Month: March 2014

soccer

The indoor soccer wars, part 3,785

Posted on by Beau Dure

Imagine if, in 2002, five MLS teams had broken away from the league to seek a stronger future in the A-League.

That’s roughly what we’re seeing now in the latest twist of indoor soccer, which had a fractious history in its heyday and continues to have as many views on the way forward as it has prospective owners.

In another sport, perhaps we would have been surprised to see a championship game immediately followed by a statement about the USL’s commitment to moving forward with a top-quality league … without a few teams.

Fundamental to the resulting reforms that will be implemented is ensuring that our most important partners, the team owners, not only share our vision, but are also capable of meeting the operational, economic, and legal standards of participating in a high-level indoor professional soccer league.  As a result, several teams that possess a different philosophy on how to structure and operate an indoor professional soccer league will not be returning to the MISL.

As a follow-up, the USL released a video explaining the situation:

It didn’t take long for the “several teams that possess a different philosophy” to reveal themselves …

Syracuse president/head coach Tommy Tanner, whom some may remember playing on some “physical” N.C. State teams of the late 80s: “What I want to see is a league that’s sustainable, that year after year we don’t lose teams, that we can grow the sport. We definitely are on good terms with the MISL. But we need to find more teams.”

MISL champion Missouri Comets president Brian Budzinski: “We told the league a year and a half ago that we’re committed to this league, but we need to see some sort of growth. We need you guys to step up and get more teams, basically. They haven’t done enough to make us happy. The four of us, if we don’t see some sort of immediate changes, then we’re leaving.”

The other two teams besides Syracuse and Missouri — Rochester and, the unkindest cut of all, indoor soccer cornerstone Baltimore.

Left out of the mix at the moment is another venerable indoor franchise, Milwaukee.

They have another option besides the MISL — the PASL, which launched a professional league a few years ago. It’s not a model of stability, either, and most of its teams would be thrilled to have the attendance figures posted by MISL clubs. But it has more teams, including two that have some institutional links to the glory days — the Dallas Sidekicks and the San Diego Sockers. You may remember the Sockers, who claimed the record for longest professional winning streak ahead of the Washington Kastles of World Team Tennis.

So will we see these four teams move to the PASL? Or will they grab the Sidekicks and Sockers and a couple of as-yet-nonexistent teams to form yet another league? Or will the MISL make a massive comeback again?

0
olympic sports

Monday Myriad, March 17: St. Patrick’s delay

Posted on by Beau Dure

The Monday Myriad is a day late, and not just because we have so much to wrap up from the end of the Paralympics and the Alpine ski season.

Best and worst …

Best U.S. Paralympic day: A sweep in snowboardcross, Heath Calhoun’s first medal, bronze for Dancing with the Stars cast member Amy Purdy and a total of eight medals. (OlympicTalk recap | TeamUSA video)

Best comeback (in one day): Canada’s Brian McKeever was bidding to do an Olympic/Paralympic double on home snow in 2010, but he was omitted from the start lists. He held a gracious interview session with me and a few other journalists. In Sochi, the visually impaired cross-country skier fell early in the 1k sprint final but charged back for the win.

Best comeback (in a few weeks): The USA’s Shani Davis and Heather Richardson had a rough time in Sochi but finished strong World Cup seasons with the overall titles.

Best short-track performance: J.R. Celski won the 3,000 meters and finished second in the overall standings at short-track speedskating’s World Championships, while Jessica Smith took a bronze in the women’s 3,000.

Best first: Lowell Bailey reached a World Cup biathlon podium for the first time, taking third in Finland.

Most consistent athletes:

https://twitter.com/ESPNOlympics/status/445195940035432448

Best finish (past weekend): Ted Ligety needed a win and some luck to take that giant slalom globe.

Best finish (upcoming): Hannah Kearney won a dual moguls event to take a five-point lead in the World Cup standings over Canada’s Justine Dufour-Lapointe heading into the finals this weekend.

Best U.S. summer sport result: Gwen Jorgensen and Katie Hursey finished 1-2 in a World Cup triathlon event.

