Tag Archives: sports

Michael Vick was the most fun college football player to watch of all time

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This isn’t the sort of thing I usually post, and there was the thing with the dogs later on, but what the heck, it’s football season and I am low on queued posts.

Here is Michael Vick as an Eagle in 2010. Unfortunately he didn’t look like this in every game as a pro player.

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But in college, he was just simply the most fun player to watch of all time, in my opinion. And I am not really a Virginia Tech partisan although there are a couple alums in the family.

I’ll vote for Joe Burrow as the second most fun college quarterback to watch of all time. And I am most definitely, most certainly not an LSU partisan. Those people are barely civilized down there, although they are certainly passionate.

College Football? There’s an API for that

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I’ve always wondered if there is a public source of college football stats to play with, and there is (at least one) called the College Football Database. There’s also an R package that taps it.

Of course, don’t think for a second that you can crunch these numbers and make money through gambling. Only large “professional gamblers” can consistently make money through gambling, by (legally, as I understand it, at least in certain states) cornering the market by manipulating betting spreads. The idea there is that you can bet a large amount of money on the underdog in a contest that is not getting a lot of attention, which will move the spread in favor of the underdog. You can then bet an even larger amount of money on the favorite. If you are able to manipulate the odds in your favor, you will lose this bet less than half the time, and over time you will make money off the backs of us poor schmucks who take bets with expected values less than what we put in. Don’t try this – there are smarter, richer people than you doing it and you can’t beat them. Also, don’t take my word for it that it would be legal. Finally, think of making small, occasional, close-to-even-money bets as a source of cheap entertainment and you’ll be okay, and then only if you do not have a tendency to become addicted.

An API, by the way, is an Application Programming Interface.

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them.

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Nate Silver and college football

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I thought Nate Silver only looked at professional sports. I was wrong – here is a cool interactive web page he has put together for college football. The numbers don’t always give you the answers you want to hear though – even if my beloved Gators somehow win all the rest of their games, which would include beating Alabama in the conference championship game, he gives them only a 13% chance of winning the national championship. Another nice thing about Nate Silver – he always explains his methodology.

We’ll be updating the numbers twice weekly: first, on Sunday morning (or very late Saturday evening) after the week’s games are complete; and second, on Tuesday evening after the new committee rankings come out. In addition to a probabilistic estimate of each team’s chances of winning its conference, making the playoff, and winning the national championship, we’ll also list three inputs to the model: their current committee ranking, FPI, and Elo. Let me explain the role that each of these play…

FPI is ESPN’s Football Power Index. We consider it the best predictor of future college games so that’s the role it plays in the model: if we say Team A has a 72 percent chance of beating Team B, that prediction is derived from FPI. Technically speaking, we’re using a simplified version of FPI that accounts for only each team’s current rating and home field advantage; the FPI-based predictons you see on ESPN.com may differ slightly because they also account for travel distance and days of rest…

Our college football Elo ratings are a little different, however. Instead of being designed to maximize predictive accuracy — we have FPI for that — they’re designed to mimic how humans rank the teams instead.4 Their parameters are set so as to place a lot of emphasis on strength of schedule and especially on recent “big wins,” because that’s what human voters have historically done too. They aren’t very forgiving of losses, conversely, even if they came by a narrow margin under tough circumstances. And they assume that, instead of everyone starting with a truly blank slate, human beings look a little bit at how a team fared in previous seasons. Alabama is more likely to get the benefit of the doubt than Vanderbilt, for example, other factors held equal.

Best Steve Spurrier Put-Downs

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I don’t normally post this sort of thing, but Steve Spurrier only retires once. I happened to catch the very tail end of the Ol’ Ball Coach era at Florida in person in 1998-99. Without further ado, courtesy of Gatorzone.com, are some of the all-time best Spurrier zingers.

  • “We read in their media guide where no opponent had ever come ‘Between the Hedges‘ and got 50, so we figured we’d do it,” he said. “Pretty nice ball yard, too!”
  • “Can’t spell Citrus without a U and T.”
  • “These kinds of games don’t prove all that much. Just proves we’re better than Kentucky,” Spurrier said after a 66-0 smashing of the Wildcats.
  • “They said it was going to be really loud up there and I have to admit it was — during pre-game warm-ups,” Spurrier crowed after UF took a 35-0 second-quarter lead and went on to beat Tennessee in a No. 2 vs. No. 3 showdown in Knoxville.
  • “Hopefully, LSU’s defensive coordinator won’t be giving any more clinics on how to stop the Gators all next offseason,” Spurrier said after hanging 635 yards on the Tigers in a 56-13 rout, the year after struggling for a season-low 327 in a win at Baton Rouge.
  • Oh, and that one about fire [that destroyed 20 books] at the Auburn library. “Shame of it all, 15 of the books hadn’t even been colored in yet.”

Let’s go over to ESPN for a few more.

  • “I don’t know. I sort of always liked playing them that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”
  • “Why is it that during recruiting season they sign all the great players, but when it comes time to play the game, we have all the great players? I don’t understand that. What happens to them?”
  • “You know what FSU stands for, don’t you? Free Shoes University.”

Ouch! We’ll miss you, coach.