure why you keep feeling the need to say, I'm not interested in this argument, I wasn't talking about this. I wasn't talking to you at any point until you interjected except to comment on the idiocy of thinking that Sklansky's quote was anything other than a gross logical fallacy of the exact sort he denounces and a revelation of his cognitive blocks.


The same authority by which you make all sorts of claims, apparently.


So front offices keep innovating by accepting outside knowledge and this is why random internet posters know more than front offices? If you're saying that front offices of the past were worse than random internet posters of the past, this isn't really true either - teams started hiring those guys pretty much immediately after they started producing good, accessible works. Insiders have been reading Bill James for years. Note also that it's a competitive business and successful executives don't always talk about what they do and why they make decisions.


Strawman.


Your strawman argument aside, Branch Rickey wrote this in 1954:

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/...o_old_idea.htm

Onbase percentage as a statistic, I believe, was invented by Branch Rickey.

It's also quite likely that many front office people before him and after him had similar ideas and were open to even others. The problem has always been that of culture - you need guys who understand baseball well at every level and a lot of these guys weren't numbers people. It's fairly clear that if you had to have either traditional baseball people or stats people, but not both, you'd go with the former. Culture clash causes emotional friction, political issues, etc, which often leads to subpar decision making, especially in knowledge-oriented ventures. Furthermore, owners had no real basis with which to evaluate baseball executives other than on-field results, personnel management, organizational structure that seems to reward people who understand the game, etc.

What changed isn't the introduction of new knowledge, but rather a way for outsiders to understand things that were exclusively within the domain of insiders, allowing for a greater level of accountability throughout the organization and to the owner. Generally successful business people are the type of people who would be open to ideas like this and predictably, they moved quickly. Note that traditional baseball people were still an important part of the organization and simple sabermetrics appeared to work better than it would in a neutral setting because it wasn't widely used. In a market setting, if two people had equal knowledge, the one with more variant knowledge (further away from the market norm) does better. For the same reason, statistical projection sometimes works well because teams aren't using the same statistical projection to promote players. In this sense, I'd argue that front offices as a group moved about as fast as they could given the constraints and at no point were they far behind in terms of utilizing proven knowledge. While cultural inertia does hold innovation back, market incentives are aligned the other way - knowledge that other teams don't have is more crucial to success than having knowledge that all teams have.


Baseball has employed numbers people for a long time - Branch Rickey had been doing since 1930's.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/column...lan&id=1835745

There's no new paradigm, but gradual increase in the ability of people without intuitive, specific knowledge, but with strong comprehension mathematics and data analysis to judge performance of others with such knowledge. This can be a GM evaluating splayer, scouts or managers; a manager evaluating players matchups, roles, an owner evaluating GMs. Most of this simply has to do with advances in data gathering, gradual increase in the availability of and capabilities of personal computers, wider acceptance of statistical and computational techniques throughout the business world. Very little has to do with outsiders being right and insiders being wrong.


This isn't strictly true. Game theory is general enough to cover all decision making, since mathematically speaking, all computation can be reduced to solving a game. What you meant to say is probably that game theory isn't an appropriate framework for everything and I agree.


I don't know if that's the case, but either way, I only mentioned it because it was brought up by Thremp as though game theory is something that is well-understood by twoplustwo posters, but not by good business people. Knowing the phrase "game theory" has very little to do with the ability to apply it or understand its principles behind it. Most twoplustwo posters, even fairly good poker players appear to have at best a rudimentary understanding of game theory as applied to poker (as far as I can tell, this includes David Sklansky) and I can't imagine how it would be better when applied to other areas.


This is somewhat overstated. This is like saying physics, as a set of theories, is mildly interesting, because it's mostly a search for a fairly uninteresting computational/cognitive model, the universal case of which is fairly well-understood, that happens to best fit the data. Either way, no one needs to understand game theory from a mathematical sense to use its principles in a specific situation like - you just need enough common sense to consider the range of your opponent's responses, the range of your responses and so on while understanding how to properly reduce that to arrive at an ideal response. Chess players (and other game players) were doing this long before there was a formalized notion of game theory.


