Posts by Yamis
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Had a gander at your post (from 3 years ago) and it's good stuff.
It's something that I wax lyrical on quite often and get shot down over at sportsfreak for (going under 'westie stylz' there).
It looks like they are going to 15 teams in 2 years with a team being set up in Melbourne.
Then a couple of years later they will go to 18 teams with the 3 new teams most likely coming from Japan, USA and I would say either Argentina or the PI's.
It is going to be ultra messy from there because they aren't sure about whether to have 3 conferences, playing those teams home and away and each other team in the comp once.
It's also going to provide a dilemna with where to put Argentina. If they don't play in Argentina it will be stupid and if they do then the travel from them and other teams will be getting ridiculous.
Teams can't be expected to perform when they play 2 games in South Africa, then fly to Argentina, then fly to Japan, then back to NZ for a few games, then to Aussie for 2 games...
or a variation of that.
Logistically South Africa and Argentina should join the European comps while the Pacific rim countries play in a Super comp.
It won't happen though because if the SA dollars disappeared they would pump more $$'s into the Euro comps and then they could poach more top players from OZ and NZ.
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Auckland goes through 2007 unbeaten, taking out the NPC and Ranfurly Shield.
They lose 16 players from that squad and a good chunk of those who remained were All Blacks who were unavailable for virtually all of the competition.
I challenge any other team in the competition that gets completely gutted because it has so many quality players that get bought up abroad to amount to anything the following season when they field their b team (in reality probably more like their c or d team looking at some of those names.
I was bitching at sportsfreak for days about the bonus point sham (before Auckland missed out I might add).
It's a joke. Where does 4 tries come from? Where does a 7 point loss come from?
They are arbitrary numbers that make no sense. Why not give teams bonus points for winning by more than 7 points? Why not give teams extra bonus points for 8 tries or 12 tries?
Why treat a team the same that has scored 4 tries or 9 tries the same?
Why does team that loses by 8 points 3 weeks in a row get nothing and a team that loses by 4 or 5 points 3 weeks in a row get 3 compeition points?
It's all completely ridiculous with no rhymn or reason. It might make games a little more interesting sometimes but it's just plain not fair.
Never has been and never will be.
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I'm not overly keen on Saville. He's a rugby commentator and brings that bias to the sports news. Not that I have anything against rugby (as it's my second favourite game in the entire world), but TVNZ has had a bit of an anti-league (Warriors) thing going on for quite a few years. Classic example was when the NRL had 2 players sent off in one round a while ago and TVNZ showed the two incidents and neglected to mention the scores, show any of the tries, or any highlights from any games from the round whatsoever.
Every time I see Saville read out a league story I just get a bit uncomfy.
And as Leg break points out, he does have a tendency to get a bit huffy and serious.
Anyway, probably no big deal for me since I tend to watch the 3News most nights. ;)
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The parachuting dude took his own life in 2002.
Amazing what you find on the internet... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Man
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We need to add knockon, forward pass and accidental off side left, right and up the middle.
Then the referee has 1,785 options up his sleeve if he knows the rule book well enough.
On the issue of missing or not missing great sporting moment, anybody see that moment when the dude came down into the ring during that heavyweight fight with one of those propeller driven parachute thingees and the entourage proceeded to beat the shit out of him.
Now there ladies and gentlement was truth being way the fuck stranger than fiction.
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I had a crack for this years NRL and it came out at 39.2%. I'm sure there's an error or three in there but the actual total would be within a percent of that so it's fairly solid.
http://bloggingitreal.blogspot.com/2008/09/your-numbers-up.html
Interestingly though after 23 of the 26 weeks the figure was 44.1%. It wasn't until the last three weeks when 19 results went to the favourites and just 2 to the 'weaker' teams that it crashed to 39.2%.
That gives me a bit more fuel for my dream that they cut the season from 24 games to 20. But that's a whole other discussion.
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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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Oh, I'd better use their simple equation aye?
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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.