It is, or at least used to be, a truth universally acknowledged, that the Athletic Department was the only bastion of sanity left in higher “education”. I love watching Marxists squirm, so the start of football season was always my favorite time back in my professin’ days. Every year, the doofus Marxoid faculty would write their annual complaint about sportsball — “not germane to the purpose of a university”; “takes away too many resources from academics”; “toxic masculinity” and so forth — and every year, the President and Board of Trustees would tell the eggheads to go pound sand.
NOT, I hasten to add, because the Prez and the Trustees (hereafter: The Administration) were some kind of normal folks. Oh God no — quite the opposite, in fact. No open conservative has been hired to any position in academia for the past thirty, forty years; to make it into the ranks of The Administration, you have to be #woker than #woke. Rather, it was because The Administration were among the few mortals privy to the college’s balance sheet. Seriously, those things are more closely guarded than our nuclear launch codes … but The Administration sees them, and draws the only possible conclusion: Without sportsball, the whole university system is toast.
But alas for the bottom line, Intersectionality is a jealous god, and xzhey will have none before xzhem. The Administration knows — they must know, they can’t not know — that all the stuff that makes big league college football go comes from “boosters”, i.e. rich idiots with way more money than sense, and their corporations. But since The Administration is full of even dumber Marxists than the faculty — yeah yeah, I know, I didn’t think it was possible either — they’ve apparently decided to assume, in true Leftist style, that since the money has always just kinda, you know, been there, it will continue to, you know, somehow, someway, continue to be there.
I mean, what are those rich oilmen from Texas gonna do, not watch football?
Severian, “Ludicrous Speed Update: The NCAA”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-14.
November 22, 2023
QotD: American universities, “sportsball”, and wealthy alumni
September 10, 2023
Time for NFL running backs to set up their own union?
It’s been known for a few years, but has been brought into clear focus during this NFL offseason that the position of running back — historically one of the most important positions on the field after the quarterback — has been steadily devalued by NFL teams. Superbowl-hopeful teams no longer centre their game plan around a workhorse running back, with more and more plays being passes to wide receivers and tight ends rather than running the ball. During the 2023 offseason, several big-name running backs went public with their frustrations over new contracts. The NFL Players Association, the union for players to negotiate with the NFL’s owners, has not been as proactive for running back concerns so a break-away RB union is back under discussion:
… running backs — whose job includes receiving handoffs from the quarterback, catching passes, and blocking — are getting pummeled like never before by bigger, stronger, faster NFL players. Which means that when their contracts are up, running backs are more damaged than they used to be.
What’s more, the drama has shifted: running backs used to score a lot, but now the action revolves around quarterbacks and wide receivers.
That explains why team owners are increasingly hiring rookies to be their running backs and, instead of investing in them long-term, replacing those rookies with other rookies at the end of their first contract.
So, running backs — having suffered tons of concussions, ankle sprains, and other injuries — never see the big, second-contract payday other NFL players land. Like the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ $450 million contract or the $120 million deal wide receiver Tyreek Hill signed with the Miami Dolphins.
All of which explains how Harris has become a leading advocate for a running-backs-only union — and the unlikely face of the new American labor movement.
“I agree with my running back brothers around the NFL — history will show that you need running backs to win — we set the tone every game and run through walls for our team,” Harris tweeted in July, after three of his fellow running backs failed to secure long-term deals with their teams.
The new union, which would be separate from the NFL Players Association, was first proposed in 2019, when the International Brotherhood of Professional Running Backs filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board.
When Harris was asked in June what he thought of the idea, he said: “I’m open to it.”
He is joined by Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry, 29. Known as King Henry, he tweeted in July: “At this point, just take the RB position out the game then. The ones that want to be great & work as hard as they can to give their all to an organization, just seems like it don’t even matter. I’m with every RB that’s fighting to get what they deserve.”
Granted, professional running backs, with an average salary of $1.8 million, make a lot more than nurses, pilots, public school teachers, and everyone else in a union, but the money is declining, and they increasingly feel as though they’re being exploited by management at the same time the NFL is seeing record success. In 2023, the NFL secured $130 billion in new media deals. Of the top 100 network television broadcasts in the country last year, the league accounted for 82, and that figure is going up. On top of all that, game attendance is nearing an all-time high.
