Field Theory: One man with 18 feeds
57 Responses
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I'm no fan of Alonzo, but I'm also no fan of Lewis Hamilton (mainly because he drives for McClaren – points off to the first person who calls McClaren a "kiwi team").
I was not a big fan of Alonzo, but he was always one of the league leading defensive centers and so deserves respect. Must have been hard to squeeze into one of them little cars though.
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You left out the Phoenix win.
They’ve had a crap week, and even suffered the complete humiliation of being compared to the Kingz / Knightz.
And then came from behind to beat the joint-leaders yesterday.
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McLaren, BTW. And I guess they're as Kiwi as the America's Cup team.
I think you should do more on:
Skiing (for real)Medieval football (still played in a few places)
Bog snorkelling
Fencing (this sort) -
You left out the Phoenix win.
Indeed. And as a local boy, you should be forced to stand on the cnr of Courtney and Tory bearing a placard that says, " Even without my recognition, they will rise from the ashes"*.
*Only to plummet again in short order.
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I don't follow football (soccer). I find the Premiership to be dull and the Champion's League only just bearable. However, Hull beating Arsenal 2-1 is sweet. Arsène Wenger saying after the match that Arsenal "gave too much room to West Brom" is even sweeter.
This is why the Premiership can be so fab. Unpredictable results and crazy foreign managers. What's not to like?
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Even one man with eighteen feeds should surely have noticed a Grand Final over in Melbourne at which 100,012 spectators showed up and shouted themselves hoarse?
Shame the wrong team won this year's AFL Grand Final. :-/
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Shame the wrong team won
Agreed; it’s hard to warm to a team wearing yellow and …. Brown.
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And as a local boy, you should be forced to stand on the cnr of Courtney and Tory bearing a placard that says, " Even without my recognition, they will rise from the ashes"
Hadyn reserves the right to ignore the Phoenix (and any other team) when the article on them has a headline with a terrible pun like "Phoenix Rise from the Ashes" (also included is any story on Hosea Gear that has a "changing Gear", "new Gear", "top Gear" pun).
Even one man with eighteen feeds should surely have noticed a Grand Final over in Melbourne
Hadyn reserves the right to ignore any sport that has incredibly ugly uniforms and scores in decimal points.
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This is why the Premiership can be so fab. Unpredictable results and crazy foreign managers. What's not to like?
Actually I remember hearing about a study done on which sport had the most "upsets" (odds favourite beaten by underdog). The winner was the Premiership, followed by American football.
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Just saw that your Mets lost, meaning that for the second straight year they won't make the playoffs after seeming shoo-ins.
But don't feel bad - my Yankees were out of it weeks ago depite having the biggest payroll in the sport. You'd think with all of that money they'd buy some pitching help for Rivera, but alas no.
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HG,
If you ignore sports that get covered via excruciating puns you’d run dry pretty quickly.
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It wasn't so much ignoring my favourite sport Hadyn, as ignoring ALL other sports ;)
I think I'm going to tip the Sea Eagles by a smallish margin. Hopefully the game lives up to what it should be which is a bloody fascinating duel between two teams with dangerous attacks and miserable as hell defence.
Is that upset study done across a large number of top level sport around the world or just 3 different competitions? I'd have thought that the best way of telling would be to look at the win loss records of all the sides. The bigger the spread the fewer upsets, the closer the sides the more upsets.
Going by that ill thought out theory the MLB would probably have more upsets than any other comps as the best record this year compared to the worst record doesn't seem that outrageously different. Despite being about 45 wins behind :)
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Is that upset study done across a large number of top level sport around the world or just 3 different competitions?
From memory it was the top football leagues in Spain, England and Italy and all of the American professional (male) sports. So not the best study in the world.
I'd have thought that the best way of telling would be to look at the win loss records of all the sides. The bigger the spread the fewer upsets, the closer the sides the more upsets.
I think they used odds-favourites rather than just wins simply because some teams only have a small number of games in which to get an upset (say 16 for gridiron) while others have a large number (the billion games they play for baseball).
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Just saw that your Mets lost, meaning that for the second straight year they won't make the playoffs after seeming shoo-ins.
But don't feel bad - my Yankees were out of it weeks ago depite having the biggest payroll in the sport. You'd think with all of that money they'd buy some pitching help for Rivera, but alas no.