Best diplomacy: 

Most versatile athlete: The USA’s Tatyana McFadden swept all four major marathons last year in her wheelchair. This year, she’s a silver medalist in the cross-country skiing sprint.

Best ski finish: Watch Norway’s Mariann Marthinsen battle McFadden in the sprint final. (Same link)

Worst ski finish: Like Lindsey Vonn last year, Maria Höfl-Riesch had her season-ending injury and loud reaction captured on video.

Worst media slam: Veronica Campbell-Brown is angry that drug-testing cost her a few months of her career. It’s the media’s fault, apparently.

Worst of the worst: The stomach bug that left me unconscious most of Monday. Hence the delay.

Best events this week: The women’s curling World Championships continue (see YouTube for some live broadcasts), as does the chess World Championship Candidates tournament. Anand’s back!

0
soccer

Spirit preseason: Scrimmage between snowstorms

Posted on by Beau Dure

A couple of weeks ago, the D.C. metro area was buried in snow. The forecasters say it may happen again Sunday night.

So everyone was happy to be outside on a lovely spring day at the Soccerplex, where the Spirit had a festive intrasquad scrimmage and autograph sessions. (Yes, plural.)

They played on the main stadium field, unlike the open practices the Spirit held last season, but the lines on the field were roughly 75×50 for the 9v9 game. The smaller field and smaller numbers made a goalfest that much more likely. So did the presence of Tiffany Weimer, who scorched the defense for four goals and an assist in the Red team’s 5-2 win.

A couple of those goals were defensive miscues by people who won’t be on the roster in three or four days. But Weimer also beat a couple of veterans. Better yet, she combined well with Danesha Adams, who set up one of those goals with a nifty back heel.

The highlight for the White team was the midfield pairing of Yael Averbuch and Jordan Angeli. Averbuch had a few slick passes, and Angeli opened the scoring.

The postgame highlight was seeing Angeli, who has been out of competition for nearly three years, talking about her goal and the feeling of playing in front of a crowd. She was near tears. Though Mark Parsons says she’s still a couple of weeks away from full match fitness, Spirit fans have good reason to be optimistic she’ll contribute. Angeli fans have even better reason to be happy.

But Spirit fans might worry that too many players are coming back from major injuries. Caroline Miller, whom a few message board posters are abandoning all too quickly, played about 20 uneventful minutes. Candace Chapman looked solid on the back line in limited time. Colleen Williams didn’t play.

It’s too soon to tell whether anyone will emerge from the trialists. Honestly, we couldn’t really identify most of them — the jerseys had no numbers, leaving us all to sort one ponytail from another. And a couple of them haven’t learned the art of waving when they’re introduced as starters.

Gloria Douglas converted her big chance after Weimer cut into the box with the ball, drew the defense and centered. But she’s trying to crack into a forward group that includes Weimer, Adams, Miller, Renae Cuellar, Jodie Taylor and maybe Williams (pending health and positioning).

The curiosity was North Carolina’s Meg Morris, a 5-2 tank. If you met her randomly away from the field, you’d never guess someone of such stature played soccer. But she’s surprisingly athletic and showed a bit of tactical sense. As Chris Henderson’s analysis points out, she was a consistent starter at Carolina but didn’t play a ton of minutes, rotating in the Anson Dorrance hockey-style line changes. If someone starts a women’s indoor league, she’d be dominant.

The other player who stood out was Mexican center back Bianca Sierra, who impressed Parsons with her poise. With Marisa Abegg retired and Chapman’s fitness still a question mark, she could be a sound insurance policy.

But it’s one game. I remember seeing an early practice last season in which Miller and Tiffany McCarty were absolutely dominant. Miller was starting to show it in the games last season before she was injured. McCarty lost her confidence somewhere early in the season and surely needed the change of scenery she got in the offseason.

This Spirit squad has a few players who can string together passes in the opposing third. A few fans were clearly drooling over the idea of Diana Matheson joining the fun when she returns to the Plex.

The two-word summary: Cautious optimism. We’ll check in again after we dig out from more snow.

0
soccer

NWSL media guidelines: Is the door open?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s say you’re running a fledgling women’s soccer league. Do you let reporters run around all over the place or keep them at arm’s length?