August 28, 2023
The Last Chance | Dorktown
Secret Base
Published 15 Aug 2023The Minnesota Vikings of the 1970s were among the greatest football teams ever assembled. Entering 1974, Bud Grant’s teams had reached two Super Bowls, but lost them both. The good times don’t last forever. It’s time to cash in.
Written and directed by Jon Bois
Written and produced by Alex Rubenstein
Rights specialist Lindley Sico
Secret Base executive producers Will Buikema and Jon BoisKnown goofs:
• At about the 42-minute mark, Jon says Fran Tarkenton held a 45-8-1 record as starter between 1973 and 1976. His record across these years was actually 43-10-1.
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August 21, 2023
What the parades are for | Dorktown
Secret Base
Published 8 Aug 2023This is the second episode of our seven-part docuseries, The History Of The Minnesota Vikings.
For the Vikings, the 1970s were so full of comedy, drama, and doomed snowmobiling expeditions that we had to split this decade into two episodes. And we STILL had to leave stuff out! What a team.
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August 14, 2023
56 pounds of beer | Dorktown
Secret Base
Published 1 Aug 2023In the early years, the Minnesota Vikings were like many new franchises of the time: dysfunctional, bad at football, and often intoxicated. And then a former NBA champion came back home to Minnesota and changed the identity of this franchise forever.
This is the first episode of Dorktown’s seven-part docuseries, The History of the Minnesota Vikings.
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July 7, 2023
This would be a Super Bowl halftime show I’d absolutely watch
Christopher Gates makes the case for Weird Al Yankovic being the star of the next Super Bowl halftime show:
“Weird” Al has pretty much universal appeal
With most of the acts that could be selected for the Super Bowl halftime show, a sizeable portion of your potential audience isn’t going to like them. Whether it leans more towards rap/hip hop music or pop music or whatever the case may be, you’re going to have plenty of people that aren’t into it.
Since “Weird” Al’s work spans genres and time frames, you don’t have to worry about that. There’s almost universal appeal in having someone with this sort of talent perform on the biggest possible stage, because you could have a show that hits pretty much all of the different types of music that would appeal to anyone else.
Also, to put it bluntly: Nobody hates “Weird” Al. They might not be the biggest fans of his style of music, necessarily, but there’s nobody that really has an outright hatred or even a dislike for the guy. He’s apparently one of the nicest people in the entire entertainment industry, so he’s got that going for him … which is nice.
Think of the cameo potential
One of the best possible cases that you could make for something like this is the case for cameo appearances, which have become a bit of a thing at Super Bowl halftime shows in recent years. After all, “Weird” Al has been at this for four decades. Literally anyone that he’s parodied over the years that’s still with us is fair game for a potential cameo appearance during something like this.
All those years ago, “Weird” Al started out doing parodies of acts like Madonna and Huey Lewis and the News, and on his last studio album did send-ups of Imagine Dragons, Lorde, and Iggy Azalea. You don’t think you could sell some of those folks on the idea of sharing the biggest possible stage in the world with him for one night? I certainly think that you could. There’s really a lot of potential there, to be honest.
April 28, 2023
Use and misuse of the term “regression to the mean”
I still follow my favourite pro football team, the Minnesota Vikings, and last year they hired a new General Manager who was unlike the previous GM in that not only was he a big believer in analytics, he actually had worked in the analytics area for years before moving into an executive position. The first NFL draft under the new GM and head coach was much more in line with what the public analytics fans wanted — although the result on the field is still undetermined as only one player in that draft class got significant playing time. Freddie deBoer is a fan of analytics, but he wants to help people understand what the frequently misunderstood term “regression to the mean” actually … means:
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, General Manager of the Minnesota Vikings. Adofo-Mensah was hired in 2022 to replace Rick Spielman.
Photo from the team website – https://www.vikings.com/team/front-office-roster/kwesi-adofo-mensah
The sports analytics movement has proven time and again to help teams win games, across sports and leagues, and so unsurprisingly essentially every team in every major sport employs an analytics department. I in fact find it very annoying that there are still statheads that act like they’re David and not Goliath for this reason. I also think that the impact of analytics on baseball has been a disaster from an entertainment standpoint. There’s a whole lot one could say about the general topic. (I frequently think about the fact that Moneyball helped advance the course of analytics, and analytics is fundamentally correct in its claims, and yet the fundamental narrative of the book was wrong.*) But while the predictive claims of analytics continue to evolve, they’ve been wildly successful.