He's a lot more than a stat guy though. Sounds like the guy is obssessed about and knows a lot about football, who also happens to be really smart and well-informed about statistical analysis. A football genius, a brainy mastermind of sorts.

Calling him a stat guy is just wrong. Most of his value, it appears, has very little to do with statistical analysis.


I don't think it's a coincidence that Kraft has all these high quality people working for him.

I think an analogy that sums up the position of most of the people who acknowledge the math and are backing off calling it a terrible decision, but still aren't willing to say it was the right call is playing with a rigged deck.

Yes, historical statistics show that pockets Jacks have an edge over AK, but what if their are six aces in the deck we are playing with (obviously could be the other way and there are only two aces in the deck)? Given all the variables of this spot what proof do we have that we are playing with a standard deck? I mean this Casino seems pretty sketchy and the dealer has tattoos on his neck, are we sure our odds are the same here? And what is the sample size of spots that are sufficiently similar to use in this situation. The response is that factoring in Brady and Manning only makes it more of a no-brainer, but how do we know that the other factors in this game do not outweigh the Brady and Manning factor?

The key question that swings this from being a slightly bad call to probably being a good call is whether Tom Brady converts in this spot more than 50% of the time. My intuition would tell me that he does, but I haven't seen any stats that support this and the 45% league average conversion rate for two point conversions seems much more analagous than the 4th and 2 60% number cited by Advanced NFL stats since their are many varieties of 4th and 2 which are not analagous at all, for example many spots that still have the defense giving a small cushion or even playing prevent.

I've been looking for Tom Brady's two point conversion stats, but other than sifting through game logs, I haven't found a source for this. While still being a woefully inadequate sample size and different in many respects, I would think this would really be the most relevant historical stat you could use in this situation. Limiting it to above average defenses would be even better, but the sample size would be tiny.

Christ. I really wanna copy paste that into my Word doc and word count it.

However, I'm a bit afraid that it'll stall my machine counting that crap.

Phone Booth,

Do you have an academic background?

knowing only what that article says, I would say calling Ernie Adams a "stat guy" is kind of like calling Theo Epstein a "stat guy"

they both seem smart and knowledgeable enough about their subject matter to marry all types of data, quant and qual

This is an interesting observation. Just out of curiosity - do any of you here have trouble engaging in this sort of talk when out at a sports bar with friends? Generally speaking, I find that those who have trouble adapting to social norms without strong resentment, when they are able to find others that are like-minded, become rigidly conformist and have trouble with others not conforming to this new found set of norms. What's interesting is that a lot of literal-minded people tend to judge others by the simplistic front they put up - a lot of people are way more sophisticated than they reveal. Extremely successful business people for instance have this mastered and combine an incredibly analytic, sophisticated understanding inside with a warm exterior that doesn't reveal much beyond what's necessary for any given communication. This is part of what I meant by people with certain wisdom do not share it. Not seeing this, interpreting things literally is a sign of either lack of intelligence and perceptiveness or an overly needy ego. It's no different from taking compliments literally. More broadly speaking, language usage is less literal the higher the class level.


And how the medium changes this game. I'm sure not all of us are quite this insufferable in person and are hopefully using the internet to blow off steam. The ability to stay emotionally centered is extremely important if you want to play this game correctly. It's life tilt control.


It's not as easy as the standard 4th and 2 because the defense doesn't care about giving up yards, but still a bit easier than two point conversion because there's more space to work with.


Interestingly enough given the frequency of this accusation, I don't write that much - I concatenate what would be multiple posts into one, which gives it this air of impenetrability and allows me to respond to a lot more points in less time. For my purposes, I don't mind if this discourages a lot of impatient people from reading it - it's still much easier to physically go through my post than to understand and offer up a considered response.


Right. It sounds like he's one of the most knowledgeable people about qualitative aspects of football as well. He's a nerd, but he's an all-around football nerd not just a stat/numbers/quant nerd.

Fixed.

The dome also helps both offenses as well, and Chris Hanson is a crummy punter. He does have a big leg, but he shanks more than his fair share of punts.

i think this is the most facepalmtastic of freddies ramblings.