Organizations on their way up are often eager about opening up as much as possible. When I covered mixed martial arts for USA TODAY in the late 2000s, the UFC made it really easy for me to chat with Dana White and anyone else they could gather at almost any time. Now that the UFC has grown, Dana can’t spend a free hour chatting with some dude from USA TODAY about the music they play when fighters walk to the cage.

And that’s typical. Call a league that isn’t swamped with media requests, and you’re more likely to get through than you are if you say, “Hey, NFL? I write a blog. Can I talk with the commissioner today?”

Generally, I’ve found that women’s soccer is more of a closed community than men’s soccer. Read Steve Sirk’s book Massive, about the Columbus Crew, and you’ll find he had much more open chats with the players than I did in Enduring Spirit. Part of that is the locker room — door’s open in MLS, closed in the NWSL. Part of it was Columbus player Frankie Hejduk, as outgoing an athlete as you’ll ever find. And part of it, from my experience, is that women’s soccer players are more protective of the inner workings of their team than men’s soccer players.

Note the weasel words in that paragraph. First, “generally.” Sure, women’s soccer has its exceptions. And then there’s “from my experience.” I couldn’t tell you if the Portland Thorns are more forthcoming than the Timbers. If anyone has different experiences, please share.

The Spirit organization worked well with me for the book, but we did set some boundaries along the way. I only went to one team meeting — the one with the entertaining game of charades. And after preseason, the team and I agreed that I would usually come out to midweek practices, not the Friday practices in which they went over the tactics for the next game. At those practices, I made an effort to keep a respectful distance, though they appreciated my efforts in chasing down loose balls that had rolled down the many hills at the Soccerplex.

All of these access decisions were easy to work out among reasonable people with good communication. If you just drove up to the Soccerplex and started watching the team practice without telling anyone, you were going to get someone walking up and asking who you are and what you’re doing there. (The family that was just taking a snack break before going to lacrosse camp on a neighboring field was OK; the guy who was intently watching from a distance drew a few more questions.)

And to be honest, I didn’t see a lot of reporters coming out to practices, and I’m sure the Spirit didn’t turn a busload of people away every day. Still, the league quite rightly saw a need for standardized media guidelines, published on its site.

Last week, those guidelines read in part:

Media Access to Practices: Clubs are encouraged to make all practices open to media. If a practice is closed, clubs must grant a 15-minute media access period at the start or end of practice, as well as making the coach and players available for interviews following the conclusion of practice. Clubs are strongly encouraged to ensure that ballwork is at least part of the 15-minutes access period. If practices are open to the media, as defined above, they must be open to all media; if practices are closed to the media, they must be closed to all media.

Seems reasonable, and it’s consistent with what I’ve seen in other leagues. (That said, we’ve always joked about what teams are doing in practice that they don’t want others to see. “Oh, wow — are they doing a possession drill? They must want to possess the ball!”)

That section now reads as follows:

Media Access to Training Sessions: Teams are highly encouraged to make every training session open or at least partially open (i.e., if a session is declared “closed,” teams are required to have a 15 minute period for b-roll and photos at the start and time for media interviews following the session).

The change isn’t related to any agitation in the preseason. The latter phrasing is in the 2014 operations manual, the league says. The site was updated this week to match what was said in the operations manual.

So is that enough to meet the limited but occasionally intense media demand?

From a practical point of view, journalists need to give NWSL teams a bit of leeway. The teams don’t have huge staffs to shepherd reporters and photographers around at practice. And players often need to know in advance if they’re doing interviews after practice — they have jobs, classes and other logistical realities of playing for something less than a six-figure salary.

But it’s discouraging to hear, as I have from several colleagues, that a couple of teams have put up a virtual curtain on the preseason.

0
soccer

‘Enduring Spirit’ and the NWSL preseason

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’m planning to get my first peek at the 2014 Washington Spirit on Saturday, and I have no idea what to expect.

A few bits of news about Spirit-affiliated people have trickled through:

– Hayley Siegel, the Reserves’ voice of experience last season, tore her ACL last fall and won’t be back this season.