I want to address one particular bugaboo I have with the way analytical concepts are discussed. It was inevitable that popularizing these concepts was going to lead to some distortion. One topic that I see misused all the time is regression/reversion to the mean, or the tendency of outlier performances to be followed up by performances that are closer to the average (mean) performance for that player or league. (I may use reversion and regression interchangeably here, mostly because I’m too forgetful to keep one in my head at a time.) A guy plays pro baseball for five years, he hits around 10 or 12 homeruns a year, then he has a year where he hits 30, then he goes back to hitting in the low 10s again in following seasons – that’s an example of regression to the mean. After deviation from trends we tend (tend) to see returns to trend. Similarly, if the NFL has a league average of about 4.3 yards per carry for a decade, and then the next year the league average is 4.8 without a rule change or other obvious candidate for differences in underlying conditions, that’s a good candidate for regression to the mean the next year, trending back towards that lower average. It certainly doesn’t have to happen, but it’s likely to happen for reasons we’ll talk about.
Intuitively, the actual tendency isn’t hard to understand. But I find that people talk about it in a way that suggests a misunderstanding of why regression to the mean happens, and I want to work through that here.
So. We have a system, like “major league baseball” or “K-12 public education in Baltimore” or “the world”. Within those systems we have quantitative phenomena (like on-base percentage, test scores, or the price of oil) that are explainable by multiple variables, AKA the conditions in which the observed phenomena occur. Over time, we observe trends in those phenomena, which can be in the system as a whole (leaguewide batting average), in subgroups (team batting average), or individuals (a player’s batting average). Those trends are the result of underlying variables/conditions, which include internal factors like an athlete’s level of ability, as well as elements of chance and unaccounted-for variability. (We could go into a big thing about what “chance” really refers to in a complex system, but … let’s not.) The more time goes on, and the more data is collected, the more confidently we can say that a trend is an accurate representation of some underlying reality, again like an athlete’s level of ability. When we say a baseball player is a good hitter, it’s because we’ve observed over time that he has produced good statistics in hitting, and we feel confident that this consistency is the product of his skill and attributes rather than exogenous factors.
However, we know that good hitters have bad games, just as bad hitters have good games. We know that good hitters have slumps where they have bad three or five or ten etc game stretches. We even acknowledge that someone can be a good hitter and have a bad season, or at least a season that’s below their usual standards. However, if a hitter has two or three bad seasons, we’re likely to stop seeing poor performance as an outlier and change our overall perception of the player. The outlier becomes the trend. There is no certain or objective place where that transition happens.
Here’s the really essential point I want to make: outliers tend to revert to the mean because the initial outlier performance was statistically unlikely; a repeat of that outlier performance is statistically unlikely for the same reasons, but not because of the previous outlier. For ease of understanding let’s pretend underlying conditions stay exactly the same, which of course will never happen in a real-world scenario. If that’s true, then the chance of having an equally unlikely outcome is exactly as likely as the first time; repetition of outliers is not made any less likely by the fact that the initial outlier happened. That is, there’s no inherent reason why a repetition of the outlier becomes more unlikely, given consistent underlying conditions. I think it’s really important to avoid the Gambler’s Fallacy here, thinking that a roulette wheel is somehow more likely to come up red because it’s come up black a hundred times in a row. Statistically unlikely outcomes in the past don’t make statistically unlikely outcomes any less likely in the future. The universe doesn’t “remember” that there’s been an outlier before. Reversion to the mean is not a force in the universe. It’s not a matter of results being bent back into the previous trend by the gods. Rather, if underlying conditions are similar (if a player is about as good as he was the previous year and the role of variability and chance remains the same), and he had an unlikely level of success/failure the prior year, he’s unlikely to repeat that performance because reaching that level of performance was unlikely in the first place.
