04 « May « 2014 « Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2014

Quarterback boom or bust metrics

Filed under: Football — Tags: NFL, NFLDraft, Statistics — Nicholas @ 11:31

At the Daily Norseman, CCNorseman has been working on developing a set of metrics for determining the chances of NFL success for prospective draft picks at the quarterback position:

This past off-season I have been scouring current and past scouting reports to try to develop a metric that we can use to evaluate quarterback prospects. I started by developing a metric to evaluate the traits of successful quarterbacks. I cataloged the traits found in pre-draft scouting reports of an elite list of 25 successful quarterbacks that have been drafted since 1998, and based the metric on those traits that were most common among that pool of players. In other words, I attempted to answer the question, “What common traits did the most successful quarterbacks in the NFL have coming out of college?” Then I went back and re-evaluated the “success metric” based on excellent feedback from the readers here at the Daily Norseman. I also developed a second metric to evaluate the traits of quarterback busts. It was the same process, except that I catalogued the common traits of the 17 quarterback busts since 1998 and based the bust metric on those traits that were most common among those players. That led me to the final Boom or Bust metric, which you can also find in that second link (and is listed below). The last step in this process is what you’ll find here: verifying the accuracy of the metric. I have gone back and run the metric on quarterbacks drafted in the 1st round of past drafts to see how successful it would have been at predicting the future successes of those players. The short of it is: it’s more accurate than a random guess. It’s not fool-proof mind you, but over the course of seven drafts from 2004 through 2010, it would have accurately predicted which 1st round quarterbacks would bust and which would be serviceable or better 73% of the time. Why did I only go back to 2004? Well, I really wanted to use at least two scouting reports for every quarterback when testing the metric to ensure better accuracy, but the farther back in time I went, the harder and harder it was to find reliable scouting reports online. I wasn’t able to track down more than one reliable scouting report for the quarterbacks drafted in 2003 and earlier, so there really is no other reason than that. I stopped at 2010, because a quarterback needs at least 4 years in the league to qualify as a bust or not, and those quarterbacks drafted in 2011 and later haven’t had a full 4 years yet.

[…]

It’s worth pointing out that in this particular data set (2004-2010), the Bust Metric by itself was almost as accurate overall as the combined metric in predicting the future of these quarterbacks and was 68% accurate by itself (although they each had slightly different results on a per quarterback basis). The success metric by itself was a little less accurate, correctly predicting the future only 61% of the time. In any case listed below are the 19 first round quarterbacks drafted between 2004 and 2010, with their metric scores from their pre-draft scouting reports and pre-draft prediction. I have taken some leeway in assigning the outcome score to this. My biggest concern in all of this is to ensure that if the metric predicts the quarterback to be in the bust category that they truly are a bust. After that, we can end up splitting hairs all day about what makes a quarterback “average” or “successful” or not. In other words, if the metric predicts that a quarterback will be merely league average, but he turns out to be a successful one then I’ll still call it a win for the metric, because it didn’t predict that quarterback to bust. I think teams are mostly concerned with not having their 1st round quarterback bust (like JaMarcus Russell or Ryan Leaf), than whether or not they get a Jason Campbell versus Aaron Rodgers type. I have given each quarterback an outcome label of “yes”, “maybe” or “no”. A “maybe” label essentially means that the player has performed reasonably well, but still has enough time left in their career to qualify for their prediction label. In those cases, the quarterback receives half-credit for their outcome.

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How to start a wine cellar (not applicable in Ontario)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Wine — Tags: Competition, LCBO, Regulation — Nicholas @ 10:21

In rational jurisdictions — where you don’t have a government-mandated monopoly supplier — following the advice of Will Lyons makes a lot of sense. For obvious reasons, wine fans in Ontario can only stare in envy at the concept of competitive pricing for wine and not being limited to what the government chooses to bring in for sale:

IF YOU ENJOY WINE, are starting to take more than a passing interest and have perhaps bought the odd reference book about vino varieties, it might be time to think about beginning your very own wine cellar.

The worst habit you can get into is to stop off at your local wine shop once a week and pick up the odd few bottles. A much better approach is to buy by the dozen or a six pack, as most wine merchants will offer a discount on a mixed case. Better still is to select two or three wine merchants, order their catalogs or look online and, when you’re in the mood, spend some time selecting your favorite wines and comparing prices. I like to do this on the weekend, with a cup of tea and all the catalogs spread out over the kitchen table.

But a cellar isn’t just a few cases of your favorite wine. It may sound like a cliché but a good cellar requires a bit of forethought and planning to provide pleasurable drinking over the long term. I like to break wine collecting into three categories: wines for immediate drinking, wines to lay down that will improve with age, and investment wines — those special bottles whose value will steadily increase year on year.