– Marisa Abegg, as you’ve probably heard, officially retired to focus on her medical career.

– Colleen Williams, whose season ended with a nasty knee injury last summer, is back on the field.

– Heather Cooke, who was in preseason camp with the Spirit but wound up spending the summer with the Philippines national team and MTV, is in camp with Chicago.

But news isn’t traveling fast. I heard today that a Spirit mainstay from last season, Julia Roberts, was waived and is already in camp elsewhere. (Yes, that explains why she says “new city” in this tweet with her colorful injury:)

https://twitter.com/TheReelJRoberts/status/443182548307279873/

I’ve got several emails out in an attempt to confirm this through official channels. Why player transactions are treated with such secrecy is something I’ll never understand.

(Clumsy segue to book plug here …)

The secrecy makes me that much more appreciative that the Spirit let me follow the team around last season for Enduring Spirit. I didn’t have unfettered access by any stretch of the imagination — I went to only one team meeting, and I have no idea what the Spirit’s locker room looks like — but I went to many practices and a couple of road trips.

A couple of months ago, I listed things you’ll learn from reading the book (mostly from the first two chapters). I also did some questions and answers, including my definitive take on the funniest person in the Spirit organization. If you want to try before you buy, check out these two excerpts on an early-season practice and a team-building exercise after Mark Parsons took over as coach.

The book is available in several formats: print (through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and possibly other retailers), Kindle, Nook, Apple and whatever you use to read books from Kobo. You’ve still got roughly a month before the regular season, and I can assure you it won’t take that long to read it. Enjoy.

One more note today relating to the book — one of the inspirations for Enduring Spirit was the Joe McGinniss book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. The Spirit’s story was less controversial than that of Castel di Sangro, where the mafia lurked in the background, but I often found myself thinking back to his approach as I went about reporting and writing. I’m sorry to hear McGinniss passed away yesterday, and I wish all the best to his family and his many fans.

2
olympic sports, track and field

Monday Myriad, March 10: USA and Ukraine celebrate

Posted on by Beau Dure

Through three days of the Paralympics, host Russia unsurprisingly has a huge lead in the medal count with 24 medals, 7 gold. Tied for second with 7 medals is the USA and the inspiring team from Ukraine.

The U.S. track and field team ran away with the medals at the World Indoor Championships — 12 overall, 8 gold.

The USA’s week also included a redemptive World Cup weekend for speedskaters and more Alpine glory for Mikaela Shiffrin and Ted Ligety. (TeamUSA.org is also posting daily Paralympic recaps.)

Best and worst of the week …

Best event to watch Tuesday morning: USA-Russia in sled hockey.

Best documentary: USA Track and Field wrapped up Alan Webb’s track career with an inspirational 12-minute video.

Best Paralympic starter: Allison Jones won the first U.S. medal of the London 2012 Paralympics (in cycling). Then she took downhill bronze for the first U.S. medal in Sochi.

Best statement: The first 2012 Paralympic gold medalist from Ukraine, Olena Iurkovska, spoke proudly: “Every time I race, it will be for Ukrainian independence and peace in my country.” And she embraced a top Russian lawmaker at the flower ceremony.

Best bounce-back from Sochi: U.S. Speedskating medals in Sochi: zero. At the World Cup in Inzell, Germany, with most of the same skaters competing: eight. Heather Richardson won three races, Shani Davis and Brian Hansen each won one, Brittany Bowe had a second and a third, and Hansen added a third.

Best place to swim: London’s swimming venue is now open to the public.

Best description of covering the Olympics: Canadian journalist Bruce Arthur offers the proper mix of humility and humor:

On one Wednesday in Sochi I got up at 6:15 on three hours’ sleep, was on a bus to the mountains by 7:30, covered slopestyle for seven hours, wrote it, ate a meal cobbled together out of apples and water and a cake-like yellowish thing with raisins in it, covered the half-pipe where Shaun White lost, ran out of the mixed zone and under the bleachers as White’s last run ended to get a Canadian cross-country coach on the phone after he’d given a ski to a Russian competitor, scrambled back, slipping on the snow, covered the half-pipe until White finally spoke around midnight, wrote one of the columns on the bus ride back down the mountain, wrote the other one in the Main Press Centre (MPC), missed the 3 a.m. bus, had a beer with a colleague in the media bar, caught the 4 a.m. bus, decided to have two more beers with the same colleague in the media village bar because at the Olympics you start to get punchy after a while, and went to bed 24 hours after I started.