* – the A’s not only were not a uniquely bad franchise, they had won the most games of any team in major league baseball in the ten years prior to the Moneyball season
– major league baseball had entered an era of unusual parity at that time, belying Michael Lewis’s implication that it was a game of haves and have-nots
– readers come away from the book convinced that the A’s won so many games because of Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, the players that epitomize the Moneyball ethos, but the numbers tell us they were so successful because of a remarkably effective rotation in Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder, and the offensive skill of shortstop Miguel Tejada – all of whom were very highly regarded players according to the old-school scouting approach that the book has such disdain for.
– Art Howe was not an obstructionist asshole.
December 11, 2022
QotD: Democracy
Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this. It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers. All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!
A better analogy is the professional sports team. Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers. You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff. The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day. And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium. Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise. And it’s worse than that, actually. We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game. So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office. Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.
Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.
But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly “elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion. They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
August 10, 2022
QotD: “Most academics [are] twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers”
I say the answer is: Institutional incentives. I’m not a football coach, but I was an academic — there’s a surprising amount of overlap in their institutional structures. Let me explain: In both cases, working conditions for everyone except those at the very tippy-top are brutal. We’d all willingly endure them, I think, for the kind of money and bennies big league coaches / tenured professors get, but below that tiny handful of folks everyone works even worse hours for far less compensation. Even coaches at dinky little high schools in the middle of Flyover Country spend countless hours breaking down film — he might only have fifteen kids on the team, but he’s expected to win with those fifteen kids, damn it, and win now.
Consider, then, what type of person would willingly sign up for such a life. Leave aside the question of whether or not what academics do has any intrinsic value. The fact remains that simply writing one’s dissertation takes, at minimum, a year or two of grinding toil. I’m the laziest sumbitch in captivity, and nobody’s better than me at gaming the system (especially a droolingly stupid system like academia), but even I pulled more 80+ hour weeks in grad school than I care to remember. It’s simple economics: You’ve got X dollars in grant money to hit the archives. Archives are always located in expensive cities in distant states, if not on different continents. Your X dollars run out pretty goddamn fast in a place like London, even when you’re staying at the cheapest hostel, living on ramen noodles and water, walking everywhere. Given that, you work, for as long as they’ll let you in the building, for as long as your eyesight holds.
And all that is to complete the bare minimum requirement for the possibility — by no means anywhere near the certainty — of securing an entry-level job. I’d ask “Who in his right mind would ever do that?”, but the answer is obvious: Nobody in his right mind would. You have to either really, really want to be an academic (coach), or have absolutely no other choice. Most academics, of course, are the latter — they’re twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers. But wannabe-coaches, I hypothesize, face a similar dilemma: You’re an athlete who has made his living off his body. And a nice living it was, too, while it lasted … but now you’re 35 and your body just can’t do it anymore. You have no other skills. What else is there to do, but try coaching?
Severian, “Organizational Behaviour in the Human Male”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-23.
July 8, 2022
The Missing Rings • The Story Of The 1969 Minnesota Vikings
Randy Fast
Published 28 May 2016I know that this video has already been posted on YouTube, but for those of you that have never seen it, here’s a great documentary by NFL Films on the 1969 Minnesota Vikings season. I was only seven at the time, and professional football wasn’t quite yet on my radar, but for hardcore Vikings fans, the finale of this season must have been a pretty hard pill to swallow. Anyway, I hope YouTube/NFL Films allows me to keep this video posted, so until then…
April 30, 2022
“The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids”
Peter Jacobsen refutes the claim that the NFL Draft is like socialism:
Once we recognize that teams aren’t really business competitors, and insofar as there is athletic competition it’s tempered to maximize profit, the claim that the draft is socialism rings pretty hollow.
But, as if this weren’t enough, history also debunks the claim that the draft is a socialist institution.
In 1934, Minnesota Gophers’ senior running back, Stan Kostka, led his team to an undefeated season and made himself the top prospect for professional teams. As a result, teams engaged in a bidding war which ended in Stan going to the (no longer existing) Brooklyn Dodgers.
As a result of the bidding war, Kostka became the highest paid player in the NFL (with a $5,000 contract).
The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles was so mad about losing the bidding war that he proposed the idea of the draft to the NFL the following year.
So, in other words, the NFL draft started as a way for team owners to cooperate to keep player wages below where they would be if bidding wars were allowed.
