Olympic Badminton II

There are always problems with teams throwing games when you go from multi-game rounds to single-elimination tournaments.  The problem for the Olympics is that single-elimination tournaments are a horrible way of determining the second and third-best teams.  Because of the silver and bronze medals this matters a lot more here than most playoffs.

Olympic Badminton

Hey, I'm almost good enough at a sport to play in the Olympics.  Oh wait, they were trying to lose.

Free Agents are not the Cubs Problem

As I pointed out before, the primary problem of the latter years of the Hendy regime in Chicago was not the overspending on free agents. The better culprit is the complete incompetence in drafting and developing young talent. Here is more support for this view (see the Table 3 at the end). In fairness, this study probably would underestimate the negative impact of the Soriano contract since the last three years of his contract are not included. However, the overall point is that the free agent signings were not the biggest problem of the Hendry years.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Last week I did an interview with Brian Schwartz who published a short editorial about my work in the Daily Camera. The paper he cited was my Economic Inquiry article with Christian End, "A Winning Proposition: The Economic Impact of Successful National Football League Franchises". One interesting thing to come out of the interview was that I realized when I give estimates for the dollar impact of a team winning, I typically use the real income number. Using real income makes sense from a research point of view, but people do not think in 1984 dollars. Inflation has more than doubled the dollar amount in the last 25 years, so I should probably adjust the numbers to state nominal income.

You can find the editorial here (it is the last one), and you can find Brian's blog entry about it here.

Quick Advice for NFL Players

A quick personal service announcement to all professional football players. Do not say anything about the Saints' Bounty story. Do not become the Clinton Portis of the Bounty story. The implications in this case are probably worse, as Portis only embarrassed himself, whereas this time players might inadvertently implicate their own teams.

Upsets on the First Two Days of the Tournament

The first two days of the NCAA tournament provided a number of upsets. Two 15-seeds, one 13-seed, two 12-seeds and two 11-seeds all won, along with one 16-seed who may have won without the hindrance of the refs. Most commentators seem to be describing the upsets as being due to more general parity. That parity has been evident in the last few years with Butler's multiple trips to the Final Four, along with VCU's and George Mason's runs as well. However, an additional factor likely on display this year was the overall quality of the lower seeded teams. In particular, the usual bottom feeders that inhabit the 15 and 16 seed lines looked much better than usual. I think part of the reason was that many of these weaker conferences put their best team forward. In past years, many of these leagues would see their top team get knocked off in the conference tournament. The conferences ranked 20^th, 21^st and 23^rd – 27^th by RPI all sent their regular season champion. Of the higher ranked conferences only the Sun Belt sent a clearly inferior team that belonged on the 16-seed line, Western Kentucky. A couple of them sent teams that weren't their strongest, Detroit from the Horizon and Loyola from the MAAC, but those conferences sent teams that were at least in their top four teams. Add it all up and there was a logjam of teams that typically would have been 13 and 14 seeds getting pushed down to the 15-seed line. If you have enough good teams, some of them will pull off the upset.

Of course this might not be a sufficient excuse for Mizzou, as the one 15-seed that seemed like a typical 15-seed was Norfolk State.

2012 96-Team NCAA Basketball Field

As I did last year, and the year before I tried to come up with what my projection would be for the NCAA field if it was 96 teams instead of 68. One assumption I make is that they will take no losing teams. Two years ago this was a strong assumption, but this year it probably would not have made a difference. Unlike in last year's projection I will not assume that all of the NIT at-large teams will make it. While there were a lot of automatic bids to the NIT, like in years past, the different thing this year was that there were a lot of automatic bids who would have made the NIT without the automatic bids (Washington, Drexel, Nevada …). What that means is that we cannot assume that all of the NIT at-large bids would have made the NCAA tournament. In particular, it is hard to imagine Iowa making a 96-team NCAA tournament. However, being a large university with a large fan base who could host an NIT game made them a good choice for the NIT. I was also skeptical of Stanford, but they received a 3-seed so maybe my view of them is probably lower than that of the people making the decisions.

Clear additions to a 96-team field: Washington, Tennessee, Arizona, Seton Hall, St. Joe's, Mississippi, Miami, Dayton, Oregon, Drexel, Oral Roberts, Northwestern, Mississippi St., Akron, Nevada, Marshall

Likely additions: La Salle, Middle Tennessee, UMass, Central Florida

Bubble teams: Cleveland St., Northern Iowa, LSU, Valparaiso (The Horizon was a pretty highly rated conference so I think Cleveland St. and Valpo would have been selected)

Last 4 in: UMass, Bucknell, Stanford, Minnesota

Last 4 out: George Mason, Weber St., Princeton, Buffalo

I ended up taking all of the at-large teams from the NIT except Iowa (RPI in the 120s) plus two additional auto bids from the NIT that had 7 or 8 seeds (Valparaiso and Bucknell)