I started my own cellar soon after I left university and began working in the wine trade. I well remember buying a case of northern Rhône Syrah to lay down — I still have four bottles — and six bottles of a well-known New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc producer. I now buy most of my wine twice a year: during the bin end sales at the beginning of the year, when merchants are unloading old stock at discounted prices, and when a wine is offered En Primeur (wine futures). This is where the wine is put up for sale from the barrel, months before it is bottled and shipped. The advantages are that you can guarantee an allocation of your chosen wine, you can choose the size of the bottle it is shipped in and also secure it at a discounted price. However, the latter isn’t always guaranteed — Bordeaux 2010 being a case in point. Many of the wines are cheaper now than when they were when released En Primeur.

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This is why the 220 girls in Nigeria are not big news in the West

Filed under: Africa, Media, Religion — Tags: Islam, Nigeria, PoliticalCorrectness, Slavery, Terrorism — Nicholas @ 10:03

In the Guardian, Nick Cohen says that the girls have not been “abducted” — they’ve been enslaved:

Terrorists from a religious cult so reactionary you don’t have to stretch the language too far to describe it as fascistic attack a school. The assault on a civilian target, filled with non-combatant children, has a grotesque logic behind it. They call themselves “Boko Haram”, which translates as “western education is forbidden”. The sect regards learning as oppression. They will stop all teaching that conflicts with a holy book from the 7th century and accounts of doubtful provenance on the life and sayings of their prophet written hundreds of years after he died.

A desire for sexual supremacy accompanies their loathing of knowledge. They take 220 schoolgirls as slaves and force them to convert to their version of Islam. They either rape them or sell them on for £10 or so to new masters. The girls are the victims of slavery, child abuse and forced marriage. Their captors are by extension slavers and rapists.

As you can see, English does not lack plain words to describe the foulness of the crimes in Nigeria, and no doubt they would be used in the highly improbable event of western soldiers seizing and selling women.

Yet read parts of the press and you enter a world of euphemism. They have not been enslaved but “abducted” or “kidnapped”, as if they will be released unharmed when the parties have negotiated a mutually acceptable ransom. Writers are typing with one eye over their shoulder: watching their backs to make sure that no one can accuse them of “demonising the other”.

Turn from today’s papers to the theoretical pages of leftwing journals and you find that the grounds for understanding Boko Haram more and condemning it less were prepared last year.

Without fully endorsing Boko Haram, of course, socialists explained that it finds “resonance in the hearts of many poor and dispossessed” people, who are revolted by “the corruption and flamboyant lifestyle of the elites”. Islamism is recast as a rational reaction to local corruption and the global oppression of “neoliberalism”, one of those conveniently vague labels that can mean just about anything.

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Three Japanese fencers and 50 opponents

Filed under: Japan, Sports — Tags: Fencing, RealityTV — Nicholas @ 00:02

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

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The Battle of the Atlantic

Filed under: Cancon, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: Navy, RCAF, RCN, Submarines — Nicholas @ 00:01

On the first Sunday in May every year, we remember the Battle of the Atlantic, one of the major contributions to allied victory in World War 2, and the Canadian part in that multi-year battle:

The Battle of the Atlantic campaign was fought at sea from 1939 to 1945 with the strategic outcome being sea-control of the North Atlantic Ocean. It was the longest, largest, and arguably the most complex campaign of the Second World War. Over the course of 2,075 days, Allied naval and air forces fought more than 100 convoy battles and perhaps 1,000 single ship actions against the submarines and warships of the German and Italian navies. Enemy vessels targeted mainly the convoys of merchant ships transporting material and troops vital to safeguarding the freedom of the peoples of North America and Europe.

On any given day, up to 125 merchant vessels were sailing in convoy across the North Atlantic. It was during these treacherous, stormy crossings that Canada’s navy matured and won the mantle of a professional service. Our navy escorted more than 25,000 merchant vessels across the Atlantic. These ships carried some 182,000,000 tonnes of cargo to Europe — the equivalent of eleven lines of freight cars, each stretching from Vancouver to Halifax. Without these supplies, the war effort would have collapsed.

Thousands of Canadian men and women – members of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the Merchant Navy (MN) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), mostly volunteers from small town Canada – had to face situations so perilous they are difficult for us to imagine. As Canadians, we should be proud of their courage.

Although largely unprepared for war in 1939, Canada’s navy grew at an unparalleled rate eventually providing 47 percent of all convoy escorts. Rear Admiral Leonard Murray, who as Commander-in-Chief Northwest Atlantic from March 1943, would become the only Canadian to hold an Allied theatre command during the war and direct the convoy battles out of his headquarters in Halifax.

During the Second World War the RCN grew from 13 vessels to a strength of nearly 100,000 uniformed men and women and nearly 400 vessels, the fourth largest navy in the world. It had suffered 2,210 fatalities, including six women, and had lost 33 vessels. It had destroyed or shared in the destruction of 33 U-Boats and 42 enemy surface craft. In partnership with Canada’s maritime air forces and merchant navy, it had played a pivotal and successful role in the contest for seaward supremacy.

Merchant ships of Convoy HX188 en route to Britain.
Photo: Library and Archives Canada PA-115006

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