To be fair, I haven’t read everything Marx wrote. But something tells me a system where capital owners cooperate to keep employer bidding wars from occurring isn’t praised in some obscure work he and Engels published. In fact, this is about as opposite to Marx as you can get.
In the modern day, players have formed unions to combat owner cooperation, but the point remains the same. The NFL is a highly sophisticated organizational structure that allows athletic competitors to cooperate in the goal of making money.
So, insofar as Americans enjoy the exciting games created by the draft system, they don’t have socialism to thank. Instead they should thank the cooperation facilitated by self-interest channeled through the free market.
The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids.
April 28, 2022
QotD: The NFL Draft
Every year they draft these big, strong, good-looking guys that can chuck it a country mile. And three years later they turn out to be Joey Harrington or Tim Couch or Jeff George or some other bust who couldn’t lead a hungry lineman to free barbeque, let alone an entire team to a championship.
Dan Wetzel, “Follow the Leader”, Yahoo! Sports, 2006-04-27.
February 5, 2022
Why great NFL players rarely make good coaches
In his (mostly) weekly mailbag post, Severian at Founding Questions considers the latest NFL scandal and some of the insane requirements to be a really great NFL quarterback and how few can both play and coach at that high level. First, the Romney Rule scandal:
I see that some black coach has sued the NFL for racial discrimination, and I must say I hope he takes them for every cent they’ve got. From the very little I’ve seen, his case is airtight, because of the NFL’s astounding stupidity. For those who don’t know, the NFL has been using what’s called the “Rooney Rule” for at least two decades now. This states that whenever a head coaching job comes up, the team must interview at least one (and I think two are mandatory now) black candidate.
Since there’s a serious dearth of black coaches at all levels of organized football (we’ll psircle back to that in a minute), this means that the same three or four guys go through the same pro forma interviews every time. As far as I understand it, then (which is not very, admittedly), this particular coach was actually told to his face that this interview with whatever team was just pro forma compliance with the Rooney Rule; we’ve already got our guy, so just fly out here, we’ll buy you lunch, have a nice chat, and put you back on the plane lickety split.
That’s one part of his airtight case. The other is that whatever team he interviewed with also has a Diversity and Inclusion Officer — because of course they do — and the DIE Officer is on record as saying all kinds of typical sanctimonious virtue-signaling shit, e.g. “We are a systemically racist organization and have to do better,” blah blah blah. Put those together, and what else can you conclude except that this coach got screwed out of a job because of explicit racial animus?
But as to why there are so few black NFL coaches, part of it is due to the way young quarterbacks are trained — he discussed this in detail here — which very frequently diverts talented young black quarterbacks away from learning the skillset they would need to make it in the NFL. The other thing is that the skills you need to be a good coach don’t often appear in a person who has the physical ability to be a good player:
If you haven’t met any high-caliber pro athletes, think of professors. The third-rate knockoff cow college I went to had a pretty big league chemist on staff; if he hadn’t won the Nobel he was at least in the conversation, something like that. This guy was a terrible teacher, because he just couldn’t grok that other people couldn’t follow him. Your brain couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with his, and he couldn’t slow his down enough to let you catch up. The best chemistry teacher was still pretty smart — no dummies in Chem PhD programs, at least not back then — but because he was nowhere near the top guy’s level, he was so much better at explaining the nuts and bolts.
You could ask the low-end guy “What do I need to do to get better at chemistry?” and he could give you some solid, practical advice (I know, because with his help I squeaked out a C-). You asked that of the high end guy, and he’d reply “Be smarter”. (Not really, he was actually pretty cool, personally, but nonetheless that’s really all he could say).
Sports works the same way. While I was there, this same college also hired a former NBA player to coach basketball. Not a Hall of Famer, but a Hall of the Pretty Good-er; if you know basketball from the late 70s, you’ve heard of him. They thought having this guy as a coach would boost recruiting and ticket sales (he was a local notable, too), and it did … for a time, but under his stewardship the team got much worse, and for the same reason the Nobel-candidate chem wiz was the worst teacher. Billy Bigshot would tell his guys “Just go out there and do this and that” … but his guys couldn’t do this and that. Billy could, which is why he was a very good player at the highest professional level; but he couldn’t grok that not everyone could do the same genetic freak shit on the court he could, because they weren’t genetic freaks like him.