Stupid fat Brewers. Though it is hard to hate a team that has a sausage race. And you can't really begrudge the Rays can you?
If you ignore sports that get covered via excruciating puns you’d run dry pretty quickly.
touche
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It’s a fair bet that the Sea Eagles will be tipped to soar a fair bit this week.
They will need to do this to weather the Melbourne Storm.
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Medieval football (still played in a few places)
Bog snorkelling
FencingEven better, Farnarkeling:
In essence, Farnarkeling is engaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet. Arkeling is not permissible, however, from any position adjacent to the phlange (or leiderkrantz) or from within 15 yards of the wiffenwacker at the point where the shifting tube abuts the centre-line on either side of the 34 metre mark, measured from the valve at the back of the defending side's transom-housing.
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Though it is hard to hate a team that has a sausage race.
No love for the Pierogi race?
Ah, major league baseball. A hundred and something games a season, and every one of them is exactly the same.
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And you can't really begrudge the Rays can you?
Yeah I can, because they changed their name from the Devil Rays to try and change their team's luck and it worked. I'm surprised that some fundamentalist hasn't mentioned this.
Wait, did they do the name change this season or last? -
Ah, major league baseball. A hundred and something games a season, and every one of them is exactly the same.
Splutter. Baseball naysayers. What are you, Jake, some kind of *communist* or something? ;)
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From memory it was the top football leagues in Spain, England and Italy and all of the American professional (male) sports. So not the best study in the world.
Cheers. I might have to do a bit of google research on it later since I'm a sad statto sport sap when I get the freetime.
I'd guess that the upsets should mirror fairly closely the level of spending control over the leagues (amongst other factors like the size of the teams and cities), ie salary caps.
Since the NRL got one it's been damn near impossible to tip each week with most tipsters going at about 58-65% success and that would be roughly the number of results that go the favourites way.
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Found it
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8531
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/01/which_sport_has.htmlThey didn't do cricket or rugby (or rugby league for that matter) because they aren't closely followed in the US. Should I dare attempt it for this years NRL and NPC? And how did they know if it was an upset? going back 100 years they didn't have sports betting and home ground advantage in football can be a lot more important than say it is in baseball.
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The stats are here...
http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/display.php?id=1048"Crunching a century’s worth of more than 300,000 games in the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, and the English Football Association, showed that the latter — soccer to Americans — is the most “competitive” sport where underdogs won 45% of the time.
Baseball was next with 44%, then hockey with 41.5%, basketball with 36.5%, and American football least the competitive with an upset frequency of 36.4%. Trends in recent decades, however, show baseball and soccer trading places, and football nearly catching up with hockey and basketball in unpredictability".
I guess it's pretty obvious that they are discounting ALL draws and looking at results only where there was a winner.
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Oh, I'd better use their simple equation aye?
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Excuse me as I have a one man posting war with myself
I found this after all the mathematical gobblegook.
"We then measured the upset frequency q by counting the fraction of times that the team with the worse record on the game date actually won (table I). Games between teams with no record (start of a season) or teams with equal records were disregarded. Game location was ignored and so was the margin of victory. In soccer, hockey, and football, ties were counted as 1/2 of a victory for both teams. We verified that handling ties this way did not significantly affect the results: the upset probability changes by at most 0:02(and typically, much less) if ties are ignored".
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Splutter. Baseball naysayers. What are you, Jake, some kind of *communist* or something? ;)
After my discourse on the Marxist vs Whiggish interpretation of history on Friday, I'm pretty sure seven classrooms full of rural Pennsylvanians think so.
I'm not knocking baseball. I don't follow it, don't have a TV so I can't watch it on a regular basis, and find it hard to get my mind around how winning half of your games makes for a good season, and hitting the ball one out of three times makes you an all time great, but my American friends stare in amazement when I explain to them that the most absorbing form of cricket takes place over five days, and is as likely as not to end in a draw, so I try not to judge.
But I really enjoy going to PNC Park a couple of times a year to watch the Pirates. My basic understanding of the sport has improved, and I'm not invested in them so I don't care that they suck. What I love about it is that every single game is exactly the same -- the same cheers, the same pierogi race, the same shooting hotdogs out of cannons into the crowd, the same fireworks, and the same song during the seventh inning stretch. They change it up for 'bring your dog day', but that's about it. The play might be different each time, but there's a real ritual surrounding it that those who are more involved don't even really notice. It's hugely entertaining.
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