The NFL offseason is a time for the talking heads and the analysts to rehash some age-old and accepted talking points in previewing the season ahead. One of those popular points is that turnovers are unsustainable for a defense. They say always that you are surely bound to see a sharp regression in your turnover count following a really high number of forced turnovers the previous year. The extremes don’t last, everything always reverts to the middle, fundamentals matter most, etc.
There are three things that have always held true: death, taxes, and NFL coaches getting paranoid over their information. But are we in a new age with regards to the NFL? According to a certain article on the Wall Street Journal, yes. However, that may be a little misleading.
The Houston Texans were unpredictably bad last season. Injuries, regression, and age all combined to mire the team in a nightmarish 2-14 campaign.
For a team coming off such a bad season, the Texans weren’t particularly active in free agency. And their draft didn’t produce many major (at least, not on first glance) contributors in the way of offensive skill players. The defense will undoubtedly be better, with guys returning from injury (i.e. Brian Cushing), an influx of younger, more athletic players (i.e. Jadeveon Clowney), and the addition of a highly respected defensive coordinator in Romeo Crennel. What about offense though? Bob McNair and Rick Smith are banking on new head coach Bill O’Brien being the key to turning things around on that end.
Summer of 1992 in Barcelona, a collection of US basketball players touched down and set off an international firestorm. The Dream Team, perhaps the greatest collection of basketball talent ever assembled, rolled over their opponents as though they were playing against middle school students. But their victory wasn’t the important part so much as what followed.
“Hey Chandler, want to play with me next season?”
There seems to be a lot of revisionist history going on in the wake of Chandler Parsons’ departure north to Dallas. Many are saying that Parsons is actually overrated and that Trevor Ariza will be a better fit anyway. This is all summarized neatly by one article on BleacherReport that I felt compelled to respond to. “One could argue that Ariza is actually an upgrade at small forward.” The author is right, there are numbers that favor Ariza. But statistics without context do not do much good, so I decided to examine the evidence a little closer. What can I say? Chandler Parsons is one of my favorite players. Have to make an attempt to defend him.
Let’s get this out of the way. Based on Nate Silver’s models, Brazil had a 1 in 4000 chance of losing by six goals. By that same model, Brazil had a 65% chance of victory, even without Neymar and Thiago Silva [1]. And there is no statistical model I would trust more than something Nate Silver created (John Hollinger being a not-too-close second).
Even if you take the reasoning that statistical models don’t really care about the difference at the extremes, that 1-in-4000 is not that distinguishable from 1-in-400, this beatdown was still an all time outlier, as in this was one of the most unexpected scorelines in history.
There were/are some big developments over the weekend and taking place currently in the sports and business worlds, so I wanted to focus this post on a discussion of various links and items. You know, just over two weeks ago, I was wondering how I was going to stay productive at work with the World Cup on. Suffice it to say, as I rehab from surgery (more on that at a later date), my questions were answered. I now have time to watch all the soccer games I want. Which brings me to the first item…
My Three Senths: Sports. Business. Life. 