Psircling back to the NFL, if you want a race-neutral entry point for discussing this stuff, there you go. Good players are generally terrible coaches, because pretty much by definition good players are genetic freaks who have no idea how they do the things they do; they just do them. Good coaches, on the other hand, tend to be nerdlingers with people skills … another fairly rare combo, it must be said, but nowhere near as rare as a 6’4″ chess master with a big arm. If pro teams really wanted to start thinking outside the box, they’d start recruiting potential coaching candidates at video game tournaments … or straight from high school, where guys have to do much more with much, much less.
December 28, 2021
QotD: Football, Minnesota Viking style
Tom Pelissero, “Vikings rediscover winning ways”, KFAN Sports, 2005-01-10.
December 19, 2021
“Instant replay” in the NFL
Severian talks about the surprising statistical results when the NFL introduced “instant replay”:
I was a big NFL fan when they first started debating the now-standard “instant replay challenge” rules. Like most people, I was all for it — geez, these refs are terrible, video’s the way to go. My only worry was that if every call those numbnuts obviously screwed up got reviewed, games would last 12 hours …
But a funny thing happened: As with most people, my respect for the refs went way, way up once they put in the video challenge rules. Yeah, they screw up one or two calls per game, the challenges prove that … but that’s one or two out of hundreds, which is a phenomenal success rate. Not only that, even the very toughest calls — the ones that draw the red flags — they get right, or at least not-wrong (football is nothing if not Hegelian), about half the time. Put it through all the techno-whizbangery you want — slow it down to molasses-in-winter speed, run it through one of those Blade Runner image enhancers — and it’s still pretty much a coin toss, at least half the time. And the refs are making those calls at full speed, from dramatically different angles.
In other words, I learned a lesson in applied statistics. Before instant replay, if you’d asked me to guess, as objectively as possible, how many calls per game the refs blew, I’d have said something like “four or five, tops”. (I suppose we must pause here to note, for the benefit of anyone who still follows the NFL for some reason, that I’m not talking about bullshit like the “tuck rule” or whatever the fuck a “catch” is supposed to be these days, which even the refs don’t seem to understand; I’m talking stuff like “Did he fumble?” or “They missed the ball spot by a yard or two”). I certainly wouldn’t go any higher than that, and if you told me that an independent auditing firm had reviewed ten seasons’ worth of game tape and came up with a hard number of 2.6 calls per game, I’d roll with it, no problem.
If you then told me that this represents a “failure rate” of well under 1%, well, I’m not sure I want to go through all the math to check you, but I’d believe it, because I know something about how the game is played. I don’t want to get too far off track here, but for the benefit of casual fans and especially non-American readers, there are 11 men on a football team, and all of them have the opportunity to do all kinds of illegal stuff on every single play. Call it 65 plays per game (the first rough number I could find with a five second internet search), and that’s … well, my math doesn’t go that high, but let’s just say it’s a lot of opportunities for fouls. And that’s not counting all the other stuff refs have to do — that they have the opportunity to get wrong — on nearly every play: Marking the ball spot, determining where a guy went out of bounds, and so on.
The important thing to note is how far my emotional perceptions of the game diverge from statistical reality. Let’s stipulate that all the math up there results in a “success rate” of 99.993%. I’d buy that … Intellectually I’d buy it, because I know a bit about how math works, and a lot more about how football works, but note my first impression when they started talking about instant replay: “Oh God yes, these guys suck, they blow so many calls that games are going to last 12 hours if they review all the calls those lousy refs obviously miss.”
Emotion beats math, every time.
And note that I’m talking about refs in general here. In general, they blow calls all the time (the emotional me said), but when it comes to my team in particular, well, they’ve obviously got it out for us. They screw up an entire season’s worth of calls every time my team plays, and all those screwups go the opponents’ way!
I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. I got to see this process firsthand, and that’s the second lesson instant replay taught me: “Indisputable video evidence,” as the phrase is, don’t mean squat when you’ve got your heart and soul in it.
Every NFL fan knows that the refs hate their particular team and love their most hated rival, and no amount of indisputable evidence will shake that belief. NFL fans are rather like progressives in that way …