Great day.

Best top 10: Not sure how much longer 2010 gold medalist Bill Demong will compete, but it’s nice to see him back in the mix in a World Cup Nordic combined.

Least necessary apology:

Best World Indoor lap: Francena McCorory blew past and said goodbye in the women’s 400 meters.

Best hurled object at World Indoors: David Storl took the shot put lead, putting down the challenge for the USA’s Ryan Whiting. He responded with a shot that cut through the air like a meteor.

Biggest World Indoors upset: Nia Ali over Australia’s Sally Pearson in the 60-meter hurdles.

Most dominant World Indoors run, individual: Chanelle Price led each lap in the women’s 800 to win in 2:00.09, best in the world this year.

Most dominant World Indoors run, team: McCorory, Natasha Hastings, Joanna Atkins and Cassandra Tate won by nearly two seconds over a Jamaican 4×400 team that set a national record.

Best World Indoors win by someone I admit I’d never heard of: Omo Osaghae won the men’s 60 hurdles in a world-leading 7.45 seconds.

Most dominant multi-events athlete: Ashton Eaton was actually disappointed after winning World Indoors heptathlon gold. He didn’t break the world record. Poor guy.

Best multi-sport show: 

And finally, the world record World Indoors win: Kyle Clemons, David Verburg, Kind Butler III and Calvin Smith — 3:02.13 in the men’s 4×400. At least, that might be a world record — we have a discrepancy of record-keeping.

That’s eight gold medals for the USA. No other country got more than five medals, let alone gold medals. But that was still lower than the projection at DailyRelay.com, which posted a lively in-depth recap of the meet.

Most compelling argument for change in the Olympics: This many slopestyle snowboarders can’t be wrong.

Most emphatic continuation of Olympic gold medal form: Wins for Ted Ligety (though he concedes he’s unlikely to win the season title) and Mikaela Shiffrin (who clinched her second straight season slalom title).

Most depleted World Championship field: Raising the age-old question of why they bother to have a figure skating championship one month after the Olympics.

Worst time to have a part fall off a rifle: OK, maybe the Olympics would’ve been worse, but you still have to feel for Susan Dunklee trying to shoot without a sight.

0
soccer

MLS: Time to quit playing hardball

Posted on by Beau Dure

You may have already seen former FC Dallas player Bobby Warshaw’s epic takedown of anti-MLS snobbery. If not, please pause here and go read it.

Warshaw makes a realistic case, conceding a few problems with the “crazy, messed-up league.” Pay disparities within a team and attendance disparities between them are hardly unique to MLS, but the meddlesome league office and the lack of free agency are a little disorienting.

Then Warshaw hits Eurosnobbery hard. Manchester United? Barcelona? Bayern Munich? OK, those clubs are worth watching ahead of MLS clubs. But: “If you are saying that you’d rather watch Stoke City vs. West Ham instead of Seattle Sounders vs. Portland, you aren’t being honest.”

And if you’ve been watching a lot of Premier League games this season, you know what Warshaw means. On an individual level, most Premier League players are better than MLS players. Of course. But put them all together on a 14th-place team against a 15th-place team, and you can see some dreadfully dull games. U.S. fans may wince watching Jozy Altidore these days, but the rest of Sunderland’s squad isn’t going to move broadcasters to wax poetic, either.

Warshaw wraps it up pretty well:

I’m not sure why you’d rather watch a random European game with unidentifiable Italian and Spanish players when you could watch an equally entertaining game of players who grew up in cities you’ve been to and who attended colleges you’ve visited. You can identify with the player on the field. You can buy him a drink. He lives down the block from you and drives the same car as you. You can tell stories about how you played with a guy as a kid that played against a guy that dated the girlfriend of the guy that is playing left mid on the field. You can wear your team’s jersey to a Rep Yo City party. You weren’t born in Arsenaltown, were you?

