Point Blank – September 28
The Play’s The Thing, 2016 Edition (on football conscience)…Can we survive Jay Gruden…The “Mets Must” is being priced rather fair…
As September wraps up it means that both the NCAA and NFL bring us a plethora of useful statistics now, the former bringing the opportunity to smooth out those garbage games involving opponents from a lower weight class, and the latter having the players getting into rhythm now, as those low-contact training camps and pre-season games get compensated for
The focus now becomes on assigning weight to the numbers, and that is where once again it becomes every bit as much Art as Science. Sports scores and statistics are not absolutes; instead they are educated mathematical guesses in an attempt to best measure what happened on the playing field. Even at their best they only tell us part of the story anyway – properly charting a game outcome is not just reviewing what happened, but how, which includes also understanding what could have happened and didn’t. Football only allows a team to score six points on a single play, yet often one play can swing the final scoreboard result by far more than that.
That carries us to what will likely be an annual take around this time of each football season, the opportunity to bring a little Shakespeare into play in terms of accepting the nuances of sport, and we head to Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet for one more rendition of “The Play’s the Thing”. We are not out to catch the conscience of the king, but to better improve our own ability to interpret events.
As noted back in the Monday review there were a series of games in which the final score was not all that close to measuring the performances of the combatants on the field. That provides the ideal time to dive in.
Item: Wisconsin 30 Michigan State 6
For the Badgers to get that kind of scoreboard win in East Lansing would appear to be a resounding success, but while they indeed played a solid fundamental game, they weren’t anything special. The Spartans actually won the first downs 21-15; had a slight edge in Total Offense at 325-317; while yards per play finished 4.7 to 4.6 for Wisconsin. You would not have known which team was better from watching each play, and the cornerstone of the Badgers offense was stuffed cold – they wanted to establish Corey Clement and the ground game, and he only managed 54 yards on 23 attempts. One of those was a 22-yard scamper, so on Clement’s other 22 carries it was a miserly 1.5 per attempt. That matters.
Wisconsin scored three TDs in the game, only one coming on a drive of longer than 28 yards, and two were scoreboard gifts – a five-yard drive after a bad snap on a Michigan State punt (bad punt snaps are a mistake by the team with the ball, but not a merit play by the opposition); and a 66-yard fumble return for a TD by Leo Musso on what was simply a bounce of football luck.
It was the Musso return that we can isolate as the single play that proved to be worth much more in terms of setting up the final score than the direct points involved. From Mark Dantonio in the aftermatch - “It’s never as bad as you think and never as good. That’s the nature of things. We had the football, and if we go down and score, all of a sudden it’s 13-all. The game changes. It is what it is.”
Item: Texas A&M 45 Arkansas 24
So here’s the setting – tie game at 17-17, 2:30 remaining in the 3rd quarter, Arkansas with a 4th-and-goal at the Texas A&M one-yard line, after a grinding 18-play march by the Razorbacks from their own five-yard line. Now do some football math. What are the odds of Arkansas getting out-scored by 21 points over the final 17:30 of play from that game situation?
There were two major swing plays the ignited the sequence, the Razorbacks running an ill-conceived fourth down play that failed, and on the second snap of the ensuing possession Trevor Knight hit Josh Reynolds for a 92-yard TD pass. There was a massive jolt of football momentum, and instead of Arkansas leading 24-17, had the offense made that final yard, less than 6:30 of football time later it was 38-17 the other way.
Could that fourth down play by Arkansas really have been worth that much to the scoreboard? Having seen the game flow to that point, I believe the answer is yes.
Item: Arizona State 51 California 41
We could think of this one in terms of both the merit of the winner, and also the grading of the Total. Imagine if you had an Under 84.5 ticket in a game that was sitting on 47 with 13:00 to play.
Arizona State wasn’t the better team in this game through most measures, with total offense 637-454 to Cal, and 6.8 to 5.7 in terms of yards per play. Yet the Sun Devils won by 10, despite twice trailing outright by a full touchdown in the fourth quarter. It took the extent of football possibilities to make it happen.
Arizona State tied the game at 34-all with 6:27 to play, and from that point forward the Sun Devils only gained nine yards. Yet they scored 17 points out of them. How about this sequence – California had 19 consecutive offensive snaps, from 3:17 until 0:11, when ASU kneeled down on the final play. Through those 19 snaps the Golden Bears got out-scored 14-7. The last two Arizona State TDs came on a Pick 6 and a return of an on-side kick. The former does happen every once in a while; the latter perhaps once per decade. And you want to let your computer model crunch the numbers and point to the winners each week without adding interpretation…
So how does the handicapper sort through these game flows? There are no formulas or easy answers, but in truth the best path is that you have to become a little Shakespearean. The greatness of The Bard came in his ability to develop characters, and his unique understanding of the nuances of human behavior came fully into play. He did not have a novel through which to gradually allow a character to evolve; for so many of his creations there were human beings that would only have a few handfuls of spoken lines, and he had to make their nature come across within those limitations. Shakespeare did that in a way that perhaps no one else ever will, and it is in attempting to treat sport that way that we create the opportunity to be successful.
What you first must do is not look for certainty in scoreboards; it won’t be there. While that may seem like a severe hindrance it isn’t. Everyone else in this endeavor has to deal with the same thing, and it is in developing an ability to outmaneuver the others in the game that you take a step forward. One of those major steps is first to accept scores and stats for what they are, and then to dig deeper into those results to find the highest truth that you can find. The reality is that the scoreboard and the box score are not end-points; for all that really do want to get ahead of the game those numerical constructs are often only the beginning of the process.
Survivor Pool Week #4
There hasn’t been a hint of any genius here through the first three weeks of the season, escaping with bad tickets on the Chiefs in Week #1 and the Dolphins last Sunday, but that is how these things work – you will win by being lucky, not being good. This week the decision is an easy one, not so much calling for the WASHINGTON REDSKINS to win a game, but for the patch-work Browns to lose.
This is one of those “best timing of the season” spots, with the Redskins not having a game the rest of the way that would put them anywhere near the list. Meanwhile other contenders like Cincinnati and Arizona will bring multiple opportunities as the schedule progresses.
Week #1 – Kansas City
Week #2 – Carolina
Week #3 – Miami
Week #4 – WASHINGTON REDSKINS
In the Sights…
The early stages of Mets/Marlins on Monday night will be remembered long throughout the annals of baseball history, beginning with that dramatic HR from Dee Gordon. But over the last 15 innings between these teams it has been 15-1 Mets, and I am surprised to see the price point that is available in the early trading for tonight, so it will be #907 New York (7:10 Eastern) in play, with as low as -108 available off of the opener of -125. I consider this one good all the way back up to the opener, in a rare case of a team in a must-win situation not being priced at all for it.
Seth Lugo is not as good as his 4-2/2.61 would indicate, but he has been effective enough to put the Mets in the position to go 6-0 across his last half dozen starts, and off of last night’s big working margin the bullpen is well-set, even with Jeurys Familia getting up to 21 pitches (he had not worked since last Thursday, so Terry Collins needed to get him into a game). The other side of the equation may be a mess.
Jose Urena has not established yet that he has the stuff to be a starter at this level, now siting at 5-13/5.64 over 140.1 MLB innings. He put a career-game together three starts back against the Dodgers, coming within one out of a complete-game shutout, but for a guy of his ability that workload may have been too much – in two outings since then, vs. the lowly offenses of the Phillies and Braves, he has lasted only four innings, getting rocked for 12 runs. There may not be much left in his 2016 tank, and that is a problem for Don Mattingly after he could only get 6.2 frames combined from his starters the last two nights.
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