Pro Football As A Computer ‘Geek’ Contest
Professional football is more and more becoming a sport in which ‘experts’ of all ilk are finding themselves without any expertise when it comes to predicting how teams will do. It has become almost laughable and pitiful. Football practices and games are analyzed to death before, during, and after the season. Many of these people are not dumb and have been around football all their life.
At the start of the season, after watching teams practice and participate in pre season games the sport writers and TV experts summarized what the new season was going to look like. Seattle was far too good to be ousted from the top, or so was the consensus. San Francisco was right up there, the Packers were like in 7th place on the list, Denver was up there, New England was up there, the Cowboys were going no where, and I just don’t remember a lot of it.
But the season is half over and nothing is like all the expert’s predicted. Now either the experts are not knowledgeable about football (which I assume is not true) or football has become more and more impossible to predict. Here is how they line up at the half-way point by wins and losses:
6 wins: Dallas, Detroit, New England, Denver, Arizona
5 wins: SanDiego, Philly, Green Bay,
And opinion changes constantly. Green Bay was back in about 7th place in likelihood to get to the Super Bowl early in the season, then after losing a couple of games badly, they sunk to 16th place, then they won a game, then clobbered some team. That week I saw a prediction by some major sport channel that the two teams most likely to be in the Superbowl by some sort of computer prediction were Denver and Green Bay. Huh? How did Green Bay go from 16 to the top two?
The sportscasters who broadcast the Bear games on radio, all of whom have been around football all their life and know enough football to talk about each position, game plans, etc for hours in pre and post game broadcasts were really excited about the Bears after covering training camp. And most other experts put the Bears up there, often ahead of the Packers. I myself thought Trestman seemed to know what he was talking about. Well, the Bears have won 3 games.
When I look at prediction contests between the ‘experts’ from week to week the top predictors guess correctly anywhere from 8-12 games right. At the end of the season the winner will win with some sort of low 60’s percentile. That’s a little over 10% better than just guessing. And if we take out the poorest teams, the winning predicting percentage would be even closer to 50%. And each week there will be some games where everyone picks a certain team to win. This season so far, there will be anywhere from 3-5 games per week in which the unanimous picked winner will lose. I mean wow.
While I don’t have stats on this, it just seems 40 years ago games were a lot more predictable.
So what gives? My guess is that professional football is becoming some sort of chess match with computers and other gadgets creating the ‘chess moves’. It used to be the coaches and players who determined the outcome of the game pretty much on their own. Raw talent and good coaching and you carried the day. Not today, except for the quarterback and lineman, the other players are more and more dependent on an every down chess game going on with every game and many downs. Multiple players come on and off the field with every play practically, and many key players have mics in their helmets to think for them. What, I begin to wonder, am I rooting for? The best computerized game plans? Whose computers can cough up adjustments the fastest and implement the quickest? The best of position players can’t make a tackle or catch a ball if the plays called don’t put them in a position to tackle or catch. Are there any teams today which demonstrate solid consistency? Certainly individual player talent can’t vary so much from game to game. And if player talent is less the answer, for what are people rooting for?
Maybe in the near future the Coaches will all be computer geeks who have never played a football game in their lives. And every player will have mics in their helmets to think for them. Maybe to be maximally efficient, we won’t need games where so many serious injuries are now occurring, and instead, the Head geek coaches will arrive at midfield to submit their plays or defense schemes for every down. Then another computer will figure out what happened, and this will continue until at the end of the game the winner is declared by the best computerized input. No injured players, no bad referee calls, no bad weather, no personal fouls or misconduct, no fighting, no loud crowd noise to interfere with the plays, and no debate over who should have won the game.
After I wrote the above Dallas got beat by Washington, still another game when just about everyone predicted an easy win for Dallas. A week ago Dallas had been elevated by the experts to now be one of the top two teams this season. Based on all the above in earlier paragraphs I guess it figures that they would then be beat by one of the poorest teams in the league. These football experts (and they really do know a lot bout the nuts and bolts of football) are like the financial experts who explain why the stock market went up or down a particular day. Look, if they could really predict what the stock market was going to react to, they then would every dam night be able to use the same reasons they will use after the fact, to predict the same change the night before. Outside of a major global event it doesn’t work at all. Same with football, before the game the experts rarely can predict the outcome with any degree of accuracy at all these days, while after the game they can analyze the game for hours to explain why the outcome was the way it was.
The funniest post game analysis is probably baseball where the coaches are reduced to such brilliant comments as “we need to score more runs”, “we need to have fewer errors”, “we need better pitching”, “we need the bullpen to do it’s job”, “we need to be more consistent” and blah blah blah.
The favorite one to me is the “we need to play better as a team”. That is really a dumb thing to say in a sport like baseball. When somebody is at the plate does the coach tell them “we need to play better as a team” or is it well understood by the player and coach that “if you don’t get enough hits when at bat your salary or your being on the team is at stake”. Of course as coach you want teammates to get along with each other and this boils down to accepting diversity. Some players are quiet, some are motor mouths, some players are good leaders and others like the “Beast” in Seattle just need to be allowed to be their ‘weird’ selves. It is rare for a teammate to be dismissed because of their personality unless they physically or verbally are assaulting others on the team. The best way to help your team is to be the best you can at your position.
If I had my way, when the game starts neither the coaches or players would have any gadgets to assist them during the game. I prefer to depend on, and root for, good players and coaches, not some gadgets running the show. Fill the coaches and players with all the information you can during practice and the information can come from any source. But once the game starts it should be the players and coaches calling the plays and making adjustments. I am not sure I even want any shifting of players until four downs are completed, minus injury to a player. I prefer the game to be won by those athletes on the field with the most physical/mental talents. The way it is heading now it might not be too far off when all 17 assistant coaches are wired to particular players via mics in the helmet to ‘assist’ the player while on the field. I never have been all that appreciative of puppet shows.