One thing Warshaw omits: You can also see a lot of these players with your own eyes. You can go to games with great atmospheres, melding European and Latin American fan cultures with local American and Canadian twists. Soccer is a good TV sport but a great live sport, and you’re going to get more value out of an MLS game than out of a summer preseason game with AC Milan and Liverpool’s second teams sleepwalking in front of 60,000 people, many of them deluded into thinking they’re soccer fans.

It’s nonsense for a true soccer fan to ignore decent soccer in his or her backyard without a compelling reason to do so. If you live in Sunderland, then go see Sunderland. If you live in Cancun, then go see Atlante.

So congratulations to Warshaw for writing a powerful argument to root for the home league. And kudos to Deadspin for running it as a rebuttal to something the snarky sports blog had run earlier.

Now here’s the problem: MLS’s detractors … have a point. And the league is giving them ammunition as it heads into a very important year.

This is the last season of the league’s TV broadcast deals with ESPN, NBC and Univision. It’s also the last season of the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players.

And speaking of collective bargaining, the league is starting the season with replacement referees.

That looks bad. And it is bad. Finding quality referees is already a challenge in any league. Now we’re trotting out retirees to run around with some high-strung players anxious for their first game of the season.

And what kind of tone is the league setting for the collective bargaining ahead? After several years of remarkable growth in which the league’s team have broken open their wallets for big-name players, will MLS really risk a credibility-killing work stoppage to withhold money from the rank and file? Will it insist upon a complex system of allocations and re-entry drafts to avoid bidding wars over five-year MLS veterans while Drake is helping Toronto FC sign Jermain Defoe to a megabucks contract?

MLS is ready to take a step forward. To do that, it needs players. And referees. Now is not the time to play hardball and go backwards.

0
medal projections, olympic sports, track and field

Medal projections: Stats vs. subjectivity

Posted on by Beau Dure

Can we really come up with a statistical model for projecting Olympic medals?

I’ve often joked that I want to be the Nate Silver of Olympic medal projections. But Nate knows a lot more about stats than I do — I never took a single class in the subject, and I just hack my way through spreadsheets on the basis of some self-teaching and the occasional journalists’ seminar. (Did I just ruin my chances of getting hired to consult at the new FiveThirtyEight?)

Since Sochi, I’ve embarked on a bit more self-teaching in spreadsheets and stats. At the same time, I firmly believe I’m hitting the limits of what stats can tell us about Olympic performance.

Check this prototype I’ve made for the Rio 2016 medal projections:

[gview file=”https://duresport.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2016-track-and-field-sheet1.pdf”%5D

A bit of explanation:

– Columns C through I are results from the Olympics, World Championships and the Diamond League. Obviously, we have a long way to go in this cycle, so many spaces are x’d out.

– Column J is each athlete’s personal best. Column K is each athlete’s best from the past season — for now, from 2013.

– I’ve assigned points to each of these columns, as you’ll see in the lower half of the spreadsheet. These can be adjusted without redoing a whole lot of work! If I decide to count the 2013-14 Diamond Leagues a little bit less, I simply change the point values in that chart. And I can duplicate this spreadsheet for use in sports that have different competitions.

So the point system is already bringing some subjectivity into the mix. I’ve decided to weigh the 2012 Olympics, the 2015 World Championship and the 2016 Diamond League more heavily than other competition. Then I’ve made a judgment call to assign points to times.

Then add another bit of subjectivity: Column N is an adjustment value. I can use this to account for any competitions missed through injury (Yohan Blake, Asafa Powell) or suspension (Tyson Gay).

Add it all up, and you have three columns that look scientific. Column O is “PI” or Predictive Index. (Yes, I said “Performance Index” on the spreadsheet – please ignore that.) Column P shows the percentage of possible points — divide an athlete’s PI by the “Max predictive index” in the middle of the spreadsheet. That number will rise throughout the cycle. When the 2014 Diamond League is complete, we’ll add 15 (the maximum value for Diamond League standings) for a total of 105.

Then Column Q is “odds”, a simple percentage chance of earning a medal in this event. I tinkered with a couple of possible formulas for this column. Perhaps I simply apply the %max column and adjust it so the numbers will add up to reality — you wouldn’t want four people to have am 80% chance at winning a medal, for example. Or perhaps I calculate how many standard deviations an athlete’s PI is away from the other contenders.

What formula is in there now? None. I eyeballed it.

That’s not a final decision. Perhaps I’ll figure out a statistically sound way to convert the PI into actual odds. But I’m not sure it’s really necessary.

We know Usain Bolt will win a medal unless he (A) isn’t healthy or (B) has a serious problem at the start, including a false start. The 100 meters, moreso than most events, is all about raw speed. Work up to 1,500 meters, and tactics become an issue — in a slower race, finishing speed is more important than a personal best over the whole distance.

I haven’t taken age into account, though I would expect the 2015 and 2016 results to catch anyone on the decline. But for now, I’m skeptical that Justin Gatlin will be in 2012 form in 2016.

So to make the 2016 projections, I’ll compile a lot of numbers. That helps, of course. If Nickel Ashmeade doesn’t improve his personal best of 9.90, it’s ridiculous to declare him a medal favorite. Yet when all is said and done, I’m going to leave some space for a gut feeling.

This isn’t a 162-game baseball season, where weather conditions and other factors tend to even out over time. This isn’t a presidential election, where substantial polling points to clear trends, and Nate’s success has shut up the pundits who didn’t get the math. This is a projection of who is going to run the fastest in one 10-second race.

I do hope to add some probability this time around. Usain Bolt (if healthy) will be much more likely to win a medal for Jamaica than my gold medal pick in some random judo weight class in which 10 people have a legitimate shot to win, and I hope my medal count projection will reflect this.

So I’m not afraid of a little math. I’m just looking for a healthy balance between the calculated world and the real world.

0
medal projections, olympic sports

Olympic medals: The host-nation bounce is real

Posted on by Beau Dure

Olympic stats wizard Bill Mallon has quantified the host-nation bounce, showing that the country that last hosted the Olympics can typically expect to win roughly 70% of the medals it won at home.

The genius of this analysis is that it factors out the growth of the Games (particularly winter) by analyzing the medal count in terms of percentage of medals won. So if the Olympics add 30 events for 2018 (don’t worry — it won’t happen), then sure, Russia could match its Sochi record count. But the percentage of available medals won should drop.

When you’re projecting medals event-by-event, like I do, it’s difficult to account for this bounce. For London and Sochi, I’ve tended to break ties by favoring the home athlete. For London, I overreached, predicting 78 medals for Britain. They got 65. For Russia, I undershot, predicting 26 to an actual 33.

Some of the bounce comes from increased interest at home. Athletes on the verge of retirement stick around to compete. Federations get a bit more sponsorship money.

Some comes from home crowds. Some comes from those crowds affecting the judges. (Looking your way, figure skating folks.)

Brazil has revved up for 2016 with its best-ever medal haul in 2012 — 17 medals. They’ve been in double digits for the last five Games, with 15 in Atlanta 1996 and Beijing 2008.

In 2018, South Korea will surely improve on its total of eight from Sochi. Crowds at the 2002 World Cup turned an average soccer team into a world-beater, and they should have no trouble having the same effect on the speedskaters who underperformed this year.

5
sports culture

Rugby rules could spice up NFL extra point

Posted on by Beau Dure

The NFL’s proposal to move the extra point back 23 yards has landed like a lead balloon.

As it should. It’s silly. It messes up the flow of the game, moving everyone back to the 25-yard line (unless they’re going for two, which would still be at close range).

Here’s an idea: Think back to why a touchdown is called a “touchdown.” American football’s history is intertwined with rugby, where the equivalent of a touchdown (inexplicably called a “try”) requires that the ball literally be touched down.

And the location, from left to right, matters. The placement of the ball on the try determines where the kicker will attempt the conversion. That’s why you’ll see rugby players cross the line but then run toward the center of the field before touching the ball down.

So why not try that in the NFL? Throw for the corner? Congratulations — you’ve left your kicker a tough angle.

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